Short Abstract

This panel examines relationships of obligation in their plural, often gendered, registers - including aspects of patronage, informality, and moral economies of obligation. It asks how hierarchies are built, contested, and legitimised across African political economies.

Long Abstract

Political clientelism in Africa has long been theorised as a dyadic relationship: a powerful patron and a subaltern client, bound by loyalty, protection, or resources, dramatised through idioms of bodily excess (Bayart; Mbembe) and formalised as the field's basic unit of analysis. This picture has since been complicated by accounts of "real governance," where informal obligation structures the state as much as, or more than, its formal rules, often through arrangements exceeding any single pair. Parallel debates on informality and popular economies have shown unregulated economic life with its own hierarchies of control, access, and obligation, rather than simply lying "outside" formal power.

These literatures have developed separately: clientelism studies ask how political office converts into private gain redistributed to secure loyalty; informality studies examine market relationships and livelihoods, treating politics as background. Yet both describe obligation organised through redistributive logics, where access is owed, brokered and repaid rather than given.

This panel treats that convergence as its starting point. We take the conference's idea of prism seriously: clientelism literature has reduced diverse practices to a single figure (the patron, the big man ) an artefact of an elite-focused, implicitly male vantage point. Refraction names this panel's move: splitting obligation into its plural registers, where gendered institutions run alongside patron networks and legitimacy sits uneasily with extraction. We seek abstracts on how informal governance produces hierarchy beyond the classic patron-client dyad, how gendered institutions organise obligation differently, and how redistribution can be legitimate to some and extractive to others.

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