The articles that appear in this part issue focus on disparate topics, from rumours of electoral fraud to the production of art, and span the African continent from Guinea and Ghana in the west to Zimbabwe in the south. Despite their evident differences, the contributors see their pieces as united by a common theme: emergence. Elaborating on Simone's influential exploration of the intertwined concepts of emergence and emergency (Reference Simone2004), as well as prior research in Africa on informal economic practices (the exchange of goods and services unregulated by states) (Hart Reference Hart1973; Piot Reference Piot2010; Roitman Reference Roitman, Das and Poole2004; Weiss Reference Weiss2009), we consider emergence to be the process by which new social formations become thinkable, repeatable, and even – at times – habitual. Although conditions of crisis or precarity or even revolutionary upheaval might be fertile ground for emergence, insofar as these social conditions represent ‘rupture[s] in the organization of the present’ (Simone Reference Simone2004: 4), the articles here also show that new social practices do not emerge out of nowhere. Rather, these articles demonstrate that attention to quotidian encounters can illuminate how citizens mobilize previously existing norms and patterns of behaviour in response to social change or economic crisis.

Themes of emergence appear throughout Africanist scholarship, though not always under that particular term. For instance, in Brian Larkin's work on media and infrastructure in Nigeria, we find emergence in the ways in which new technologies are incorporated into existing cultural regimes (Reference Larkin2008: 10). In Michael Degani's (Reference Degani2017) consideration of electrical infrastructure in Dar es Salaam, it is moral frameworks that emerge when social actors delineate how infrastructure ought to be exploited, why, when and by whom. In an entirely different vein, Danny Hoffman (Reference Hoffman2011) theorizes bodily vitality and identity as emergent. He uses the Deleuzian notion of a ‘war machine’ – a formation that unifies bodies, objects and their respective vitalities in contingent social arrangements – as a means to understand how young men in West Africa were brought together to work, socialize and make war during the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Political scientists also engage with the concept of emergence. Nicholas Rush Smith (Reference Smith2019), for example, explains how everyday practices of vigilantism in South Africa provide a lens through which we can understand the process of democratization, especially how its rules and procedures are understood by citizens. Residents confront an emergent new legal system, but they react and adapt to it in contradictory – sometimes violent – ways. This approach stresses the need to move beyond the ‘technical effectiveness’ of the state and its institutions to the ‘substance of the legal system’, and in particular the ‘meaningful access to rights’ (ibid.: 11). This approach also seeks to emphasize the emergent meanings that state power and formal institutions acquire on the ground, in the political conditions of everyday life in neighbourhoods and villages.

Etymologically, ‘emergence’ arrived in English via Latin and French. Buried in its significance are connotations of rising up, of solids separating from liquids, and of things coming out of the darkness and into the light. What all of these connotations share is an understanding of coherence developing from incoherence, order from chaos. Although this definition has widespread historical and social currency, we are reluctant to embrace it. At worst, this definition exposes emergence to reactionary politics. It is unsurprising, in this sense, that we find the contemporary connotations of ‘states of emergency’ so closely and comfortably aligned with the historical connotations of emergence itself. As Ranajit Guha showed (Reference Guha, Guha and Spivak1988), the arrival of the insurgent ‘new’ (read as spontaneous, ahistorical and chaotic from the vantage point of those in power) can appear to demand an immediate and violent response. At best, this definition deflects attention onto the ‘emergent’ and away from the environments that produced it. The situation that prompted emergence is shrouded in ‘darkness’, while the emergent ‘new’ is visible, present and available for analysis.

To use such a definition to characterize the above cases would be plainly unsatisfactory, in that it would detach the linkages of bodies, technologies, practices and beliefs from the contexts in which they appear. Larkin's emergent technologies, in this sense, are clearly historically and socially contingent. Different technologies in a different place and time would produce different political possibilities. Such a definition, furthermore, would necessarily struggle to account for the ways in which periods of social change – whether dramatic or gradual – prompt not just reconsiderations of difference and local belonging but also re-articulations and re-inscriptions of previously existing forms of difference and belonging (and, in some cases, with quite virulent consequences). The contemporary Africanist literature on ‘autochthony’ demonstrates this qualification with poignancy, as McGovern (Reference McGovern2013), Geschiere (Reference Geschiere2009), Roitman (Reference Roitman1990) and Comaroff and Comaroff (Reference Comaroff, Comaroff, Hansen and Stepputat2005) all show in different places and with attention to different historical moments.

A decontextualized conception of emergence would also overlook the ways in which economic scarcity and precarity are embedded in political and institutional structures of marginalization, uncertainty and underrepresentation. Under such conditions, De Herdt and Olivier de Sardan (Reference De Herdt and Olivier de Sardan2015) argue, people rely on ‘practical norms’ or informal regulations that provide possibilities for new social bonds to form. Simone calls these new bonds ‘new forms of social collaboration’ (Reference Simone2004: 15). Many Africanist ethnographies offer striking illustrations of collaborations in precarious circumstances. In Côte d'Ivoire, young men respond to situations of political uncertainty by ‘bluffing’ their way to success through ostentatious displays of wealth – and, in the process, shaping the emergence of a new kind of national identity (Newell Reference Newell2012). Visa applicants in Togo bluff as well. They pay fixers to prepare for the lottery, and those fixers provide them with interview training, set them up with attractive apprenticeships, and even add other people's dependants to their applications. These collaborations are extremely lucrative. Taken together, Piot calculates, the subsidiary markets generated by the visa lottery total upwards of US$15 million annually (Reference Piot2010: 86). Likewise, in Julie Livingston's (Reference Livingston2012) ethnography of an oncology ward in Botswana, doctors, nurses and patients contend with cancer and its symptoms in a context defined in large part by the inadequacy of the ward's facilities. Not merely destructive, this scarcity produces strategies of improvisation that shape not only paths of treatment but also affective conceptions of loss and hope. In each of these cases, emergence is conditionally dependent on scarcity.

And yet emergence is never wholly defined by its context. Emergence is brought about by the creativity of individual human actors, responding in novel and indeterminate ways to changing circumstances. Nor are these responses always the ‘productive collaborations’ that Simone seems to take them to be (Reference Simone2004: 15). For example, in wartime Guinea-Bissau, young men face similar problems to young men in Côte d'Ivoire, in that they have to navigate constantly shifting social and political relations to try to find a firm grounding in order to build future life paths (Vigh Reference Vigh2006). In an unstable, violent context, joining an armed group and engaging in warfare becomes a practical means of survival for many young men, even though they may not have a strong ideological stake in the fighting. The tragic irony, of course, is that warfare structurally limits the kinds of life opportunities available to these young men, and engaging in warfare to navigate a situation of political and economic collapse can be deadly. Precarity conditions emergence, but emergence conditions precarity too.

In the interests of formulating a theory of emergence that attends to the openness of possibility but refuses to collapse the process of emergence into its context or detach the process definitively from it, we draw inspiration from the theories of revolutionary social change that we find in Hannah Arendt, William Sewell and Richard Stites. For each of these theorists, the central defining feature of revolution is its openness. For Arendt (Reference Arendt1990), the contemporary definition of revolution is marked not by a desire to ‘revolve’ to an earlier idyllic way of life, but rather to sweep away all existing social structures so as to clear space for ones that are dramatically and arrestingly new. Under this definition, political hierarchies are not the only aspect of social life that revolutions seek to attenuate. Stable identity categories and even established narrative frameworks (be they national, ethnic, cultural or otherwise) are contested, flattened or deliberately abandoned.

This theoretical perspective is replicated at an empirical level by Stites (Reference Stites1989) and Sewell (Reference Sewell2005) in their work on the Russian and French revolutions respectively. With the Russian revolution, Stites tells us, all manner of social experimentation became possible. Honorifics were abandoned, housing arrangements were reconsidered, and even orchestras were reimagined in order to escape the hierarchical relationship that privileged conductor over instrumentalists. When they stormed the Bastille, liberated prisoners and paraded officials’ heads on pikes through the city's streets, Sewell (Reference Sewell2005: 236–46) tells us, Parisians invented revolution in the modern sense because of the purposeful way in which they used violence to seize authority for ‘the people’. The revolution was invented as an event by the claims that actors made during the storming as well as in the debates that occurred in the National Assembly in the weeks that followed. As French citizens recognized it as a revolution, it became one.

The cases that we examine in this part issue do not in themselves involve revolution, but we find that an awareness of the particular dynamics of revolutionary emergence makes us attentive to the processual openness of emergence in much more quotidian and everyday cases. A fire in a neighbourhood in Accra may not be a grand revolutionary moment, but theorizing the aftermath of that fire with an awareness of revolution's transformative potential keeps both the moment and the concept of emergence open, active and alive. The same is true of the distribution of liquid petroleum gas in Bulawayo. Seen through a revolutionary lens, border crossings, bribes and relations of trust show their contingency. Each needs to be performed, or re-inscribed, with every shipment of gas, and every performance is subject to failure. The price of gas looks different, too. Rather than fluctuating deterministically, on the basis of mechanical laws of supply and demand, shifts in price carry the traces of the open processes that produce them.

Even as Sewell, Stites and Arendt attend to the openness of revolution, they remain aware that not even the most transformative revolution can un-till the soil in which it is planted. These theorists argue that disparate interests and goals, individual and collective actions, unpredictable reactions, available rhetorical and material resources, and competing interpretations of events all inevitably complicate abstract dreams as people try to bring those dreams into reality. Nor, furthermore, must these dreams be revolutionary in scale. If we recognize that even the most apparently dramatic social transformations remain nevertheless rooted in their context, the same can also be said for more gradual, more ad hoc, forms of social change.

With these lessons in mind, we see ‘emergence’ as a means to identify, hold open and analyse processes of social change without losing sight of the pre-existing practices and generative conditions that provide its contextually specific shapes. Understanding emergence as an open process highlights the commonalities across African contexts, demonstrating how different informal practices contribute to new forms of social orientations and sensibilities. The scholars we reference above, as well as many others, have demonstrated how existing social practices are mobilized in the context of economic precarity and political uncertainty, and, in doing so, take new forms. Everyday negotiations can be disorienting but also productive – not only of discussion and reflection, but also of new avenues for profit and self-advancement, new forms of social action and expression, new social bonds, new norms and rules for behaviour, and new identities (Goldstone and Obarrio Reference Goldstone and Obarrio2017). Individuals engage in these social navigations, as Vigh (Reference Vigh2009) calls them, in the context of everyday life in order to achieve the practical ends of survival. This ‘recombination of contingency’ coalesces in various layers of sedimentation that require further theorization (Simone Reference Simone2004: 14).

Whether revolutionary or reactionary, large-scale or quotidian, unsettled circumstances require a flexibility in action or belief. New situations and new problems complicate existing social relations or demand that novel ones be formulated on the fly. Importantly, real political and social change emerges out of these moments of rupture or ‘crisis’, confirming the need for a process-driven analysis of informal practices and techniques of social navigation. When we consider these structural features together, independent of their contextual manifestations, we see a common process by which social practices take shape, change and (sometimes) become widely shared.

Spanning the African continent and written by an interdisciplinary group of Africanists (two anthropologists and one political scientist), the articles in this part issue elaborate on these prior scholarly insights, while going beyond them to specify the concrete ways in which earlier repertoires of action structure the emergence of new practices in response to precarity, crisis or radical social change. In doing so, we seek to perform two interconnected interpretive and analytical tasks: (1) to describe some of the diverse ways in which African people have perceived and negotiated changing social, political and economic conditions; and (2) to link emergent practices, relations and norms with existing repertoires of social action that people have ready at their disposal. We investigate social origins, examining how people design and enact new practices, relations and identities from pre-existing ones, and explore the moments of spontaneity and creativity that occur before these emergent forms settle into recognizable patterns. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (Reference Sahlins1981) has observed, the coming together – or conjuncture – of myriad structuring processes results in outcomes that neither replicate existing forms nor break fully from them. Those outcomes are particular, and perhaps irreplicable, products of the terms of their emergence.

While processes of large-scale political change can illustrate processes of emergence, as in the case of the emergent legal system and the subsequent resistance to it in South Africa (Smith Reference Smith2015), the emergence of new social formations need not be so totalizing. Susanna Fioratta's contribution to this issue, ‘Conspiracy theorizing as political practice in Guinea’, makes clear the connections between new formal political structures, pre-existing political habits, and the emergence of new political orientations, actions and events. In her research on the role of conspiracy theory in the 2010 Guinean presidential elections, the country's first democratic elections since independence from France in 1958, Fioratta shows that such theories should be understood neither as misinterpretations of real events nor as irrational reactions with little connection to the actual workings of politics. Instead, she argues, conspiracy theories are forms of popular theorizing that intervene to reshape the country's political terrain. As soon as we see that a conspiracy theory about poisoned water at an electoral campaign event actively generates interethnic suspicion, we also recognize that emergence is a fundamentally dialectical process. For the people with whom Fioratta worked, events generate new conspiracy theories that in turn generate new events. In this sense, conspiracy theorizing should be understood not as incidental to a purer, more genuine political process, but rather as an emergent mode of political action in its own right that may have profound and long-term effects.

As Fioratta's article demonstrates, scholars are not the only people who must find ways to theorize emergence. People who live in conditions of rapid – even disorienting – socio-political change must do so as well. Joshua D. Rubin's article, ‘Assembling emergence: making art and selling gas in Bulawayo’, elaborates on this same theme. In his contribution, Rubin shows how artists and ‘quasi-unregulated’ dealers in natural gas act creatively within the social conditions established by Zimbabwe's economic crisis and predatory state. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari (Reference Deleuze and Guattari2011), he argues that artists and dealers in Bulawayo tried to interpret those conditions and ‘assemble’ them into controlled and comprehensible social formations. Artists opted for cheaper materials, they responded reluctantly to the needs of the tourist market, and they never forgot that they were producing artworks under the watchful gaze of a repressive state. Dealers, for their part, purchased gas from foreign refineries, bribed state officials, refused to deposit their profits in Zimbabwean banks, and managed cross-border trade partnerships. Although some artists and natural gas dealers hoped that their ‘assemblages’ might one day crystallize into coherent and organized systems, the strategies they used to make art and circulate gas tended to stabilize emergent social formations only temporarily and situationally. This being the case, for Rubin, these strategies signal the fact that theories of emergence need not entail a definitive endpoint. Social actions can be emergent even if they never settle into sustainable – never mind habitual – forms.

Although vulnerability and precarity undoubtedly shape emergent habits and practices, it would be a mistake to assume that these habits and practices are fully determined by the conditions in which they occur. On the contrary, prior informal norms can be powerful repositories for responding to duress, even as pressure creates the conditions for the emergence of new norms. During these times of crisis, the space between what James Scott (Reference Scott1990) calls the ‘hidden’ and ‘public transcripts’ collapses, opening up new arenas of political engagement for ordinary people, as well as for those in power. Jeffrey W. Paller's submission, ‘Building permanence: fire outbreaks and emergent tenure security in urban Ghana’, demonstrates these possibilities clearly. In his examination of the aftermath of the effects of four fires on an Accra squatter settlement, Paller finds not just vulnerability and precarity but political possibility as well. Residents, he argues, used the destruction of their existing houses as an occasion to build sturdier dwellings, redraw property lines, and reshape the established limits of local governance. The fire outbreaks, therefore, created ‘break[s] from the past’ that provided new opportunities to experiment with governance while allowing residents the political space to construct a permanent future in the otherwise illegally occupied land. For Paller, urban reconstruction was a form of emergent political action in which residents concretized their aspirations in the cement blocks that they used to rebuild their homes, even as the new, formal structures were anchored in informal political arrangements that emerged after the destruction caused by the fire.

To name a process is to run the risk of characterizing it as a stable concept. Given the fluidity and openness of ‘emergence’, this issue of reification is an especially thorny one. What is emergence, if not the very antithesis of an object? To treat emergence as an object is to ignore its processual nature. When emergence becomes reified, the process that social agents generate becomes, analytically, a concept that is taken to act back on them. They become beholden to it. In an African context, this reification of emergence comes with notably problematic consequences. If we commit too fully to the notion that emergence ‘is occurring’ in a particular African location, then the people who live within that state of emergence (and are in fact actively contributing to the process with their actions) become excluded from its temporality. Put simply, a reified ‘emergence’ threatens to exclude African agents from their own history, effectively replicating the failings of so many previous theoretical frameworks.

And yet, ethnographers who study emergent processes must acknowledge the fact that, empirically, emergence often feels qualitatively distinct from the actions that compose it. In addition, at an analytical level, we must allow ‘emergence’ to be at least partially detached from its particular locus of unfolding if we want it to possess any broad utility. Reification, then, is not just empirically and theoretically problematic; it seems empirically and theoretically necessary, too.

Attending to the revolutionary qualities of emergence confronts this tension directly. Seen as an open process, emergence involves both structural constraints and possibilities for future social relations and orientations. Each article in this part issue shows that new social practices, relations and identities emerge in moments of crisis or change and yet are powerfully shaped by previously existing political and economic conditions. While these new formations may take shape on the margins of formal institutions (for instance, interlocutors paying bribes to inspectors in Rubin's article), they need not compromise or undermine formal political processes. Indeed, they may make for more active forms of engagement (for instance, through the swirling of rumours in Fioratta's piece) or even founts of possible, positive change (as with the squatters who deepened their land tenure in Paller's article). With their shared focus on the process of emergence, these three articles attend to conditions of crisis and chronic uncertainty while also highlighting the everyday forms of improvisation that may be of more importance to average citizens than the contexts of instability in which they occur.