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Short Abstract:
This panel explores diverse forms of Muslim political dissent in Eastern Africa, including jihadi militancy and civic activism. Attending to parallels, divergences, entanglements, and ambivalences, it challenges prevailing representations of local politico-religious landscapes.
Long Abstract:
This panel invites researchers to draw on empirically grounded studies to explore diverse forms of Muslim political dissent in Eastern Africa. In recent years, currents of jihadi militancy in the region that extend beyond Somalia have garnered a considerable degree of international attention—most recently in the context of the ongoing insurgency in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, but also in relation to the activities of militant networks operating in DR Congo, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and elsewhere. Rather less well-publicised has been the emergence of a number of Muslim civic activist movements which have contested ruling parties and the Muslim leaders that support them.
This panel adopts a broad notion of Muslim political dissent, not in order to conflate jihadi militancy and civic activism, but rather to tease out parallels, divergences, and entanglements between these different forms of political expression—as well as the ways in which states and other actors have responsed to politico-religious contention. The panel also creates space for researchers to acknowledge the contingencies and ambivalences that permeate the contexts and events that they study.
In doing so, the panel sets out to unsettle and reconfigure prevailing representations of Muslim political dissent in and beyond Eastern Africa which all too often gloss the diversity of such expressions and the contexts they emerge in, as well as the ambiguities that their research interlocutors must navigate. Here we also make room for critical reflection on the political work that such representations perform (and, indeed, the ends that they serve).