Lexi Alexander

In contrast to complacent pronouncements of Africa as a continent that is rising, critical analysts have highlighted widespread uprising. This project draws on extensive media data to explore the scale of popular protest in Africa and the extent to which it is possible to generalize across 56 countries that comprise the second largest and second most populous continent. It intersects with a case study on South Africa, for which the researchers have a unique police record of 165,000 crowd incidents for 1997-2013. Are protests associated with inequality and social change or are they more about corruption and desires for democratisation?