Paper short abstract:

We focus on how Zimbabwean and Ugandan citizens engaged with political authorities during important political moments. In particular, we focus on the dynamics of engagement on Twitter during Uganda’s 2021 election, as well as during widely publicised Covid19-related corruption cases in Zimbabwe.

Paper long abstract:

Much of the literature on the role of social media platforms as spaces for civic and political participation points to a set of both enabling and limiting factors shaped by context. On the one hand, the digital ecologies present present the connected citizen with opportunities to talk back to power, mobilise across time and space and to be heard or make a difference. On the other, odds that include the digital divide, authoritarian restrictions to access, inordinate corporate practices among others are presented as the limits of citizen participation. This study focuses on Zimbabwe and Uganda to explore the ways in which citizen engagement with political power through digital media spaces was constituted during important political moments. In particular, we focus on the dynamics of engagement on Twitter during Uganda’s hotly-contested January 2021 election, as well as during widely publicised Covid19-related corruption cases in Zimbabwe in 2020. Both cases attracted substantial levels of citizen political deliberation and agitation online, as well as authoritarian state responses—in the Uganda case the shutting down of the Internet for a week. We seek to demonstrate that in the context of a shrinking civic space, citizens find creative and novel ways of asserting their right to be heard, talk back to power, and mobilise both locally and globally to amplify the case for political change. Equally, we demonstrate in this study the limited efficacy of such engagements, drawing on intersectional lenses to highlight the gender, class and historical dynamics shaping access to participation and development.