The End of a Road Introduction1 The Global Political Agreement (GPA), which set out to prepare the political process for a generally acceptable election after the debacle of June 2008, was marked by severe contestations all too characteristic of the battle for the state that constituted the politics of the agreement. At almost every stage of the agreement intense conflicts over the interpretation of the accord left their debris on the political terrain, at the heart of which was the meaning of ‘sovereignty.’ Around this notion, ZANU PF in particular wove dense layers of political discourse, combined with the coercive use of the state that it continued to control. The major aim of this strategy on the part of ZANU PF, was to manipulate and stall the reform provisions in the GPA, regroup, and reconfigure its political resources after plunging to the nadir of its legitimacy in the 2008 electoral defeat. In 2009, Solidarity Peace Trust (SPT) published a monograph2 that provided a comprehensive overview of the GPA, setting out its central dynamics and the key structures and processes involved in the politics of this period. The aim of this report is not to repeat the analysis provided in that book, but to provide succinct coverage of the election that brought that agreement to a close. Moreover the report will also provide some pointers to the future of Zimbabwean politics. The Constitutional Process Between 2009 and 2013 a key area of contestation between the parties to the GPA was the struggle for constitutional reform. Article VI of the agreement set out the ‘fundamental right and duty of the Zimbabwean people to make a constitution for themselves’, also stipulating that the process would be carried out by a Select Committee of Parliament composed of parties to the GPA. Constitutionalism and the constitutional reform is often a highly contested process with different parties bringing different political agendas and competing imaginaries to the process. Zimbabwe was no exception to this trend and since the 1990’s the major political parties often fought out their rival positions on this terrain. For the nationalists coming out of the liberation struggle, constitutionalism and the law have had a complicated history. On the one hand, these discourses were constitutive of their demands against the colonial state and helped to conceptualise their own legality and                                                              1 This Introduction and the section on the constitution draw from B.Raftopoulos, ‘Towards another stalemate in Zimbabwe?” NOREF, October 2012. 2 Brian Raftopoulos (Ed), The Hard Road to Reform: The Politics of Zimbabwe’s Global Political Agreement. Weaver Press, Harare.   7