Abstract Previous studies have documented that legislative behaviour in Africa is shaped by a combination of executive, partisan, and constituency incentives, but instances where these pressures sharply diverge are rare. The 2024 Finance Bill in Kenya represents one such critical juncture, where parliamentarians were caught between historic public outrage and unyielding institutional demands. Drawing on an original dataset of parliamentary speeches and votes, this article analyses both the discursive and behavioural dimensions of legislative activity during a period of crisis. The main finding is that even under severe public pressure, party affiliation powerfully shapes parliamentary dynamics: government MPs maintained firm support for the bill, while opposition MPs organized in dissent. However, tracking voting patterns over time, I find that opposition legislators increasingly shifted towards abstention as the executive continued to push the bill forward. Further, MPs representing urban constituencies, where protest exposure and cost-of-living pressures were most acute, were more likely to oppose the bill or deviate from party lines. The study highlights a divergence between executive and legislative responsiveness, suggesting that while protests can prompt rapid policy concessions, their effects on lawmaking remain limited and conditional.
Disasters can function as social disruptors, shifting the day-to-day relations of power in response to the crisis. In Tanzania, coronavirus disease-2019 (Covid-19) was not nationally acknowledged as a disaster in the same ways as in neighbouring countries. Yet, in northern Tanzania, where much of the economy depends on tourism, it was a disaster. This article examines how Tanzanian tourism companies responded to the Covid-19 crisis through the interpretive lens of everyday humanitarianism. Through collaboration, qualitative interviews with stakeholders, and participant observation, we argue that businesspeople in tourism engaged in a locally grounded form of corporate helping that mitigated the crisis while avoiding direct political conflict. The actions of Tanzanian tourist companies involved navigating complex political dynamics around naming the crisis, negotiating relationships with foreigners, and distinguishing effective helping from aid dependency. Thus, understanding how these everyday humanitarians experience and negotiate the politics of helping challenges our preconceptions around business helping in crisis and expands our conceptualization of humanitarianism.
Anchored in a historical and geographical analysis of the music of the 2019 Sudanese revolution, this article demonstrates the various ways in which music has been politically consequential in Sudan since the mid-twentieth century. It shows that Khartoum's music scenes were, historically, deeply intertwined with resistance movements because they provided vital avenues for political communication and collective identity formation, including politicized gender identities. The article argues that the displacement of these scenes through the out-migration of musicians, producers, and fans was not necessarily a political loss to popular resistance, as the literature on the politics of music suggests. Instead, the Khartoum case tells us that protracted displacement paradoxically forged resilient social infrastructures that proved invaluable in facilitating on-the-ground resistance in 2019. In addition, the gendered asymmetries in accessing these transnational processes significantly shaped the music of the revolution and the political identities fomented by it. This argument contributes important geographical and historical analysis to the literature on the 2019 Sudanese revolution, as well as demonstrating the hidden political opportunities for resistance music that are afforded by displacement.
How do the effects of victimization from political violence reverberate in repressive post-conflict environments? Scholars have clarified the politicizing and mobilizing legacies of violence in politically liberal environments. Our study extends the analysis of victimization to an understudied autocratic context: Cameroon. Southern Cameroon was the site of an extended conflict between the Union des populations du Cameroun (UPC) and the colonial French administration. Crucially, the UPC lost, and the newly implanted French-aligned Union camerounaise instituted a draconian legal regime that inhibited citizens from speaking publicly about the trauma they experienced during a conflict that frequently targeted civilians. Through the 1980s, speaking publicly about victimization risked severe state retribution. We fielded an original survey to measure potential legacies of violence and document patterns consistent with the intergenerational transmission of political beliefs. We find that perceptions of inter-ethnic and state-based discrimination are higher among individuals in communities that the historical record identifies as having been exposed to violence. Furthermore, this sense of grievance is associated with greater opposition to the ruling party, a derivative of which has been in power since the 1960s.
This article explores the complex interplay between foreign investments, state-building, and kin-based political structures and conflict in Somaliland. While foreign investments are often viewed as mechanisms to bolster governance and foster economic development, they can also exacerbate existing socio-political tensions. We argue that this has been the case in Somaliland. By tracing the historical and structural shifts in Somaliland's governance from consensus politics to a more centralized model influenced by external economic engagement, we trace how investment-driven development intersects with marginalization, in some cases contributing to destabilization. This culminated, we argue, in a conflict over the strategic town of Lasanod from late 2022 onward, during which the Somaliland state lost control of almost a third of its territory. We situate these dynamics within wider debates on extraversion, showing how external rents are mediated through kinship institutions that shape both co-optation and confrontation. Understanding the role of kinship in these processes is essential for more nuanced theories of state-building and conflict in Somaliland and similar states seeking international recognition. Politics in the region accelerated when, on 26 December 2025, Israel recognized Somaliland (as the only state so far) and, in response, the Somali president and his government visited Lasanod on 16 and 17 February 2026 to underline Somalia's territorial integrity. Our text provides a necessary background to assess these unfolding dynamics.
In early 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments imposed states of emergency rule to streamline budgeting, impose mitigation protocols, and increase health sector capacity. These rules fundamentally changed executive-legislative relations while in place, accruing extraordinary power to executives and sidelining legislatures. In Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa-all dominant or hegemonic party regimes where executives and their legislative majorities faced few meaningful national political challenges-this meant that opposition parties were deprived of many institutionalized mechanisms for articulating dissent. This article details how opposition parties under states of exception resorted to extra-institutional means to express dissent. In doing so, this article contributes to the growing literature exploring democratic backsliding by arguing that states of exception involve significant tradeoffs for the supply of democracy, which are thrown into sharp relief in the context of dominant party regimes. Yet, this article also contends that in the wake of the pandemic, there are signs of democratic consolidation in Southern African democratic dominant party regimes, while authoritarian states show signs of entrenching backsliding.
Research has extensively examined how different candidate selection rules shape legislators' representational behaviour. Yet far less attention has been paid to constituency-specific nomination strategies adopted by parties operating under the same formal rules and their effects on post-election legislative behaviour. This article argues that, regardless of national party rules, constituency parties apply restrictive candidate selection criteria in electorally safe constituencies but adopt more permissive criteria in competitive ones. In safe constituencies, where the threat of defeat is low, candidacy is confined to highly loyal members. However, in competitive constituencies, selection is comparatively permissive. Restricting candidacy induces a stronger post-election focus on parliamentary activity, whereas more permissive procedures encourage constituency-centred representation. The study assesses these claims using evidence from the New Patriotic Party's (NPP) 2020 parliamentary primaries in Ghana. Drawing on interviews, press reports, parliamentary records, and election data, the analysis shows that in the NPP's safe constituencies, loyal candidates were selected and subsequently devoted limited effort to constituency representation. In contrast, MPs elected from competitive constituencies, who emerged from more permissive primaries, devoted greater attention to constituency representation than to plenary activity.
This article examines digital sovereignty initiatives in Kenya, particularly efforts to cultivate technical skills, as an aperture through which to understand how postcolonial African states perform digital sovereignty within a globally asymmetrical technological and economic order. It argues that such initiatives operate not only as practical interventions in digital development but also as figural performances of state agency. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Nairobi, including interviews, policy analysis, and institutional observations, the study shows how programmes for cultivating technological talent serve as aspirational modalities through which the state enacts its commitment to digital sovereignty. While African policymakers and their corporate partners increasingly frame digital sovereignty as a pathway to state capacity and development, these very acts of assertion often reinscribe new forms of dependency, particularly through the legitimization of privatization and alignment with corporate interests. By centering these initiatives, the article illuminates the political life of technical capacity building programmes, revealing how the pursuit of sovereignty in the digital age is entangled with, and constrained by, enduring structures of dependency and global inequality.
The Mali conflict that erupted in 2012 has developed simultaneously with the advancement of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). In this article, we research how digital communication (i.e. mobile phones and smartphones) and the conflict dynamics co-constitute each other. We analyse ethnographic data gathered during the conflict, from both off- and online sources, and view these data through the lens of 'digital participatory warfare' and as a 'transformational condition of life'. On the individual, community, association, and state levels, ICTs transmit information about the conflict, create propaganda, and help organize actions. The effect of this digital participation in war is not direct and depends on social and political contexts. At the same time, there is a direct relation between the use of digital communication and the pushing of polarized religious and ethnic choices that foster feuds and violence. Simultaneously, however, digital participation also leads to networks of care.
In the October 2024 elections, Botswana experienced for the first time a change of government. The ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) lost power to the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC). The BDP was related to the minority opposition in parliament. This article delves into the factors that led to the loss of the BDP in these elections. It attributes the demise of the BDP to economic factors such as high levels of unemployment, bad governance practices, and internal squabbles over the party's primary elections, which resulted in some members contesting the elections as independent candidates.
This article advances Pan-Africanism as an analytical category for understanding African politics and global entanglements. It shows how recurring debates over Pan-Africanism's existence, critiques of essentialism, and the persistent emphasis on unity have shaped dominant approaches to the concept in public discourse, policy practice, and scholarship. This study argues that approaches which treat Pan-Africanism primarily as a normative ideal or institutional programme foreclose its analytical potential by confining it to evaluative and institutional registers. Drawing on long-term fieldwork and more than 100 interviews conducted between 2019 and 2025 in Addis Ababa, Accra, Abuja, Johannesburg, and London, the article redirects analysis toward the conditions under which Pan-Africanism acquires meaning, authority, and political force in specific contexts. It examines Pan-Africanism through the claims, practices, and political reasoning of actors who invoke it across different sites. In so doing, the article proposes an analytical orientation that treats Pan-Africanism as a heuristic for delineating an empirical field, an interpretive framework for examining what such invocations do in practice, and a reflexive stance for tracing Pan-Africanism's rearticulation over time.
