Short Abstract

This roundtable seeks to identify and discuss the key factors shaping the legitimacy, durability, or fragility of militarized affective regimes across these cases.

Long Abstract

This roundtable brings together case studies from Africa - each with distinct yet overlapping histories of militarization, authoritarianism, large-scale infrastructural investment, and potent technologies for surveillance, regulation, and the shaping of civilian life. Through major interventions in transport, energy, reconstruction, and real estate, these states have sought to cultivate legitimacy via what we term the militarized sensorium: an analytic framework that aims to connect macro-level narratives of warfare, militarized economies, infrastructure development, and state-building with the intimate realms of affect, emotion, sensation, and embodied experience. We propose that recent political upheavals in these contexts have not only intensified militarization but also embedded it within the everyday emotional and sensory fabric of diverse populations - citizens, refugees, residents, and those living under occupation. These sensoria - networks of affects, emotions, and dispositions produced under, through, and in relation to militarized and authoritarian states - have produced ambivalent outcomes. While often intended to secure compliance and loyalty, they also provoke resistance, catalysing various forms of subaltern activism. This roundtable seeks to identify and discuss the key factors shaping the legitimacy, durability, or fragility of militarized affective regimes across these cases.

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