Short Abstract

In this panel we will explore and discuss the concept and processes of democratic resilience through African prisms. Moving beyond focus on procedural democratic change, we are interested in multiple practices of democratic resilience from the everyday spaces to institutional politics.

Long Abstract

Democratic resilience has become a key term to understand how democratic societies may resist or bounce back from authoritarian pressure. The term tends to focus on narrow definitions of democracy and large-N comparisons. While useful for comparison and measuring procedural democratic change, we contend that there is more to the concept of democratic resilience; to understand how countries can bounce back or forward, we need in-depth, grounded and contextual knowledges about how resilience is socially constituted and produced through various modes of organizing, mobilization and activist practices.

In this panel we invite papers that explore what democratic resilience may mean, look like and be experienced through African prisms.

In African countries, resilient practices are both visible and hidden, highly organized as seen in contemporary youth protests yet sometimes also informal and embedded in everyday experiences and practices. How can we re-think and re-theorize democratic resilience from African experiences? What can be perceived as democratic resilient practices in African contexts?

We are interested both in theoretical and methodologically oriented papers rethinking and exploring how we can study democratic resilience through African prisms, and empirical papers on contemporary struggles for democratic change. The latter may include papers ranging from movements such as gen Z protests, the role of political parties and trade unions, to ethnographic studies of everyday politics of democratisation.

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