Short Abstract

What ideas animate protest movements in Africa today? How do we analyse the ideas of movements fighting for democracy without simply reading them as 'liberal democratic?' How do we move beyond populism in the analysis of such movements?

Long Abstract

Protests have rocked Africa. In this panel, we seek fresh approaches to the ideas of the movements behind those protests. This panel is timely. Africa continues to play host to its long 'third-wave' of protests (Mueller, 2018). This panel's subject is significant. Past research has analysed much about these movements. It has analysed their material drivers (Mueller, 2018), opportunity structures (Sanches, 2022), and digital organising (Gukurume, 2017). Yet it has understudied what ideas animate them. Despite interest in the imaginaries which these movements might generate (Branch and Zamphilly, 2015), most empirical research reads these movements as either reproducing liberal democratic ideas, or articulating populisms, or both (Melchiorre, 2023; Nenjerema and Mpofu, 2022; Paget, 2023).

This panel takes as starting point that these movements articulate distinctive ideas which are not reducible to extant liberal democratic theory. While not disputing that many these movements employ populist logics of articulation, it agrees with de Cleen and Glynos (2021) that analysing a movement as populist can only ever be a 'starting point.' As such, it looks for lenses on the ideas of these movement which move beyond populism.

We look for papers which offer lenses onto the substance of movement ideas. We privilege frameworks of ideology studies and discourse analysis, but welcome papers which adopt a variety of approaches and methodologies. We encourage papers which focus on the concepts which activists deploy as they generate meanings, the differences between activists' ideas, and the alignment between activist and popular ideas. Informal queries welcome.

Propose paper