Pierre Nkurunziza died in 2020, just a few months short of completing his tenure as the first post-civil war President of Burundi. Critics have cast him as yet another rebel-turned-politician who came to office on a promise of a democratic transformation but became progressively authoritarian, particularly during his third, disputed term in office. As a political figure, however, Nkurunziza remains poorly understood. What kind of a worldview motivated his politics? Drawing on critical discourse analysis, we identify three recurring themes in Nkurunziza's key political speeches: anti-colonialism; unity and self-sufficiency; and discourse around ‘politics of a new beginning’. These themes were stable across time, indicating Nkurunziza's consistent worldview, but became more pronounced and radical as he faced growing challenges to his legitimacy from within and without. Far from being confined to rhetoric, the themes also manifested in concrete policy decisions, underscoring the urgent need to take ideology seriously in understanding the political trajectories of African leaders.

Ebola Virus Disease struck Sierra Leone in May 2014. An international response was instrumental in ending the epidemic by December 2015 and has been extensively documented. Less attention has been paid to local responses. Here, we focus on a case in which there was no infection despite high infection in neighbouring areas. This brings into focus the role of customary public authority in implementing successful controls. We pay particular attention to the activities of a chiefdom Ebola Task force committee chaired by the Paramount Chief. Meetings were characterised by protocol and ceremony, but ‘face time’ served to reinforce, in ritual terms, important messages about quarantine and social distancing. The committee's pronouncements had illocutionary force. Local volunteers translated this ceremonial message into practical action to block imported cases. The analysis of ceremonial competence, we conclude, opens a window into how public authority addresses developmental shocks in Africa.

This study uses ethnography along Ethiopian women's irregular migration routes through Djibouti to analyse the complex reasons women leave home to seek labour opportunities in the Gulf States. Theories and policies that either narrowly depict women's motivations as economic in nature or focus only on women's needs for security and protection, fail to account both for the politics of seeking employment abroad, and the ways migration provides women a potential refuge from various forms of violence at home. Using a feminist analysis, we argue that women do not migrate only for financial opportunities, but also to escape combinations of domestic, political and structural violence. As such, irregular migration both evinces a failure of asylum systems and humanitarian organisations to protect Ethiopians, and a failure of the state to provide Ethiopian women meaningful citizenship. Lacking both protection and meaningful citizenship, international migration represents women's journeys for opportunity and emancipation.

Within two decades, Sierra Leone's ‘cliques’ have transformed from peripheral social clubs to warring Crips, Bloods, and Black street gangs at the heart of criminal and political violence. Nevertheless, they remain severely under-studied, with scholarship on Sierra Leonean youth marginality heavily focused on ex-combatants. Drawing on extended fieldwork with Freetown's cliques as they played the ‘game’ – the daily hustle to survive and resist the ‘system’ – this article offers two main contributions. First, it addresses the knowledge gap by charting the origins, evolution and contemporary organisation of these new urban players. Second, it argues that although this history reveals continuity in perennial forms of youth marginalisation, it also shows that the game itself has changed. Cycles of escalating violence and growth are hardwired into this new game. Exacerbated by a political system that sustains and exploits them, cliques present a far greater challenge to everyday peace than has hitherto been recognised.

As infrastructure development has become a key ingredient in Africa–China relations, the role of African governments in co-determining the design, funding and governance of the continent's infrastructures has come under close scrutiny. This article sheds light on the rehabilitation of a symbol of Sino–African friendship: the Tanzania–Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA). Employing Jessop's strategic-relational approach, it is shown that the strategies of the shareholding governments in the negotiations with a Chinese consortium were informed by strategic learning from previous railway privatisations, corresponding cost–benefit analyses and reflection about Chinese commercial interests. Zambia's indebtedness and Tanzania's autocratic developmental state under President Magufuli formed crucial elements of the structural context in which the fate of Africa's Freedom Railway was negotiated. The article transcends both crudely structuralist accounts of a supposedly all-powerful China and voluntarist conceptions of African agency that are void of structure. Assessing (African) agency requires analytical sensitivity towards the dialectical interaction between specific strategic capacities and strategically selective political–economic contexts.

Building on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article draws from military sociology to revisit past portrayals of Liberian former combatant networks and assesses four central assumptions connected to them: that formal wartime command structures continue as informal networks long after the end of the war; that former combatants are united by a wartime identity and form a community to an extent separated from the surrounding society; that wartime experiences have had a major disciplining effect on former combatants; and that former combatants are both good mobilisers and easy to mobilise in elections and armed conflict alike. Finding limited evidence close to two decades after the end of war to support these assumptions, I ultimately ask whether it would be more productive to both theory and Liberians alike to widen investigation from former combatants to structural issues that affect many more in the country.

For decades, Plateau State in Nigeria's Middle Belt has witnessed repeated ethnoreligious violence. Over this period, both state and federal governments have established formal Commissions of Inquiry (COIs) in response to unrest, tasked with investigating violence, identifying perpetrators, and – ultimately – strengthening accountability. While commissions’ mandates and specific outcomes varied, there is general consensus that inquiries have been largely ineffective at securing justice or establishing accountability for violence. This study seeks to understand the expectations placed on, and role of, COIs in Plateau State as pathways to formal accountability in a context of recurring violence. We argue that COIs are embedded in the complex, multilevel networks and politics of state and non-state institutions. Civil society, in turn, has diverse expectations and demands, and articulates these in fragmented ways. As a result, COIs served primarily as another avenue for interest-based negotiations.

This article applies a regime cycle framework to understand patterns of change and continuity in African competitive autocracies. We observe that regime change in African autocracies is rarely the result of actions carried out by rebels, opposition leaders or popular masses substantially altering the structure of power. Instead, they are more frequently carried out by senior regime cadres, resulting in controlled reshuffles of power. We argue that such regime shifts are best explained through a cyclical logic of elite collective action consisting of accommodation and consolidation, and ultimately leading to fragmentation and crisis. These dynamics indicate the stage of leader-elite relationships at a given time, and suggest when regimes may likely expand, contract, purge and fracture. We argue that, by acknowledging in which stage of the cycle a regime and its senior elites are dominant, we can gauge the likelihood as well as the potential success of a regime change. Our framework is finally applied to understand recent regime shifts in competitive autocracies across Africa.

While the increase of women in elected office has received much scholarly attention, less attention has been paid to the dynamics of resisting gender quotas in countries that fail to adopt such measures despite regional and international pressure. We develop a context-sensitive typology of affirmative action measures that includes gender quotas and funding incentives and explore determinants of electoral candidates’ positioning in the context of Zambia. Using a sequential mixed-methods approach and unique data, we examine how candidates of different gender, party affiliation, and level of electoral success position themselves when asked to choose between different options. Intriguingly, electoral success and party allegiance – whether a candidate is affiliated with a current or former government party – are more important than gender. This finding is relevant for the debate on feminist democratic representation by showing that candidates are likely to have their more radical views muted when getting into position.

More than 20 years after the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, the international community is concerned with taking stock of its implementation in countries undergoing transitions from war to peace. This article contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics involved in implementing the Women, Peace and Security agenda through a focus on the frictional interactions that take place between different actors promoting women's participation in the peace process in Mali. Based on extensive fieldwork in Bamako between 2017 and 2019, it analyses interactions between different international and local actors in the Malian peace process through a discussion of vertical (between international and local actors) and horizontal (between local actors) friction. It finds that the way different actors respond to friction shapes relationships and impacts norm trajectories by triggering feedback loops, which in turn trigger new responses and outcomes.

Despite the proliferation of literature on large-scale land acquisitions (LSLA) in Africa, few empirical studies exist on how patronage networks combine with socio-cultural stratification to determine the livelihood outcomes for African agrarian-based communities. This article draws from ethnographic research on Cameroon to contribute to bridging this gap. We argue that lineage and patronage considerations intersect to determine beneficiaries and losers during LSLA. Second, we show that LSLA tend to re-entrench existing inequalities in power relations that exist within communities in favour of people with traceable ancestral lineage. Concomitantly, non-indigenous groups especially migrants, bear the brunt of exclusion and are unfortunately exposed to severe livelihood stresses due to their inability to leverage patronage networks and political power to defend their interests. We submit that empirical examination of the impacts of land acquisitions should consider the centrality of power and patronage networks between indigenes and non-indigenes, and how this socio-cultural dichotomy restricts and/or mediates land acquisition outcomes in Cameroon.

Since 2000, many African countries have adopted land tenure reforms that aim at comprehensive land registration (or certification) and titling. Much work in political science and in the advocacy literature identifies recipients of land certificates or titles as ‘programme beneficiaries’, and political scientists have modelled titling programmes as a form of distributive politics. In practice, however, rural land registration programmes are often divisive and difficult to implement. This paper tackles the apparent puzzle of friction around rural land certification. We study Côte d'Ivoire's rocky history of land certification from 2004 to 2017 to identify political economy variables that may give rise to heterogeneous and even conflicting preferences around certification. Regional inequalities, social inequalities, and regional variation in pre-existing land tenure institutions are factors that help account for friction or even resistance around land titling, and thus the difficult politics that may arise around land tenure reform. Land certification is not a public good or a private good for everyone.

Parliamentary youth quotas have been adopted by nine countries, mainly African autocracies. They have also attracted the attention of international organisations, which consider them indicators of democratic progress. Why were these quotas adopted? This article challenges the long-standing regime survival thesis by explaining quota adoption as the result of the convergent strategies of actors placed inside and outside the regime. It also provides new theoretical arguments that point to the transformation of representative linkages in hybrid regimes and shows how this is justified in the light of empirical evidence grounded on qualitative methodology and extensive fieldwork. By connecting the broader historical and socio-political context where youth quotas emerged – Africa – to the micro-level processes of quota adoption – based on the Moroccan case – this article provides a dynamic picture of how political representation is claimed and mobilised in contemporary Africa while shedding some light on the inclusive limits of quota policies.

The emergence of medium-scale farms is having important consequences for agricultural commercialisation across Africa. This article examines the role of medium-scale A2 farms allocated following Zimbabwe's land reform after 2000. While the existing literature focuses on changing farm size distributions, this article investigates processes of social differentiation across medium-scale farms, based on qualitative-quantitative studies in two contrasting sites (Mvurwi and Masvingo-Gutu). Diverse processes of accumulation are identified across commercial, aspiring and struggling farmers, and linked to contrasting patterns of agricultural production and sale, asset ownership, employment and finance. The ability to mobilise finance, influenced by the state of the macro-economy, as well as forms of political patronage, is identified as a crucial driver. Contrary to assertions that A2 farms are largely occupied by ‘cronies’ and that they are unproductive and under-utilised, a more differentiated picture emerges, with important implications for policy and the wider politics of Zimbabwe's countryside following land reform.

South Africa is the intellectual epicentre of the ideology of African renaissance and of the growing scholarly attention to decoloniality as an epistemological and aesthetic agenda of decolonisation. Paradoxically, the country is also a xenophobic crime scene: the continental state associated with endemic Afrophobic violence. This is a contradiction with both contemporary and historical significance. Positing this framing of a contradictory impulse should come with a caveat: Black South African intellectual investments in pan-Africanist projects were part of a broader cosmopolitan imaginary necessitated by South African colonial history and were thus partly projects of necessity. The origins of this politics of self-fashioning were not exclusively pan-Africanist.

The Big Man has attracted considerable attention from social scientists, both as an explanatory force as well as a phenomenon to be explained. But the concept has become unmoored from its original meaning. Once used to refer to an apex figure within a patrimonial regime, today Big Men are often described as dictators or thieves. I show this using an original dataset covering discussions of Big Men in leading African Studies journals since 1980. I find that authors, especially political scientists, overemphasise theft and underemphasise accountability of Big Men. Then, drawing on my research with Ghanaian local politicians, I show how Big Men are constantly under pressure from their supporters. The paper concludes with a modest call to put the Big Man back in his place as powerful but also empowered, and thus indebted, to those beneath him.

The article argues that the impact of law enforcement efforts against corruption deserves more scholarly attention. Drawing on a mixed-methods study from Malawi in southern Africa, where a large-scale law enforcement operation has been investigating and prosecuting those involved in a 2013 corruption scandal known as ‘Cashgate’, the article explores the potential for corruption deterrence from the perspective of government officials in the Malawi civil service. Malawi provides a challenging environment for deterrence due to limited state capacity, weak law enforcement agencies and widespread corruption. Nonetheless, the research findings show that Malawian government officials perceive prosecutions and convictions to deter corruption, both with regards to the law enforcement response to Cashgate specifically and law enforcement efforts in general. The findings from Malawi suggest that law enforcement and criminal justice have the potential to make an important contribution to anti-corruption strategies in Africa and the Global South at large.

South Africa faces interconnected challenges of developing and diversifying its economy and adapting to and mitigating the impacts of climate change. A green policy tilt is ascendant in the country, manifest in a cascading array of policies and special initiatives. Utilising concepts from the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions, we assess Africa's first designated Green Special Economic Zone (SEZ), Atlantis SEZ (ASEZ) in the Western Cape, a niche innovation aimed at transforming the Province's industrial base. This initiative is very ambitious in four respects: (1) it links green SEZ development in a deprived metropolitan area to the broader regional economy; (2) it utilises an innovative governance structure; (3) it promises localization economies and export potential; and (4) it connects SEZ niche experimentation with emergent renewable energy regimes. While elements are in place which might seed a sociotechnical transition, societal and political forces (i.e. landscape features) continue to limit its realisation, highlighting the immanent, structural realities shaping South Africa's economic futures.

In the global effort to strengthen national identification systems (SDG 16.9), biometric identification technologies and civil registration systems have been associated with different motives and applications, thus fuelling their competition for public attention and resources. The case of Ghana illustrates how these alternative systems, along with further sources of personal data, have recently been integrated into the larger political vision of a centralised, national population data system. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper traces the difficulties and institutional negotiations that accompany this integration into a centralised population data infrastructure. Acknowledging how sets of actors, infrastructures and power relations are layered onto each other to unintended effects, the article describes the historical process of institutional and infrastructural harmonisation in the production of biometric population registers in Ghana.

Insistent calls to ‘decolonise’ African studies beg the question of what this quest actually involves. If it refers to an attempt to understand the continent's diverse and complex societies that builds on their indigenous structures and values, this was a task initiated during the decolonisation era of the 1950s and early 1960s. Led by historians and drawing heavily on insights from anthropology, it led to a revolution in the understanding of Africa, which nonetheless failed to maintain its impetus as a result of the political authoritarianism and economic decay of the post-independence period, which had a particularly damaging impact on Africa's universities. Of late, however, the phrase has come to refer to developments notably in North America and Europe, which in subordinating the study of Africa to agendas in the global North may appropriately be described not as decolonisation but as recolonisation. A genuine decolonisation of knowledge production for Africa must rest on a return to its roots within the continent itself.