Dis/ordering politics: urban riots and the socio-political configuration of contemporary Niger

Abstract

This article focuses on ‘generic moments of becoming’, historical sedimentation and patterns of recurrent protests to explain the structural drivers that sparked the dramatic increase in urban protests and riots in Niger between 2013 and 2018. It identifies several factors in the country's socio-political configuration as particularly important for understanding the protests: new media and politics by proxy, political machines, the social and political embeddedness of civil society, ethnicity and regional political strongholds, the legacy of Françafrique, religious reform movements, and male youth violence. In examining these drivers, the article aims to provide an informative overview of contemporary politics and society in Niger and to counter culturalist, ahistoric and Eurocentric notions of ‘African disorder’.

An ethnography of public events: Reformulating the extended case method in contemporary social theory

“…However, these two epistemological perspectives are not necessarily incompatible. I think it is indeed possible to grasp the narrative character of the field and to use the extended case method in order to illustrate a historically sedimented and fragmented order in the first place (Schritt, 2019d). In a second step, understanding the situation as inherently 'global', we are then able to both locate forces of globalization (like neoliberalism or racism) in particular locales, and avoid having to accept or imagine the world hegemony of these forces by looking at their frictions in the sense of Tsing (2000).…”