With the outbreak of the 2016–2017 Zimbabwe protests, Zimbabwean anarchists characterized the protest movement as representing a new society based on "solidarity, equality, grassroots democracy, free of all forms of oppression", identifying it with the anarchist approach to a bottom-up struggle against the state. In the wake of the 2017 Zimbabwean coup d'état, in which Emmerson Mnangagwa seized power from Robert Mugabe as part of a power struggle within ZANU-PF, Zimbabwean anarchists offered an anti-state perspective for the future of Zimbabwe, proposing mass action as a means to build libertarian socialism. There has since been movements to develop a specific anarchist organisation in Zimbabwe, in the hopes of forming a broad-based libertarian movement against the Zimbabwean state.