African Protest and Political Change

Africa stands out globally as the region with the largest number of nonviolent campaigns both in the 1990s, during the “third wave” of democratization, and since 2010. African nonviolent campaigns also have had the highest regional success rate since 1945. Yet during the 1990s and 2010s, the continent also had the highest number of violent state-based conflicts in the world. So we must ask whether today’s nonviolent mass movements, despite their disparate tactics, are substituting for prior generations’ civil wars— in other words, are protest campaigns the revolutionary tool du jour? And if so, should their successes simply be chalked up to fragile or weakened states, much as earlier scholarship attributed armed rebellions to state weakness? Or, is nonviolent resistance across a diverse range of African countries revealing a new story about organizing for political change and how to do so more effectively than in any other region in the world?