The extraversion of protest: conditions, history and use of the ‘international’ in Africa

The growing number of international causes and an intensification in the establishment of transnational networks in Africa are expanding a chain of interdependency which links an ever-larger and more diverse set of actors from North and South. It therefore seems relevant to revisit the debates of the 1990s concerning the dependency of ‘African civil society’ with regard to the North, through the concept of ‘extraversion’ within the political spaces of sub-Saharan Africa. First, it is argued that the conditions and effects of this internationalisation of protest actors are contradictory. Access to the international sphere is subject to two forms of competition: social and political. While universally determined by socially selective skills, such access also provides a vehicle for social ascension. Meanwhile, in the specifically African context, it is the object of intense political battles, representing as such both a ‘refuge’ and a resource, as well as a new source of coercion. Secondly, it is suggested that the specific modalities of relationships between actors from North and South tend to reproduce existing inequalities, with the effect that northern models of protest (in terms of both themes and tools) ultimately win out in African spaces. Finally, similarities in modalities of implementation, in vocabulary, in the skills demanded by internationalised mobilisations, and in the political and economic reforms introduced by external actors, lead to the hypothesis that these transnational mobilisations contribute to a reforming authoritarianism, that is to say to the implementation of reforms which depoliticise social and political issues and reproduce the established order. By repositioning mobilisations with access to the international sphere within the history of African political spaces, the concept of extraversion thus allows consideration of their impact as agent of both emancipation and domination.