Youth Protest in Africa – Democratic Change or Political Chaos?
Open seminar at Internasjonalen (2. etasje), Youngstorget, Oslo
Torsdag 3. april kl. 19
Keynote speaker: Professor Alcinda Honwana
Panel of commentators:
Morten Bøås, Senior Researcher, NUPI
Ina Tin, Senior Advisor, Amnesty International Norway
How can youth protests in Africa lead to democratic change?
The African continent is experiencing a rapid population growth and urbanization. A large and steadily growing generation of urban youth is a result . These youths are often jobless, disenfranchised, lacking in life opportunities or political influence.
Still, this generation is often described with positive words like resourcefulness, resilience, mobilization, entrepreneurship, hope, aspirations. Their level of education is generally higher than the generations that went before them, they have access to news media and mobile phones, and to a certain extent to internet and social media.
”My research indicates that young people are not merely waiting, and hoping that their situation will change of its own accord. On the contrary, they are proactively engaged in serious efforts to create new forms of being and interacting with society.” (Alcinda Honwana)
The last years have seen some of these youths engaging in political protest in many African cities, both in North Africa and in Sub-Saharan Africa. A wide generation gap between those who have power and those do not is a widespread tendency on the African continent, and youth are to a large extent finding ways to express themselves politically that run parallell to institutionalized civil society and popular organizations, often by social media mobilization.
We ask:
Will civil society associations, as platforms of political action, be enough to help steer meaningful political change? Will it be possible for the younger generation to drive the creation of a new political culture from outside dominant political structures? Will street protests remain young people’s main mechanism for exerting pressure on those in power? How does this generation envision the ‘new politics’?
We wish to explore these questions by drawing on experiences from various African countries, among them Senegal, Mozambique, Egypt, Tunisia and South Africa
Keynote speaker and special guest - background:
Alcinda Honwana is visiting professor of anthropology and international development at the Open University in London. She has taught at the University Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, the University of Cape Town and the New School in New York. She has written extensively on the links between political and violent conflict, culture, children, and youth. Her most recent work has been on youth and social change in Africa focusing on Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia. Her publications include Youth and Revolution in Tunisia (Zed Books for the International African Institute, 2013), The Time of Youth: work, social change, and politics in Africa (Kumarian, 2012) and Makers and Breakers: children and youth in postcolonial Africa (2005, co-edited with Filip De Boeck).
Before joining the Open University Honwana was the Director of the Africa and the Children and Armed Conflict Programmes at the Social Science Research Council in New York. Honwana also worked at the United Nations in the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict in New York, and was the office’s research activities, developing a research agenda on children and armed conflict.
Born in Mozambique, Alcinda Honwana holds a BA degree in History and Geography from the University Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, Mozambique; a Maitrise in Sociology from l’Universite de Paris 8 in France; and another MA and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. She lectured on Anthropology at the University Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, and in South Africa where she was a Senior Lecturer in the department of Social Anthropology of the University of Cape Town. She has also been a Visiting Professor at Graduate Faculty at the New School University in New York.
Alcinda Honwana was a member of the board of the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA) based in Dakar from 1998 to 2002. She was also a member of the Board of Directors of the African Studies Association in the USA in 2004-2005. Honwana is a member of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of the International African Institute, the African Sociological Review and the Journal for Higher Education in Africa.