Bringing political struggle back in: African politics, power & resistance

This article will investigate the enduring importance of political struggle as a key notion in the understanding of contemporary African politics. It does so with an awareness that this notion has fallen out of academic favour. This article sketches an approach that gives a key role to political struggle in processes of political change in sub‐Saharan Africa. In doing so, African political economies are seen as necessarily contested and therefore there is a need (to re‐work the phrase of the new statists/institutionalists) to consider bringing struggle back in to the analytical frame.