Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2023.2235661
Annamaria Macdonald, Arthur Owor, R. Tapscott
ABSTRACT What explains youth political mobilization in Uganda – or lack thereof? This article challenges the simple dichotomy of youth as either a dangerous or disengaged political constituency. Instead, we analyze the conditions that determine whether youth can coalesce as a politically salient category. For many, the outcome of the 2021 Ugandan elections defied expectations. A large and underemployed youth population combined with the emergence of self-proclaimed ‘youth candidate’ Bobi Wine, led both international and domestic analysts to predict a strong youth challenge to National Resistance Movement (NRM) dominance. However, while Bobi Wine captured the opposition vote, he was unable to create a new youth constituency that could overcome existing political and regional cleavages. This article draws on interviews and fieldwork on youth political mobilization during the 2021 elections to identify and analyze a range of historically rooted methods that the NRM effectively deploys to mobilize and fragment youth. The findings confirm the need to look beyond rallies and rhetoric to analyze whether the conditions are right to allow youth to emerge as a politically salient category.
{"title":"Explaining youth political mobilization and its absence: the case of Bobi Wine and Uganda’s 2021 election","authors":"Annamaria Macdonald, Arthur Owor, R. Tapscott","doi":"10.1080/17531055.2023.2235661","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2023.2235661","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT What explains youth political mobilization in Uganda – or lack thereof? This article challenges the simple dichotomy of youth as either a dangerous or disengaged political constituency. Instead, we analyze the conditions that determine whether youth can coalesce as a politically salient category. For many, the outcome of the 2021 Ugandan elections defied expectations. A large and underemployed youth population combined with the emergence of self-proclaimed ‘youth candidate’ Bobi Wine, led both international and domestic analysts to predict a strong youth challenge to National Resistance Movement (NRM) dominance. However, while Bobi Wine captured the opposition vote, he was unable to create a new youth constituency that could overcome existing political and regional cleavages. This article draws on interviews and fieldwork on youth political mobilization during the 2021 elections to identify and analyze a range of historically rooted methods that the NRM effectively deploys to mobilize and fragment youth. The findings confirm the need to look beyond rallies and rhetoric to analyze whether the conditions are right to allow youth to emerge as a politically salient category.","PeriodicalId":46968,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Eastern African Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"280 - 300"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41657232","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2023.2231787
Wangui Kimari
ABSTRACT Building on ethnographic fieldwork and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches, this article historicizes poor urban settlements in Nairobi as ruins – the product of systemic ruination from the colonial period to the present. In so doing, it offers the provocation to think ‘slum’ dwellers as relics: remains of past/present conterminous ruins who are treated as subhuman hauntings of a foregone time and understood to be constituted by the decayed and unwanted material of city margins. In these embodiments they are perceived as ruining the city, even when they have been produced by longue durée political processes of ruination, captured by vernacular identities such as Matigari. Yet, as I show here, like unexpected relics, the inhabitants of poor urban settlements continue to insert vital bids for survival in city landscapes. And, in these layered movements, they act as mnemonic devices that bridge the oppressions of what are seen as separate times, while shedding light on often normalized colonial city and national governance processes.
{"title":"Resisting imperial erasures: Matigari ruins and relics in Nairobi","authors":"Wangui Kimari","doi":"10.1080/17531055.2023.2231787","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2023.2231787","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Building on ethnographic fieldwork and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches, this article historicizes poor urban settlements in Nairobi as ruins – the product of systemic ruination from the colonial period to the present. In so doing, it offers the provocation to think ‘slum’ dwellers as relics: remains of past/present conterminous ruins who are treated as subhuman hauntings of a foregone time and understood to be constituted by the decayed and unwanted material of city margins. In these embodiments they are perceived as ruining the city, even when they have been produced by longue durée political processes of ruination, captured by vernacular identities such as Matigari. Yet, as I show here, like unexpected relics, the inhabitants of poor urban settlements continue to insert vital bids for survival in city landscapes. And, in these layered movements, they act as mnemonic devices that bridge the oppressions of what are seen as separate times, while shedding light on often normalized colonial city and national governance processes.","PeriodicalId":46968,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Eastern African Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"207 - 221"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44640443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2023.2238376
J. Ssentongo, Henni Alava
ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of citizenship moods to analyse citizens’ emotional (dis)engagements with the state in Uganda. Through a reflexive analysis of ethnographic and media material from 2019–2021, we claim that around the time of the 2021 elections, after 35 years of rule by Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement, the most prevalent moods among Ugandans were fear, contentment, cynicism, anger, hope, and despondency. Prior to the elections, hope soared, but this gave way to despondency following the state’s violent crack-down on opposition. Building on work on citizenship, affect, emotion, and politics, we theorise that citizenship moods are experienced both individually and collectively; coexist, transform, and fluctuate over time; and affect and are affected by political and societal change. In Uganda, a key change is the growth of intersecting ethnic, regional, generational, and class inequalities. Citizenship moods structure, transform, and vitalise the relationship between the state and its citizens, and analysing them contributes to imagining the possibilities of democratic change in Uganda and beyond. The article introduces a method of cartoon-powered sociopolitical analysis. The inherent attunement of cartoons to bodily postures and expressions enables analytical insight and effective communication of research results, and can contribute to advancing research justice.
{"title":"Citizenship moods in the late Museveni era: a cartoon-powered analysis","authors":"J. Ssentongo, Henni Alava","doi":"10.1080/17531055.2023.2238376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2023.2238376","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of citizenship moods to analyse citizens’ emotional (dis)engagements with the state in Uganda. Through a reflexive analysis of ethnographic and media material from 2019–2021, we claim that around the time of the 2021 elections, after 35 years of rule by Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement, the most prevalent moods among Ugandans were fear, contentment, cynicism, anger, hope, and despondency. Prior to the elections, hope soared, but this gave way to despondency following the state’s violent crack-down on opposition. Building on work on citizenship, affect, emotion, and politics, we theorise that citizenship moods are experienced both individually and collectively; coexist, transform, and fluctuate over time; and affect and are affected by political and societal change. In Uganda, a key change is the growth of intersecting ethnic, regional, generational, and class inequalities. Citizenship moods structure, transform, and vitalise the relationship between the state and its citizens, and analysing them contributes to imagining the possibilities of democratic change in Uganda and beyond. The article introduces a method of cartoon-powered sociopolitical analysis. The inherent attunement of cartoons to bodily postures and expressions enables analytical insight and effective communication of research results, and can contribute to advancing research justice.","PeriodicalId":46968,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Eastern African Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"301 - 324"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41421822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2023.2237265
Sam Wilkins
ABSTRACT In July 2018, the office of village chairperson (Local Council 1/LC1) was contested throughout Uganda in open elections for the first time in almost two decades. These offices, central to the National Resistance Movement’s (NRM) famed decentralisation project in its early years in power, continue to have immense significance in the daily lives of most Ugandans. While their long-awaited re-election provides a worthy focus of study in its own right, this article uses the occasion to test a broader set of claims about the evolution of village chairpersons under the NRM, and how variations in their exposure to competitive politics fits into a broader strategy of regime consolidation since 1986. Based on ethnographic research conducted between 2015 and 2017, the article will argue that LC1s should not necessarily be considered ‘illegitimate’ in the eyes of most citizens due to their long period without election before 2018, and that in many important respects they differ significantly from higher levels of local political office. Instead, it configures their place in the broader dominant party system, their main role in the maintenance of which is as symbolic as it is structural.
{"title":"Authoritarian micro-politics: village chairpersons in NRM Uganda and the lessons of their 2018 re-election","authors":"Sam Wilkins","doi":"10.1080/17531055.2023.2237265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2023.2237265","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In July 2018, the office of village chairperson (Local Council 1/LC1) was contested throughout Uganda in open elections for the first time in almost two decades. These offices, central to the National Resistance Movement’s (NRM) famed decentralisation project in its early years in power, continue to have immense significance in the daily lives of most Ugandans. While their long-awaited re-election provides a worthy focus of study in its own right, this article uses the occasion to test a broader set of claims about the evolution of village chairpersons under the NRM, and how variations in their exposure to competitive politics fits into a broader strategy of regime consolidation since 1986. Based on ethnographic research conducted between 2015 and 2017, the article will argue that LC1s should not necessarily be considered ‘illegitimate’ in the eyes of most citizens due to their long period without election before 2018, and that in many important respects they differ significantly from higher levels of local political office. Instead, it configures their place in the broader dominant party system, their main role in the maintenance of which is as symbolic as it is structural.","PeriodicalId":46968,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Eastern African Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"344 - 362"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41449652","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2023.2245596
Flora McCrone
ABSTRACT The shadow of election violence has hung over Kenyan politics since 2008, when post-election violence erupted across the country. These events paved the way for major national reforms, including the devolution of central government, designed to counteract tendencies of ethnic patronage and violence. Kenya’s subsequent election cycles have not seen the same explosion of nationwide violence, and therefore little has been written about election violence in Kenya in the post-devolution years. However, this article draws attention to the arid, pastoralist-dominated north, where there have in fact been significant episodes of violence that are election-related. Drawing on ethnographic research, it explores the case of Samburu, Isiolo and Laikipia counties during the 2017 and 2022 election cycles, when mass movements of armed pastoralists and herds forced their way, often violently, into targeted areas of land, resulting in widespread clashes, killings and displacement. The article investigates the endogenous elites and machinations within nomadic Samburu communities involved in and affected by this violence, using a ‘public authority lens’. It argues that ongoing governance changes in this region have created opportunities for political elites to mobilise territorial violence for strategic, political ends in advance of elections, including through a previously undocumented practice of “vote shipping”.
{"title":"‘I have opened the land for you’: pastoralist politics and election-related violence in Kenya’s arid north","authors":"Flora McCrone","doi":"10.1080/17531055.2023.2245596","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2023.2245596","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The shadow of election violence has hung over Kenyan politics since 2008, when post-election violence erupted across the country. These events paved the way for major national reforms, including the devolution of central government, designed to counteract tendencies of ethnic patronage and violence. Kenya’s subsequent election cycles have not seen the same explosion of nationwide violence, and therefore little has been written about election violence in Kenya in the post-devolution years. However, this article draws attention to the arid, pastoralist-dominated north, where there have in fact been significant episodes of violence that are election-related. Drawing on ethnographic research, it explores the case of Samburu, Isiolo and Laikipia counties during the 2017 and 2022 election cycles, when mass movements of armed pastoralists and herds forced their way, often violently, into targeted areas of land, resulting in widespread clashes, killings and displacement. The article investigates the endogenous elites and machinations within nomadic Samburu communities involved in and affected by this violence, using a ‘public authority lens’. It argues that ongoing governance changes in this region have created opportunities for political elites to mobilise territorial violence for strategic, political ends in advance of elections, including through a previously undocumented practice of “vote shipping”.","PeriodicalId":46968,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Eastern African Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"121 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44207474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2023.2237372
J. Saalfeld, H. Mwakimako
ABSTRACT In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kenya’s coastal region saw the rise of Islamist activism(s). Revisiting this rise, this article traces the history of two contrasting politico-religious groups seeking to address the historical marginalisation of Kenyan Muslim communities: the Mombasa-based Islamic Party of Kenya (IPK) and the southern coastal Ansar Sunnah movement. While the IPK accepted the Kenyan nation-state and sought to empower Kenya’s Muslim minority via the electoral process, the ‘Ansaris’ promoted a rejectionist agenda fundamentally opposed to democracy and the conventional state. Re-investigating the origins and the evolution of these two antithetical projects, our article provides two fieldwork-based contributions, drawing on key informant interviews. First, we tackle several historiographically unsettled questions concerning the biographies of prominent politico-religious entrepreneurs like Khalid Balala and Abdulaziz Rimo. Second, we provide a counterpoint to a growing body of literature focussing on the gradual emergence of a coastal jihadist network. While not denying the significance of this network, we show that the local rise of jihadism has been accompanied by equally important processes of moderation away from violence and exclusivism. Overall, our article therefore underlines the multi-facetted and non-linear dynamics of Islamist activism in coastal Kenya and the wider East African Region.
{"title":"Integrationism vs. rejectionism: revisiting the history of Islamist activism in coastal Kenya","authors":"J. Saalfeld, H. Mwakimako","doi":"10.1080/17531055.2023.2237372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2023.2237372","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT\u0000 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kenya’s coastal region saw the rise of Islamist activism(s). Revisiting this rise, this article traces the history of two contrasting politico-religious groups seeking to address the historical marginalisation of Kenyan Muslim communities: the Mombasa-based Islamic Party of Kenya (IPK) and the southern coastal Ansar Sunnah movement. While the IPK accepted the Kenyan nation-state and sought to empower Kenya’s Muslim minority via the electoral process, the ‘Ansaris’ promoted a rejectionist agenda fundamentally opposed to democracy and the conventional state. Re-investigating the origins and the evolution of these two antithetical projects, our article provides two fieldwork-based contributions, drawing on key informant interviews. First, we tackle several historiographically unsettled questions concerning the biographies of prominent politico-religious entrepreneurs like Khalid Balala and Abdulaziz Rimo. Second, we provide a counterpoint to a growing body of literature focussing on the gradual emergence of a coastal jihadist network. While not denying the significance of this network, we show that the local rise of jihadism has been accompanied by equally important processes of moderation away from violence and exclusivism. Overall, our article therefore underlines the multi-facetted and non-linear dynamics of Islamist activism in coastal Kenya and the wider East African Region.","PeriodicalId":46968,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Eastern African Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"40 - 56"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43693543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2023.2235659
Emma Wild-Wood, Yossa Way, A. Baba, Sadiki Kangamina, Jean-Benoît Falisse, Liz Grant, N. Pearson
ABSTRACT This article explores the perceptions of COVID-19 among faith communities in north-eastern DR Congo and their intersection with public health responses to disease outbreaks. In a situation of a political and economic insecurity and significant unaddressed health needs, faith communities have a strong trusted public presence and offer resilience in the face of political insecurity, limited state intervention and outbreaks of disease. Semi-structured interviews of members, leaders and medical professionals from seven faith communities in Ituri and North-Kivu were analysed using a thematic framework. The article demonstrates that faith communities and their leaders have a range of opinions on the causes of and responses to COVID-19 that illuminate long term trends in a complex faith-health landscape. It identifies that all faith communities have spiritual responses to disease. Some of those responses cohere with public health messages. Others run counter to them. It argues that understanding the nature, range and variability of these perceptions and their impact on public behaviour is valuable to enable those engaged in public health to work with trusted, resilient communities even where their perceptions of disease are contradictory.
{"title":"Perceptions of COVID-19 in faith communities in DR Congo","authors":"Emma Wild-Wood, Yossa Way, A. Baba, Sadiki Kangamina, Jean-Benoît Falisse, Liz Grant, N. Pearson","doi":"10.1080/17531055.2023.2235659","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2023.2235659","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT\u0000 This article explores the perceptions of COVID-19 among faith communities in north-eastern DR Congo and their intersection with public health responses to disease outbreaks. In a situation of a political and economic insecurity and significant unaddressed health needs, faith communities have a strong trusted public presence and offer resilience in the face of political insecurity, limited state intervention and outbreaks of disease. Semi-structured interviews of members, leaders and medical professionals from seven faith communities in Ituri and North-Kivu were analysed using a thematic framework. The article demonstrates that faith communities and their leaders have a range of opinions on the causes of and responses to COVID-19 that illuminate long term trends in a complex faith-health landscape. It identifies that all faith communities have spiritual responses to disease. Some of those responses cohere with public health messages. Others run counter to them. It argues that understanding the nature, range and variability of these perceptions and their impact on public behaviour is valuable to enable those engaged in public health to work with trusted, resilient communities even where their perceptions of disease are contradictory.","PeriodicalId":46968,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Eastern African Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"79 - 100"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47542398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2023.2231789
Franziska Fay
ABSTRACT Up until the 1990s, the Two Fishes Hotel on the South Kenya Coast was among the ten major hotels in Diani Beach. Today, the consequences of capitalist ruination on tourism can be observed in the decay of some once prospering hotels along on one of East Africa’s most popular tourist shores. In this article, I engage with the ruins of the Two Fishes Hotel in Diani Beach by taking as point of departure what the people who live with the ruins can tell us about how they affect their lives. I explore what their perspectives reveal about processes of deterioration and revitalization of capitalist projects like tourism, how affect and agency are engendered in them, and consider how they relate to online observations from a Facebook group dedicated to the ruins of this specific hotel. I argue that the various reappropriations of contemporary liminal spaces like hotels in decay show how infrastructures in the process of ruination have a social life of their own, reflect and give context to the wider political circumstances they are embedded in, and speak to individual and societal socio-economic challenges beyond national borders.
{"title":"The politics of skeletons and ruination: living (with) debris of the Two Fishes Hotel in Diani Beach, Kenya","authors":"Franziska Fay","doi":"10.1080/17531055.2023.2231789","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2023.2231789","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT\u0000 Up until the 1990s, the Two Fishes Hotel on the South Kenya Coast was among the ten major hotels in Diani Beach. Today, the consequences of capitalist ruination on tourism can be observed in the decay of some once prospering hotels along on one of East Africa’s most popular tourist shores. In this article, I engage with the ruins of the Two Fishes Hotel in Diani Beach by taking as point of departure what the people who live with the ruins can tell us about how they affect their lives. I explore what their perspectives reveal about processes of deterioration and revitalization of capitalist projects like tourism, how affect and agency are engendered in them, and consider how they relate to online observations from a Facebook group dedicated to the ruins of this specific hotel. I argue that the various reappropriations of contemporary liminal spaces like hotels in decay show how infrastructures in the process of ruination have a social life of their own, reflect and give context to the wider political circumstances they are embedded in, and speak to individual and societal socio-economic challenges beyond national borders.","PeriodicalId":46968,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Eastern African Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"222 - 240"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43865292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2023.2233729
N. Beardsworth, Samuel Kalonde Mutuna
ABSTRACT Presidents have access to a range of resources unavailable to challengers, and often the most important are derived from control of the state. This allows incumbents to build more inclusive elite coalitions, distribute clientelist resources to their political base and co-opt opposition politicians. Cabinet and government appointments are some of the most visible, direct and identifiable indications of elite accommodation, and African presidents are more likely to build inclusive coalitions to ensure their survival. In Zambia, balanced regional representation – popularly known as “tribal balancing” – has held an important place in the public imagination. But between 2015 and 2021, rather than using incumbent advantage to build an ethnically inclusive alliance, President Lungu used cabinet appointments and senior government positions to shore up his base. This was bolstered by an exclusionary campaign that focused on the opposition leader’s ethnicity to push the PF’s base to vote against the opposition. This article uses an analysis of cabinet appointments and coverage of the election campaign to illustrate how Lungu sought to build an exclusionary coalition and exacerbate ethnic cleavages. This contributes to debates on when and why elites might use exclusionary strategies, and when they might fail to produce the desired outcome.
{"title":"‘Tribal balancing’: exclusionary elite coalitions and Zambia’s 2021 elections","authors":"N. Beardsworth, Samuel Kalonde Mutuna","doi":"10.1080/17531055.2023.2233729","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2023.2233729","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Presidents have access to a range of resources unavailable to challengers, and often the most important are derived from control of the state. This allows incumbents to build more inclusive elite coalitions, distribute clientelist resources to their political base and co-opt opposition politicians. Cabinet and government appointments are some of the most visible, direct and identifiable indications of elite accommodation, and African presidents are more likely to build inclusive coalitions to ensure their survival. In Zambia, balanced regional representation – popularly known as “tribal balancing” – has held an important place in the public imagination. But between 2015 and 2021, rather than using incumbent advantage to build an ethnically inclusive alliance, President Lungu used cabinet appointments and senior government positions to shore up his base. This was bolstered by an exclusionary campaign that focused on the opposition leader’s ethnicity to push the PF’s base to vote against the opposition. This article uses an analysis of cabinet appointments and coverage of the election campaign to illustrate how Lungu sought to build an exclusionary coalition and exacerbate ethnic cleavages. This contributes to debates on when and why elites might use exclusionary strategies, and when they might fail to produce the desired outcome.","PeriodicalId":46968,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Eastern African Studies","volume":"16 1","pages":"619 - 642"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44514561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2022.2235656
N. Beardsworth, Hangala Siachiwena, Sishuwa Sishuwa
ABSTRACT The world is experiencing a new wave of autocratisation, characterised by a global democratic reversal. From 2010 to 2020, the share of the world population living in autocracies increased from 48 to 68%. Electoral autocracies are now the world's most common regime type, and along with closed autocracies they number 87 of the world's 195 states. Even during the height of the third wave of democratisation, elections in Africa rarely led to an alternation of power. Thirty years after the third wave, this special issue introduction takes stock of how many transfers of power occurred in the three crucial decades between 1991 and 2021. In this special issue, we focus on Zambia to understand some of the factors that contributed to an electoral turnover, notwithstanding the many benefits of incumbency that were enjoyed by the ruling Patriotic Front (PF) led by President Edgar Lungu. We show that the outcome of Zambia's August 2021 election demonstrates the limits of incumbency. We suggest that voters and opposition parties in countries with previous experiences of peaceful transfers of power might rely on a ‘democratic muscle-memory’, to dislodge autocrats and call for more research on when and why incumbents lose.
{"title":"Autocratisation, electoral politics and the limits of incumbency in African democracies","authors":"N. Beardsworth, Hangala Siachiwena, Sishuwa Sishuwa","doi":"10.1080/17531055.2022.2235656","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2022.2235656","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The world is experiencing a new wave of autocratisation, characterised by a global democratic reversal. From 2010 to 2020, the share of the world population living in autocracies increased from 48 to 68%. Electoral autocracies are now the world's most common regime type, and along with closed autocracies they number 87 of the world's 195 states. Even during the height of the third wave of democratisation, elections in Africa rarely led to an alternation of power. Thirty years after the third wave, this special issue introduction takes stock of how many transfers of power occurred in the three crucial decades between 1991 and 2021. In this special issue, we focus on Zambia to understand some of the factors that contributed to an electoral turnover, notwithstanding the many benefits of incumbency that were enjoyed by the ruling Patriotic Front (PF) led by President Edgar Lungu. We show that the outcome of Zambia's August 2021 election demonstrates the limits of incumbency. We suggest that voters and opposition parties in countries with previous experiences of peaceful transfers of power might rely on a ‘democratic muscle-memory’, to dislodge autocrats and call for more research on when and why incumbents lose.","PeriodicalId":46968,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Eastern African Studies","volume":"16 1","pages":"515 - 535"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45565347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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