Paper short abstract:

Based on a long-standing ethnographic work among youth activists in the last decade, the paper explores various citizens-led initiatives in Luanda. It shows the ambivalence of their political engagement, between the rejection of party politics and the reproduction of the personalization of power.

Paper long abstract:

In August 2017, José Eduardo dos Santos steps down from the Angolan Presidency after 38 years. Incoming President João Lourenço surprises everyone by promising to open a dialogue with civil society and to implement a national struggle against corruption. For the handful of activists who had taken the streets and suffered harsh repression under dos Santos, it is the beginning of a new era. Street mobilisations and acephalous networks give way to more formal organisations. The network “Jovens Pelas Autarquias” (Youth for Municipalisation) becomes a channel for an unprecedented campaign that brings together lobbying activities directed to Members of Parliament on the one hand, and work of popular political education in various urban communities across the city on the other hand.

By unraveling both the rhetoric and the actions of three different collectives affiliated to this network, the paper shows the emergence of an unprecedented sense of political community that effectively disrupts the old binarity of Angolan party politics. But it also points to the fragility of these initiatives. They often reproduce a political imagination marked by the hierarchy between board-members and foot-soldiers, between the intellectuals and the masses, and even between those who belong to state-institutions and those who navigate in the margins of the state.

Exploring these tensions sheds new light on the ambivalent dynamic of democratization from below and questions the theoretical vulnerability of the concept of citizenship, seen here both as a demand for accountability and as a tool of disciplinarisation of popular politics.

Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the promotion of active citizenship among donor funded NGOs in Zimbabwe. It argues that attempts to create more responsible citizens provided some opportunities for to put pressure on government officials, but also allowed the government to shut down confrontational dissent.

Paper long abstract:

Zimbabwe has experienced a prolonged series of political and economic crises over the past 25 years, as the government has grown increasingly authoritarian in the face of sustained opposition from political parties and civil society. In this context, NGOs and their international funders have made significant efforts to support a culture of democracy among Zimbabwean citizens, moving from a focus on registering and turning out voters in the 2000s, towards deeper conceptions of citizenship and civic engagement in the 2010s. During the period between the 2013 and 2018 elections, this new citizenship approach solidified around the concept of active citizenship, understood as a more responsible attitude of the citizen towards local government, with donor funded NGO projects aiming to construct more productive Zimbabweans to address the crisis in governance and political representation at a national level. This paper draws on fieldwork interviews with NGO and donor representatives, as well as participant observation in the urban civil society to space, to argue that this conception of active citizenship created opportunities for civic engagement, but also allowed for the shutting down of more confrontational activism, and other more dissident forms of citizenship. Thus, the active citizenship paradigm provided the tools for government officials to tame and control dissent, rather than empower citizens to create radical change for Zimbabwe's future.

Paper short abstract:

Africa is urbanising, with implications for citizenship and politics. Populism is increasingly used to mobilize urban voters. A survey experiment in Kampala examines how voting intention and political support relates to characteristics of (i) voters, (ii) politicians and (iii) populist appeals.

Paper long abstract:

Africa is rapidly urbanising, with fundamental implications for citizenship and politics. The last two decades have produced a wealth of research on urban populism in the African context. In contrast to rural voters, urban voters are said to increasingly eschew ethnic or clientelist appeals in favor of charismatic political actors, inclusive programmatic policies and anti-elite rhetoric (Resnick 2014). Despite this, we know relatively little about specifically what it is about populist messaging and appeals urban voters may respond to (Collord, Goodfellow and Abedi Asante 2021). This motivates this paper to examine both (i) the varieties of populist strategies and messaging that parties and political entrepreneurs may use; and (ii) what elements of such populist strategies and appeals different voters may actually respond to. We do so by utilising an online experimental survey methodology of approximately 1000 respondents in Kampala, Uganda using a conjoint vignette based design. We develop and test a series of hypotheses to determine how voting intention and support for political candidates is related to: (i) voter characteristics; (ii) the identity characteristics of the candidate; and (iii) nature of populist political appeals and messaging. Results will be interpreted in light of relevant literature on urban populism in Africa and how urbanisation is shifting the nature of politics, mobilization and citizenship in African cities.

Paper short abstract:

Economic informalisation led to a disconnect between people’s early postcolonial urban modernist ideas and reality. While the government retained modernist foundations of citizenship (employment, taxation, productivity, and residence), people started rethinking them to fit the economic reality.

Paper long abstract:

Widespread economic informalisation in Zimbabwe from the late 1990s posed many socio-economic and political challenges to people, civil society, political parties, and the government. It created a rupture between urban residents’ modernist expectations of the city which stemmed from early post-colonial (and even colonial) times and their reality which, on the one hand, made many of these modernist ideals unattainable and, on the other hand, became characterised by the narratives and practices of survival and adaptation. This disconnect was experienced and expressed on many levels ranging from people’s everyday experiences to state politics. It had a profound impact on people’s lives and their understanding and practices of urban citizenship. On the grassroots level, people started gradually engaging in debates about the nature of urban citizenship and challenging the early post-colonial top-down foundations of urban citizenship, such as formal employment, productivity, taxation, and urban residence. Retaining modernist aspirations, people started rethinking these foundations of citizenship and shaping distinct notions and practices of lived citizenship that speak to their economic reality.