BRINGING PAN-AFRICANISM BACK IN AS AN ANALYTICAL CATEGORY

What the paper says

This article advances Pan-Africanism as an analytical category for understanding African politics and global entanglements. It shows how recurring debates over Pan-Africanism’s existence, critiques of essentialism, and the persistent emphasis on unity have shaped dominant approaches to the concept in public discourse, policy practice, and scholarship. This study argues that approaches which treat Pan-Africanism primarily as a normative ideal or institutional programme foreclose its analytical potential by confining it to evaluative and institutional registers. Drawing on long-term fieldwork and more than 100 interviews conducted between 2019 and 2025 in Addis Ababa, Accra, Abuja, Johannesburg, and London, the article redirects analysis toward the conditions under which Pan-Africanism acquires meaning, authority, and political force in specific contexts. It examines Pan-Africanism through the claims, practices, and political reasoning of actors who invoke it across different sites. In so doing, the article proposes an analytical orientation that treats Pan-Africanism as a heuristic for delineating an empirical field, an interpretive framework for examining what such invocations do in practice, and a reflexive stance for tracing Pan-Africanism’s rearticulation over time.