Short Abstract

Unions, lawyers, informal traders and digital activists are governing Africa from below. This panel examines how strikes, strategic litigation, and mobile-money crowdfunding refocus civic action into new repertoires, and how states co-opt, regulate, or repress them.

Long Abstract

Across Africa, citizens are not waiting for governance to be delivered from above. Striking doctors and lecturers, informal traders’ associations, lawyers filing constitutional petitions, and protesters crowdfunding bail and medical bills through mobile money are all practising governance from below. Yet these repertoires are usually studied in separate silos: labour studies, legal mobilisation, digital activism and development finance. Using the conference theme as its lens, this panel invites participants to see how these dispersed grassroots rays of action refract into a single image of the struggle for better governance.

We invite papers on how African actors use organised labour, legal and constitutional tools, digital platforms and financial technologies to hold power to account, provide public goods or redraw the boundaries of the state. Themes of interest include the recomposition of trade unionism amid informality and precarious work; alliances and tensions between unions, established civil society and youth-led, “leaderless” protest; strategic litigation and community paralegal work; mobile money and crowdfunding as infrastructures of solidarity; and the ambivalence of digital tools, at once remedy and poison, which enable mobilisation while exposing activists to surveillance, disinformation, shutdowns and frozen accounts.

We also ask what happens after mobilisation: how states co-opt, regulate or repress grassroots initiatives, and when bottom-up action produces durable institutional change. We welcome comparative, historical and interdisciplinary work, contributions from Francophone and Lusophone contexts, and papers co-authored with activists and practitioners.

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