From Egypt to South Africa, Nigeria to Ethiopia, a new force for political change is emerging across Africa: popular protest. Widespread urban uprisings by youth, the unemployed, trade unions, activists, writers, artists, and religious groups are challenging injustice and inequality. What is driving this new wave of protest? Is it the key to substantive political change? Drawing on interviews and in-depth analysis, Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly offer a penetrating assessment of contemporary African protests, situating the current popular activism within its historical and regional contexts.

This collection of empirical and theoretical studies of social movements in Africa is a corrective to a literature that has largely ignored that continent. It shows that Africa s social movements have distinctive features that are related to its specific history.

A comparative study of the role of political parties and movements in the founding and survival of developing world democracies.

Trade unions, burial societies, students, religious and gender movements, riots and mafias. Not to mention class. The kaleidoscope of African social movements is complex and broad. But their histories have strong common threads - the experience of past oppression and the constant struggle for an identity that will encompass survival. How have they contributed to the nature of African civil society and the formation of democracy? The chapters are a living dialogue on the interpretation of these movements, and a critical and analytical appraisal of the African intellectual heritage itself. The book brings together a vast array of writers and topics from all over Africa - from bread riots in Tunisia, Communist Parties in Sudan, the "Kaduna Mafia" in Nigeria, burial societies in Zimbabwe, and the working class in Algeria.

Looking at protests from Senegal to Kenya, Lisa Mueller shows how cross-class coalitions fuel contemporary African protests across the continent.

Before the 2011 uprisings, the Middle East and North Africa were frequently seen as a uniquely undemocratic region with little civic activism. The first edition of this volume, published at the start of the Arab Spring, challenged these views by revealing a region rich with social and political mobilizations. This fully revised second edition extends the earlier explorations of Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and adds new case studies on the uprisings in Tunisia, Syria, and Yemen. The case studies are inspired by social movement theory, but they also critique and expand the horizons of the theory's classical concepts of political opportunity structures, collective action frames, mobilization structures, and repertoires of contention based on intensive fieldwork. This strong empirical base allows for a nuanced understanding of contexts, culturally conditioned rationality, the strengths and weaknesses of local networks, and innovation in contentious action to give the reader a substantive understanding of events in the Arab world before and since 2011.

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the history of democracy in Africa and explains why the continent's democratic experiments have so often failed, as well as how they could succeed. Nic Cheeseman grapples with some of the most important questions facing Africa and democracy today, including whether international actors should try and promote democracy abroad, how to design political systems that manage ethnic diversity, and why democratic governments often make bad policy decisions. Beginning in the colonial period with the introduction of multi-party elections and ending in 2013 with the collapse of democracy in Mali and South Sudan, the book describes the rise of authoritarian states in the 1970s; the attempts of trade unions and some religious groups to check the abuse of power in the 1980s; the remarkable return of multiparty politics in the 1990s; and finally, the tragic tendency for elections to exacerbate corruption and violence.