Short Abstract

This panel aims to explore contemporary developments amongst African elites, focusing on career transitions, mobility (both institutional and geographical) and the ways in which the political, economic and bureaucratic spheres overlap, challenging neo-patrimonial and Big Man readings of power.

Long Abstract

African elites – their profiles and their trajectories – are shaped by both the continent’s major economic transformations and its political and military crises. This panel aims to explore the contemporary careers of these elites, focusing on their movements between the political, economic and bureaucratic spheres, the public and private sectors, but also across countries and continents. The aim will be to identify new spaces for the accumulation and conversion of capital (institutions, educational establishments, social networks, cities) and to investigate the models of success and the imaginaries that these new trajectories reflect. The panel will critically re-examine the paradigms that have historically shaped the analysis of elites in Africa (neo-patrimonialism, extraversion and Big Man) and to propose new approaches to account for these reconfigurations. This renewal is central to understanding the transformations of the state and contemporary dynamics of social stratification: which actors are becoming or remaining dominant today, and how, and with what effects?

Three areas of focus, though by no means exhaustive, are suggested. The first focuses on the rise of private-sector elites, their organisational structure (employers’ and business associations) and their relationship with the state and the political sphere. The second focuses on the link between political change and the transformation of elites, exploring how new political, administrative and economic trajectories are forged during these periods of shifting opportunities. The third examines intra- and extra-African mobility (transnational spaces of sociability, new spaces and circuits of accumulation abroad, and return trajectories).

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