Short Abstract

Where mainstream populism theory falters in Africa, new prisms are needed. This panel invites contributions that rethink populism from postcolonial pluralism, using communaucratic populism as a shared analytical entry point, not a required framework.

Long Abstract

Populism has become a global analytical category, yet its dominant frameworks–ideational (Mudde), discursive (Laclau), and strategic (Weyland) – still struggle to name what happens in African electoral contests. This panel takes the ECAS 2027 theme literally: it treats the African postcolony as a prism, refracting the unitary category of populism into a spectrum of forms that demand their own conceptual vocabulary. We invite empirical, comparative, and theoretical contributions that mobilise–or challenge–the notion of communaucratic populism (Obame, Essaga Eteme, and Leka Essomba) as one such vocabulary. It designates a mode of political mobilisation in which electoral competition is organised less by ideological programs than by competing claims of communal belonging, ethnic, regional, religious, generational, or identitarian, to the state, conceived as a collective patrimony rotated among groups. Situated between ethnic populism and clientelism, the concept models antagonism as horizontal, community against community, rather than the vertical people-versus-elite cleavage privileged by ideational, discursive, and strategic approaches. Contributions may address: (i) how postcolonial pluralism reconfigures the “people” of populism theory; (ii) empirical analyses of communal electoral mobilisation in francophone, anglophone, or lusophone Africa; (iii) the articulation between clientelism, ethnic populism, neopatrimonialism, and communaucratic dynamics; (iv) digital mediations of communal grammars in African elections; (v) the analytical portability of Africa-forged concepts to other postcolonial democracies; and (vi) methodological reflections on building concepts from African terrains without reducing them to regional variants. The panel’s collective ambition is to consolidate an African-anchored comparative research agenda within global populism studies.

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