It has become a cliché in reviews such as this to note the timeliness of the book under discussion. Most works of political science usually meet some minimal threshold of contemporary relevance, since they would probably not be written or published otherwise. But Lisa Mueller’s Political Protest in Contemporary Africa truly is a timely book. Its focus is the explosion of popular protest across sub-Saharan Africa since 2011—what has been referred to as Africa’s “third-wave.” Crisply illustrated in the opening pages (p. 2), in a line graph depicting a steep incline in protest activity from fewer than 1,000 protest events in 2010 to just under 5,000 in 2016, this wave of popular mobilization is central to understanding some of the most pressing political phenomena in Africa today. These include democratization and democratic consolidation, political order and the coherence of the state, state–society relations, the changing nature of political violence, and Africa’s evolving urban politics.
The conventional story about Africa’s third-wave is that it was driven by Arab Spring contagion. Mueller finds this conclusion to be unpersuasive, and instead places evolving class dynamics at the center of the conversation. The economic liberalization of the 1990s generated a new, politically conscious middle class whose incomes were, unlike the previous era, derived from private (rather than state) sources. This segment of society was thus ideologically aligned with the democratic project, and had the autonomy to advance and protect this agenda. When ruling elites began to undermine the “democratic bargains that citizens and politicians forged in the 1990s” (p. 49), urban, middle-class professionals initiated protests in defense of them.
Mueller dubs these middle-class professionals “generals of the revolution” (pp. 13–20), in that they instigated, organized, and led the protests. But Africa’s middle classes were too small to be the backbone of a protest wave as substantial as that which unfolded after 2011. Mass participation required the mobilization of Africa’s poor. What aided middle-class protest leaders in the task of activating these “foot soldiers of the revolution” (pp. 20–22) was not a common value set but the contradictions produced by the very economic forces that had forged middle-class political autonomy. The economic liberalization of the 1990s grew incomes and expanded private wealth, but also increased social and economic inequality to unprecedented levels. The African poor thus mobilized behind third-wave protests not because of lofty political ideals, but because of their material interests—not poverty per se but a lack of opportunities for upward mobility.
The argument of Political Protest is an elegant one. It is clean and parsimonious, but captures the nuance of of Africa’s evolving class politics. The book’s empirics are similarly well crafted, and organized at various levels of analysis. Chapter 2 places Africa’s third-wave in historical context, comparing it to previous protest waves in the late colonial period and at the end of the Cold War. The third-wave, Mueller concludes, bears some similarity to previous protest waves, but differs in a number of respects. Careful to avoid selection problems, the chapter also examines the “missing protest wave” (pp. 39–43) of the 1980s, when political and economic stagnation should have triggered social unrest but did not. Chapter 3, for its part, synthesizes the literature on Africa’s post–Cold War political economy, and charts the expansion of Africa’s autonomous middle class amid rising economic inequality.
The remaining chapters are where the book’s original empirical contributions are made. In Chapter 4, Mueller uses the public statements of protest leaders to code their motivations across 80 protest movements between 2005 and 2014, and finds that most were motivated by political aspirations. The chapter also provides a lengthy comparison of three protest movements (two in Senegal and one in Kenya) to illustrate the backgrounds, motives, strategies, and relative success of Africa’s third-wave protest leaders. On the last point, the author shows how movement leaders that appealed to the material grievances of the African poor were most effective in building “enduring alliances” (p. 111) that gave their movements staying power. Chapter 5 leverages Afrobarometer data to take a systematic look at those who joined third-wave protest movements, and demonstrates that rank-and-file protesters tended to have low expectations about their own upward mobility. Chapter 6 examines uprisings against the rule of Nigerien President Mamadou Tandja in 2009–10, and uses an original survey to show that most protesters were moved, once again, by concerns of upward mobility, rather than political grievances against the government. Indeed, a large number of the protesters actually supported President Tandja.
Mueller has written an excellent book. The findings are robust and compelling. The writing is crisp and accessible. Its contributions will reshape not only academic conversations about African protest but popular thinking about this subject as well. For an academic book, this latter achievement is no small feat, and it is worth highlighting two specific interventions.
The first is Mueller’s call to see African protests—and African politics more generally—through the prism of class. By bringing “class back in” (p. 187), she problematizes the popular tendency common in Western journalism on Africa to reduce African politics to the calculus of ethnicity. Take, for instance, the conventional media narrative on the deluge of protest in Ethiopia since 2015, in which ethnic grievance looms large. Of course, political ethnicity was one, very important, dimension of the Ethiopian protests. But Ethiopian politics has revolved around ethnic claim making since the founding of the modern Ethiopian state in the late nineteenth century, and as such, ethnic politics can hardly be considered the proximate cause of the recent spate of protests. Mueller’s class frame would, quite appropriately, draw our attention to Ethiopia’s rapid economic growth since 2002, and the massive socioeconomic contradictions it has produced: an expanding middle class amid growing inequality, particularly in urban areas and towns; the explosion of tertiary education and the limited employment opportunities for graduates that expanding educational opportunities have produced; increasing rates of domestic and foreign investment in productive sectors and the resulting displacement of communities from their lands and traditional livelihoods. One could go on.
The second intervention is the way in which the book recasts popular dichotomies about third-wave protests, which treat them as either democratic revolutions or “bread riots.” Instead, Mueller teaches us, they are a bit of both, and the tendency to think that they are solely a result of the former reflects the public rhetoric of middle-class protest leaders. The powerful lesson for Western commentators is that African protests defy easy labels, and must be disaggregated to properly understand the confluence of interests and identities that produce them.
Like all great books, Political Protest raises a number of questions for further exploration. One set of questions arises from a tension in the book’s underlying analytical task—between interpreting what the third-wave protests actually are and explaining their causes (pp. 22–24). While the book focuses primarily on the former, it does gesture at the latter in ways that draw the reader’s attention. So what was the proximate cause of the third-wave? Given the explosion of protests in 2011 graphically depicted in the opening pages, there must have been some significant precipitating shock. Mueller suggests that the efforts by political elites to destroy existing democratic bargains was key, and certainly, the cases of Senegal and Niger support this conclusion. But was there an uptick in this kind of maneuvering by Africa’s incumbent elites in 2010–11? And if so, why? What about the issue of contagion? The author notes that the class structure of the Arab Spring was much different from the third-wave, but contagion does not necessarily require that the two regions possess the same class structure. Intra-sub-Saharan contagion might be an issue was well. The Niger protests so powerfully depicted in Chapter 6 actually predate the Arab Spring. In Chapter 4, Mueller describes Senegal as “the nerve center of political activism in Francophone Africa” and notes that the Ye’n a Marre inspired “numerous foreign offshoots” from West Africa to the Great Lakes (p. 87).
Political Protest also suggests that the evolving class dynamics that lead to protest do not occur in a vacuum, but are mediated by other variables. In Chapter 5, Mueller shows that the causal link between low expectations of upward mobility and protest participation varies significantly across countries, and notes that these results “present interesting puzzles about the reasons for cross-national variation that country experts could explore in the future” (p. 142). Could differences in ethnic politics be relevant, considering how strong the effects of ethnic grievances are in the statistical models presented in Chapter 5? Or is there some other factor at work? What do the Senegalese and Niger cases—settings where the author has done extensive fieldwork—tell us about how class-based grievances might intersect with other social and political forces in producing protest?
The final set of questions emanates from Chapter 4’s fascinating discussion of protest leader effectiveness. First, how should we define that concept? The chapter seems to imply that M23 (June 23 Movement) leaders failed, but to this non-Senegal expert, it appears that the movement’s success made it obsolete: That is, its key leaders won political power and had no incentive to keep the protest movement mobilized. Second, if cross-class alliances are fundamental to a protest movement’s success, why do middle-class protest leaders not mobilize their poorer compatriots? Is it oversight? Or are there certain trade-offs that leaders must make in selecting mobilization strategies?
To be clear, these questions do not constitute critiques of Political Protest but are a reflection of how rich and compelling this book is. Mueller has truly broken new ground in the study of contentious politics in Africa.
