Applying Tilly’s Theories on Political Change to Africa: Opportunities and Limitations

Charles Tilly’s vast scholarship on political change is focused on the European experience. Despite Tilly himself not having claimed the patterns he found would apply universally, his work has inspired research on political contention and state formation in other regions (e.g. Bo Kaspersen et al. 2017). Do Tilly’s ideas travel to Sub-Saharan Africa? This paper reviews research that has applied Tilly’s perspectives to understand political change in and across African states. By so doing, we shed light on patterns and connections that applying Tilly’s theories to African cases might enable us to see, and conversely, whether in the face of some political developments in Africa, theories inherited from Tilly seem a poor fit. The paper takes stock of existing research on Africa which draws on two parts of Tilly’s work: on warfare and state formation, and on political contention including social movements and protests. We are interested in whether, in light on Tilly-inspired research on Africa, connections can be made between postcolonial processes of war and state building, on the one hand, and recent protests and social movements on the continent, on the other. Given that colonial rule significantly shaped state formation processes in the region, current bargaining processes between rulers and ruled, whether they take place on the streets, in parliament, in courts, or in other ways; can be read not only as episodes of contention but also as part of the longer-term process of forging the social contract. We identify two major contributions that Tilly’s concepts and theories can make to the study of political contention and state formation in Africa: the focus on relational mechanisms, and the focus on process. We note, however that some of the mechanisms Tilly identified in the study of European processes are historically rooted, and so would not apply in the same way to similar processes in Africa. We illustrate our conclusions with a few recent examples from southern and central Africa.