Chiefs in Malawi exercise significant authority based on legitimacy derived from the position's purportedly deep historical origins. But, does such legitimacy confer when a new chieftaincy is created from scratch? I address this question within the context of an ongoing cultural revival of the Lhomwe ethnic group in Malawi, which has included the appointment of many new Lhomwe chiefs and the creation of a Lhomwe paramount chieftaincy. Using a combination of in-depth interviews and original survey data, I explore the political drivers, mechanisms and implications of the this newly created Lhomwe chieftaincy. I find that its creation was driven by top-down, elite-led action rather than citizen demands, and that the newly appointed chiefs enjoy the most support among urban-based backers of the political party responsible for their appointments. This research contributes to historical work on the colonial-era creation of chieftaincies, but does so using a contemporary case of cultural engineering.

Do Nigerian political parties take left/right ideological positions? Perspectives in comparative politics see party competition in Africa's ‘third wave’ democracies as devoid of disagreement on class or economic grounds – and thus as ‘absent’ of left/right ideology. Yet, a dearth of disagreement among governing parties can also suggest ideological agreement or ‘convergence’. This article maps the development of the left/right cleavage in Nigeria's party system, examining the evolution of economic pledges in the manifestos of parties that took power across Nigeria's four attempts at electoral democracy. It finds that relative to the deeper levels of economic disagreement voiced in earlier periods, the governing parties of Nigeria's Fourth Republic are now largely unanimous in the enunciation of their economic visions. Evidence of such convergence troubles a strict insistence on either the polarisation or ‘absence’ of economic ideology among governing parties in Africa's largest electoral democracy.

Zambia experienced its third electoral turnover in the 2021 election. While the ruling Patriotic Front (PF) lost votes across the territory, the electoral collapse in urban Zambia was particularly remarkable. This paper argues that economic performance voting can explain urban party switching in Zambia. The argument is supported by a unique panel survey of Zambian voters in the period 2019–2022. We show that urban voters were more likely to desert the PF, even when we control for ethnicity. We also show that they were more likely to evaluate the economy poorly and more likely to change their electoral preferences in view of such poor economic evaluation. Our results stress that African elections should not be understood as static expressions of stable political cleavages but may function as real opportunities for political accountability. However, the extent to which voters are willing to re-evaluate their vote choice varies across space.

While the challenges of family law reform and barriers to justice are widely studied, there is a gap in our understanding of the gendered nature of the use of courts in West Africa. Through analysis of judicial decisions in Courts of First Instance (Tribunaux de Première Instance) in Allada and Cotonou, Benin, this article examines how women and men use lower courts in family law cases. This article finds that despite barriers to access to formal institutions, women use these courts in equal numbers as do men, and they use them for divorce, as well as to claim child custody, child-support and alimony. Men mostly use family law courts to determine paternity and to seek divorce. Despite a widespread lack of confidence in courts and tribunals, these Courts of First Instance are a tool for women to challenge social hierarchy and to claim rights for themselves and their children.

Many large-scale land acquisition studies focus on the role of powerful transnational corporations, foreign and domestic governments. Instead, we shift the focus to the role of local actors, in this case, pastoralists in Samburu County, Kenya. Here, we apply the concept of ‘intimate exclusion’ and show that pastoralist elites' desire and ability to maximise productive and financial gains from customary land, coupled with their privileged understanding of land-related laws and regulations and ability to use or threaten others with violence, enables the control of extensive customary lands and the exclusion of weaker pastoralists. These processes, we find, are rooted in the country's capitalist development trajectory traceable to colonial rule. Overall, the paper highlights local ‘homegrown’ actors’ role in large-scale land acquisition, how social intimacy provides space and opportunity for unequal benefits and how historical gains offer unique opportunities to gain from new political and economic developments.

Over the last decade China has become a dominant player in Africa's rapidly growing hydropower sector. These mega projects typically employ thousands of Africans yet research on labour relations at these sites remains extremely limited. This article provides a rare systematic analysis of workers’ experiences on a Chinese-financed-and-constructed hydroelectric dam in Africa. We find that chronic verbal abuse of African workers by Chinese managers is a defining feature of labour relations at this project in Uganda. This abuse has tainted many workers’ attitudes towards the Chinese contractor Sinohydro, the Chinese government, and to a lesser extent Chinese people themselves. Workers also perceive Ugandan organisations and the Ugandan government as complicit in these poor labour relations. These findings underscore the limits of accountability to labour standards by Chinese firms operating in Africa, especially in contexts where host organisations and governments fail to advocate aggressively for the rights of African workers.

Somalia has a long history of famine and humanitarian crisis. This article focuses on the years 2008–2020, during which governance and aid practices changed substantially and which include three crisis periods. The article examines whether and how governance analysed as a political marketplace can help explain Somalia's repeated humanitarian crises and the manipulation of response. We argue that between 2008 and 2011 the political marketplace was a violent competitive oligopoly which contributed to famine, but that from 2012 a more collusive, informal political compact resulted in a status quo which avoided violent conflict or famine in 2017 and which functioned to keep external resources coming in. At the same time, this political arrangement benefits from the maintenance of a large group of displaced people in permanent precarity as a source of aid and labour.

This paper seeks to broaden the framework for understanding the many different roles that traditional leaders play in their communities in sub-Saharan Africa. Using data from an original public opinion survey along the Ghana–Togo border, we find that one of the most important roles of the chieftaincy is to maintain law and order: resolving disputes and keeping the community safe from crime. However, we also find considerable variation in what chiefs are expected to do, how effective they are performing their various tasks, and how much authority they wield in doing so – both over their own subjects as well as over local government officials. We explore several potential sources for this variation, finding that chiefs in Ghana, a former British colony, are expected to do more jobs, are perceived to be more effective, and hold more upward power over local state officials compared with their counterparts in Togo, a former French colony.

This paper challenges existing analyses of party cleavages in Sub-Saharan Africa which over-emphasise the centrality of ethnicity. Parties express ideological positions that reflect the socio-economic interests of specific regions, which, especially in Zambia, coincide with particular ethnic groups. We demonstrate this through an examination of party manifestos, policy documents and semi-structured interviews with members of two political parties in Zambia – the Patriotic Front and the United Party for National Development. These parties express clear normative ideas about social welfare, especially the role of the state in providing social assistance to the poorest. These ideological positions reflect the socio-economic interests of the ethnic groups and regions where support for each party is dominant. These are shaped by the ways in which these regions were historically incorporated into the colonial economy. In order to gain a better understanding of African politics, ethnicity must be conceptualised as a socio-cultural construct and situated historically.

As taxation has become a prominent issue on the international development policy agenda, a growing body of research has focused on taxpayer perceptions and experiences of taxation. A strand of this research emphasises the importance of the historical, political and social context of taxation. We position ourselves in line with this research as we pay attention to the emic definitions of taxation in Africa across contexts, languages, and time periods. We explore how the conception of taxation in different contexts is closely interrelated with the language used to describe it, with language being a product of histories of colonialism, conflict, and extraction by social, traditional and political actors. We argue that studies of taxation, particularly survey-based research, need to be complemented, if not informed, by a deeper understanding of the diversity of tax landscapes and of the meanings ascribed to taxation in a given context. This will strengthen content and interpretive validity of taxpayer perception data as well as provide important nuances to the understanding of the dynamics of taxpayers’ experiences of contemporary states and systems of taxation.

Violence based on identity constructs reinforces the experience of ethnic boundaries as felt distance between in-groups and out-groups. But what makes such an experience of rigid ethnic boundaries fade or disappear, if anything? We examined this in Burundi, a country characterised by repeated episodes of violence between Hutu and Tutsi since independence. We analysed the waxing and waning of ethnic boundaries through the (life) stories of 202 individuals collected through an iterative research process in two rural villages that were seriously touched by (ethnic) violence. Rigid boundaries between ethnic in- and out-group appeared to fade through non-violent interactions; when categorisations other than ethnic emerged; and when awareness of interstitiality, being in-between salient groups, contested the relevance and meaning of the ethnic boundary as such. These insights invite us to bring in multiple temporalities and identities when aiming to understand legacies of violence in conflict-affected societies such as Burundi. This would allow us to avoid treating groups as substantial entities, which reinforces boundaries between in-groups and out-groups.

Drawing on empirical research from Pujehun and Port Loko districts in Sierra Leone, this article explains the variable pathways of civic activism mobilised by environmental advocacy, and legal empowerment organisations, in response to two prominent land grabs. By grounding the analysis within the ontology of place, this study examines the dynamic interplay between national politics, global corporate interests, transnational advocacy, and civic agency in each place. The article finds that although the balance of power between these actors matters, the nature of corporate interests involved can be significant in determining the exact trajectory of civic mobilisation, and ultimately its success.

In South Africa, informal rental accommodation constructed in the backyards of formal houses is the fastest growing housing segment. These backyard dwellings (BDs) are makeshift structures made from timber frames, metal sheets or wooden planks. Despite the proliferation of BDs, national and local governments have done little to improve the living standards of backyard dwellers. The research uses focus groups, interviews and building surveys to examine the current state of backyard dwellings and identify opportunities and barriers for government interventions. We analyse the barriers to home improvements, highlighting the important role of tenant dignity and landlord-tenant relations. Furthermore, the research discusses the challenges of potential government-led interventions, which could easily fail in the context of resistance, mistrust and anxiety over housing. We present four key considerations that any intervention to upgrade BDs in South Africa or similar rental units in other localities must consider.

Sudan has for decades been one of Africa's most fragmented polities. Yet arguably the single most consequential actor in its recent history is among the least well studied: the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF). For most of post-independence statehood, Khartoum has been ruled by generals. This article places SAF in a longitudinal context of the expansion and contraction of state power and the functions of the coercive apparatus in these processes. It situates SAF in institutional logics, driven by historically contingent ideas about the nature of the polity, the role of the army within it and its likely partners and enemies. Doing so historicises the strategic calculus of SAF during the 2018–2019 December Revolution which mobilised millions but ended with a new coup in October 2021. I underscore how institutionalised rivalry between SAF and other security services has moulded patterns of regime change and consolidation: from Ja'afar Nimeiri and Omar Al-Bashir to Abdelfatah Al-Burhan today, anxieties over security competition and state fragility shape SAF's willingness to break with regimes it once dominated and its subsequent subversion of revolutionary change and democratisation.

This paper explores the Economic Community of West African States’ (ECOWAS) citizenship regime by investigating the institutional perceptions of five departments of the ECOWAS Commission. Creating a citizenship regime has been a central objective of the organisation's institutional framework but previous research has refrained from examining its multiplicity. The paper uses the concept of citizenship regime consisting of the dimensions rights, access, belonging and responsibility mix as the conceptual lens and draws on institutional documents and primary data from interviews conducted at the ECOWAS Commission. The paper contributes to current debates in citizenship studies and African regionalism and the literature on supra-national citizenship building, regional integration and governance research in Africa and elsewhere. The empirical data show that movement is central to the ECOWAS citizenship regime, whether formulated in terms of a right, as a way to facilitate access, or a way to establish a sense of regional belonging.

In the heat of the decolonisation struggles of the 2000s, there has been little space or tolerance for conceptual criticism of this important moment in global history. Using the South African case, this article outlines some of the dilemmas of decolonisation as a concept and method for dealing with legacy knowledge in the aftermath of colonialism and apartheid. The status of whites as citizens rather than colonials, the lack of determination of meanings of decolonisation within public universities, and the defanging of a potentially radical concept are among the concerns raised in this critical work on the uptake of the idea in post-apartheid society. What this criticism points to is the need for a theory of institutions when dealing with radical curriculum change rather than a politics that relies so much on the rhetorical, the symbolic and the performative in the demand for decolonisation.

Communities inhabiting the arid and semi-arid areas of eastern Africa have long suffered from and engaged in pastoral conflicts. However, since some countries in the region became oil producers, the conditions affecting pastoral conflicts have changed. This study examines how oil extraction may influence pastoral conflicts by using a survey experiment conducted in Turkana County, Kenya, on a sample of 801 respondents. The study finds that overall, respondents’ perceived risks of pastoral conflicts decrease when they are primed about the consequences of oil extraction leading to fundamental changes in pastoral livelihoods, such as an increase in employment opportunities in the oil sector and rapid social changes. The residents of Turkana view pastoral conflicts as customary as long as pastoralism continues and fundamental changes to pastoralism-based livelihoods originating from oil discovery and extraction may lead to a decrease in the pastoralist population engaging in pastoral conflicts.

Over the last decade, a new developmentalism has taken root across Africa, centred on promoting local production and industrialisation. One unintended consequence of this has been the proliferation of economically nationalist policy measures that have increasingly come into tension with the aims of regional integration in Africa. This article sets out to offer insights as to why these tensions are emerging by focusing on the East African Community (EAC) and the growing trend of economic nationalism among its members. Contrary to what rationalist and structuralist accounts might presume, this article argues that this rise in economic nationalism is instead reflective of a weakening of the discursive imperative – or social purpose – that had initially converged various actors around the EAC's integration agenda when revived in 2000. While drawing from the EAC's experience, it concludes by highlighting a broader legitimacy dilemma facing African regional organisations within this ‘new developmentalism’.

This article reflects on the effects of the recent mining boom on the (trans-)formation of the state in D.R. Congo. To do so, it proposes to integrate macro- and micro- approaches to the political economy of mining into a broader analysis of the power practices of actors at different levels of the state apparatus. Taking the copper mining sector as a case study, it explores the various means by which the presidency, provincial authorities and customary chiefs have drawn resources from mining in the period from the early 2000s to the present. This analysis highlights the various resources that state actors at different levels use to assert their authority over foreign mining companies. From a broader perspective, it shows that, although the liberalisation of the mining sector has opened up new revenue opportunities for all these actors, it has not resulted in a significant power redistribution between them.

This article examines the gacaca trials of women accused of perpetrating the Rwandan genocide, asking whether and how ideas about their gender impacted their defences, testimonies and experiences as defendants. It uses court reports of the trials of 91 accused women; a set of sources that provides novel insights into the role of gender in an African transitional justice system. These sources reveal that ideas about gender – particularly female peacefulness and passivity – were commonly invoked by both accused women and wider trial participants. These gendered ideas not only helped women to achieve acquittals, but they also contributed to the Rwandan state's construction of a ‘truth’ narrative that ordinary Rwandan women are not capable of genocide violence. Additionally, women's trials reveal a further function of the gacaca process: as a political tool that made moral judgements about contemporary Rwandan women's domestic roles and place within the household.