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- Convenors:
-
Anais Ménard
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Marie Deridder (UCLouvain)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Main Site Tower (MST), 01/003
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
By looking at grassroots activism in Africa, this panel explores the articulation between narratives of hope and decades of disenchantment with national politics and aid policies. How do activists reconcile those perspectives and how do their frame political action in this context?
Long Abstract:
This panel explores hopes for the future from the perspective of grassroots activism in Africa. Since the 2000s, development aid policies have followed strategies of empowerment of civil society actors, both as a counterbalance to State power and as a condition for democratization. This change has impacted local political subjectivities and the modalities of grassroots political action, including possibilities for advocacy, networking and scaling up. Concomitantly, the densification and complexification of situations of crises on the continent (including civil wars, jihadist movements, epidemics and the effects of climate change) have pushed international actors to redirect funds towards humanitarian and emergency aid, thereby forcing civil society actors to realign with new objectives imposed from the outside. This realignment occurs in contexts that have already experienced many decades of aid policies, leading to an endless circle of hope and disenchantment, and to narratives of 'lost futures' as the high expectations for countries' development following independence collapsed. Civil society actors also bear the memory of past political struggles and grassroots engagement, which informs their vision for the future. This perspective contrasts with a form of occidental amnesia regarding the history of activism on the continent. In this panel, we invite contributions that explore activist political subjectivities in African postcolonial contexts. How are hope and activism articulated in present-day Africa? How do activists reconcile hopes for the future and decades of political disenchantment? How does this affect grassroots political action and strategies? How do actors engage with competing 'models of development' and political activism?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Angela Storey (University of Louisville)
Paper short abstract:
Post-apartheid South African cities are host to significant social movement activism. This paper explores how individuals navigate within and between varied forms of politicized participation, framing such pathways as critical possibilities for future-making in and around institutions.
Paper long abstract:
Post-apartheid South African cities are host to significant social movement activism, ranging from street protests to civil society organizations, and land occupations to litigation. In addition to struggling for justice and equity on myriad social topics, movements are also far from homogenous in their internal politics, tactics, or structures. Academic work often speaks of politicized participation in relatively flattened ways, though, rarely discussing variations in politics, position, or engagement inside movements. This paper explores how individuals navigate within and between varied forms of politicized participation, drawing from interviews conducted between 2010 and 2019 in Cape Town with dozens of activists from community-based groups advocating for improved access to basic services for informal settlements. Through ethnographic vignettes, I examine the participatory contours of individuals who defy easy categorization: some are simultaneously active in groups with seemingly contradictory political positions, some present critiques of groups within which they are active members, and others move between organizational affiliations to expand networking and organizing skills. I frame these diverse experiences as critical ways through which individuals enact agency, explore possibilities for improved personal and collective lives, respond to challenges, and produce narratives of hope for their political endeavors. Grounding movements within the varied pathways of their members, instead of within a single mode of engagement or membership, provides a way to see politics as not merely the organizational director’s opportunity to shout “Amandla!” (power) at a rally, but also as the possibilities for change and future-making constantly at work in and around institutions.
Almamy Sylla (Université des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de Bamako (ULSHB)
Paper short abstract:
Notre communication explore l'articulation entre l’activisme politique « à distance » des communautés diasporiques maliennes et leur espoir à l’avènement d’une gestion politique des affaires publiques plus inclusive, transparente et vertueuse au Mali.
Paper long abstract:
L’activisme est devenu un vrai mode d’actions politiques de plus en plus recouru par les migrants dans le paysage sociopolitique malien en pleine mutation.
Avant la révolution numérique de ces deux dernières décennies, les questions politiques étaient discutées à l’interne et au niveau des partis politiques dans une quasi-exclusion des migrants non affiliés ou non partisans. Cela s’est matérialisé par leur dépolitisation de fait alors que les communautés diasporiques maliennes réclament depuis la Conférence nationale souveraine de 1991 des sièges au sein de l’assemblée nationale leur permettant de participer à l’animation de la vie politique nationale. En effet, les élections présentielles de 2013 et 2018 ont vu une participation grandissante communautés diasporiques dans les débats sur la gestion du pays où des communautés virtuelles s’affrontaient autour des programmes politiques des candidats en lice.
Dans cette présentation, nous analyserons l’activisme sous le prisme des actions politiques des migrants et des associations de migrants établis au Mali et dans la diaspora. Notre postulat est que l’activisme politique a élargi l’agir politique des migrants dans les politiques domestiques desquelles ils en étaient exclus. La circulation des normes politiques rendue possible grâce aux expériences migratoires diversifiées pousse des migrants à s’investir dans l’activisme politique dans l’espoir de voir se réaliser des changements politiques dans leur pays d’origine.
Les données de nos recherches doctorales et postdoctorales sur les mobilisations collectives des migrants, ainsi que les média sociaux et les résultats des élections de 2018 et de 2020 au Mali seront utilisés pour alimenter notre communication.
Hannelore Van Bavel (University of Bristol)
Paper short abstract:
The international development sector prioritises the eradication of FGM. Activists in Kenya have other priorities or find that ending FGM is not ambitious enough. The paper explores how activists navigate their own aspirations, development agendas, and the interests of community conservatives.
Paper long abstract:
Efforts to eradicate “female genital mutilation” (FGM) started in the early 20th century and have intensified over the last decades, accumulating in what is now a transnational, multi-million campaign to end FGM (Van Bavel 2020b). Despite the millions of dollars that have been spent on campaigning against FGM, interventions have often been ineffective or even produced unforeseen, harmful consequences (Shell-Duncan et al. 2013; Van Bavel 2020a).
Grassroots activists in Kenya attribute the ineffectiveness of anti-FGM interventions to outsiders’ failure to include communities’ priorities and aspirations. Whereas international development stakeholders and donors often prioritise the eradication of FGM, Maasai women point at the failure of the government to provide access to clean water, education, and healthcare, and at unequal gender relations that prevent them from owning land and other resources. The Kenyan government is eager to direct attention to FGM, deflecting attention from its failure to provide adequate healthcare and education. Similarly, whereas some conservatives in the community have now accepted FGM/C abandonment, they resist more extensive change in gender relations.
This paper is based on long-term ethnographic research among Kenyan Maasai and explores how grassroots activists pursue women’s priorities in a context of competing interests, conservative resistance to gender change, and legacies of failed development interventions. It investigates ways in which activists mobilise anti-FGM resources for much more ambitious agendas. Activist interlocutors criticised the anti-FGM campaign for not being ambitious enough and argued that this lack of ambition reflects colonial stereotypes about an inherently patriarchal and static Africa.