Over the last two decades, Pan-Africanism has experienced a resurgence, driven by youth-led, tech-savvy social movements that challenge traditional power structures through both institutional and grassroots channels. By forming powerful transnational networks like Afrikki, these activists coordinate mass action to safeguard democratic integrity and good governance. Conversely, many African governments have adopted repressive countermeasures, including internet shutdowns, cybersurveillance, and legal intimidation. This presentation explores how activists leverage digital technology to confront the establishment and how they navigate state-sponsored "digital tyranny." Specifically, it examines the rise of youth movements in Francophone Africa, the complexities of modern social movement governance, and the increasing frequency of state-led digital crackdowns.

•  This paper contributes to debates on thinking from Africa by examining how social and economic meaning is produced under conditions commonly described as a crisis in contemporary Zimbabwe. It moves beyond reductive crisis narratives that dominate interpretations of African societies. Rather than viewing prolonged instability as exceptional or disabling, the paper demonstrates how social and economic actors reinterpret, adapt to, and negotiate structural constraints in everyday life. Drawing on three empirical examples, crisis as an analytical category, the reconfiguration of legal professional ethics under economic strain, and the historical and contemporary role of tobacco auction floors, the study shows how institutions, livelihoods, and moral economies are continually reshaped. The legal profession illustrates how economic pressure transforms authority and justice, while tobacco auction floors reveal historically embedded spaces that enable new forms of regulation, accumulation, and survival. Overall, the paper argues for an Africa-centred approach that foregrounds continuity, adaptation, and social meaning over narratives of rupture and failure. 

Sulaiman Adebowale is the director of Amalion Publishing, an independent publishing initiative based in Dakar, Senegal, whose principal mission is to disseminate the scientific and cultural knowledge of Africa for the broader understanding of humanity. He has worked as a print journalist and is Managing Editor at CODESRIA in Senegal. He studied English at the University of Lagos and publishing and electronic media at Oxford Brookes University.

Please note that exceptionally, the CAS seminar series will take place on Tuesdays from 16:30 to 18:00 throughout Lent Term 2026.

All are welcome to attend. An informal drinks reception will be held after the talk.

This paper addresses how during Kenya’s era of intense political repression spanning the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, the government of Daniel arap Moi came to routinize juridical and physical violence as key modalities of statecraft in its efforts to quell opposition. Conflicting desires to cultivate rule of law legitimacy and to crush dissent characterized the regime’s approach to governance during this period. At the same time, the Kenya case offers important insights into a significant, but much less-studied, phenomenon: legal mobilization against authoritarianism. Activist lawyers and legal associations in Kenya drew upon an array of tools, strategies, and connections to resist Moi’s autocratic legalism. Examining their tactics enables us to consider how “lawfare” need not be considered exclusively the purview of repressive regimes but rather can take in legally-based resistance to authoritarianism.