African Geographical Review

Methodologies in African Geographies in Times of Violence and Authoritarianism

How are geographies of Africa studied, taught, whispered, translated, and contested in times of violence, genocide, in moments of global authoritarian surge, neoliberalism, augmented racial violence, and imperial rivalries in a multipolar world?

Shifting pressures and violence continue to shape what kinds of research are funded, discouraged, dangerous across the continent. Geographical knowledge has been historically structured by colonialism (Daley & Murrey, 2022) and global imperial capitalism, including violence in the emergent phases of ‘hyperimperial’ domination characterised by a dense entanglement of military force, financialized capitalism, logistics, digital infrastructures, knowledge production, and ideological governance (Tricontinental Institute for Social Research 2024). Political leadership has ‘declared a state of open hostility and war on any section of the Global South that does not comply with the policies of the Global North’ (Erskog and Prashad
2024). Universities and research communities have long been under pressure to align with external agendas, depoliticise pedagogies, collaborate with corporate entities and with the military-industrial complex or reproduce hierarchical models of collaboration, as argued by Aziz Solomone Fall, Patricia McFadden, Claude Ake, Horace Campbell, Mahmood Mamdani, Francis Nyamnjoh, Silvya Tamale, Sabelo Ndlovu Gatsheni, and more.

Intellectual, activits, artistic, and political projects, counter-institutions, and collectives continue to provide methodological resources for reciprocal care and politically situated African geographical inquiry for emancipatory politics (Daley et al. 2026)—the Ateliers de la Pensée in Dakar, the BlackHouse Kollective in Soweto, the Uta-Do Annual Gathering in Eastern Africa, the Sam Moyo African Institute for Agrarian Studies, and more. Global imperial dynamics are being reshaped by neo-Pan-African movements and anti-French protests, but also by a “war regimes” at the core of contemporary capitalism (Mezzadra and Neilson 2024) evident in Sudan, the Congo, attacks on academic freedom and the right to assembly in Cameroon and Tanzania, the configurations and consolidations of external geopolitical actors (China, the Gulf states, Turkey, Canada, the US, and more), shifts in authoritarian governance across the continent, and enduring forms of academic and intellectual imperialism (Alatas 2003; Mazrui, 1975; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2025). These conditions destabilize life and scholarship; they force a reckoning with how research is conducted (and under what conditions), created, authorized, circulated, cited under conditions of violence, repression, and uneven sovereignty.

Researchers have worked to navigate the sensitivities of doing research through creative strategies while remaining attentive to the risks internal to decolonizing projects or counter-institutions themselves, as critically articulated by Jazeel (2019) and the Revolutionary Papers collective (Ahmad et al. 2024) . Within this milieu we invite renewed attention to methodologies that foreground political agency, historical materiality, collaborative practice, and reciprocal forms of knowledge-making. In communities across the continent, from Cameroon, to Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Sudan, Tanzania, and elsewhere, impediments to scholarship are exhausting, crushing—the destruction of universities and archives, the fright of continuous displacements, the psychological wounds shaping perception, self-regulation (Basarati 2026), arbitrary detentions, state intimidation and violence, the disappearing of family, the use of rape as a weapon of war. Building, sustaining, labouring, caring, thinking within and across geographies in this moment compels deliberative, relational, and careful praxis. How do we hold place for partiality and incompleteness under conditions of duress and fatigue; how do we hold place for the challenges of unfinished projects and difficult collaborations, as well as the tensions between thinking, unthinking, learning, unlearning, forgetting, remembering and all the illegibilities within neo-imperial conditions? What are our ongoing, active methods for cultivating care, reciprocity in research practice, academic friendships, community solidarity?

Within ongoing debates, creative practices, and the need to learn from/ or map anti authoritarian strategies (International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter Strategies and kollectiv oragotango in their 2024 visual handbook, Beyond Molotovs), we invite considerations, auto-critiques, and transdisciplinary reflections that help navigate how knowledge creation is being reshaped by global authoritarianism and hyper-imperialism, how de-politicisation and patriarchy operates within academic spaces (Farr 2000), how erasure is not a marginal ethical failure but a structural effect of funding regimes, authorship norms, and institutional incentives that reproduce asymmetrical power relations while foreclosing genuine co-ownership or epistemic authority (Ansoms et al. 2020), and how scholars and communities are forging methodological alternatives rooted in accountability, creativity, and political commitment to marginalised and working classes in African societies (Mwambari and Owor 2019; Gani and Khan 2024).

These submissions will take the form of Methodological Notes in a Special Issue of African Geographical Review. Methodological Notes are short, critical, method-oriented contributions that advance the methodological landscape of African geographies and might look at:

• Reflections that foreground feminist, peace-oriented praxis, and/or grounded in long-term relationships, tracing how care, slowness, refusal, and collective protection reshape fieldwork, pedagogy, citation, and collaboration under conditions of violence, repression, and epistemic extraction (without reinscribing heroic narratives or scholarly mastery or ‘good intention’)
• Engagements with how imperial funding regimes, security infrastructures, and/or digital governance intersect with patriarchy, structuring what can be researched, said, archived, or forgotten. Thoughts, provocations, and ruminations on the function of silence, hesitation, strategic withdrawal; strategies adopted, failures, fears, and lessons (un)learned
• Emergent counter-methodologies rooted in reciprocity, shared risk, historical materialism, and accountable co-ownership of knowledge across African geographies
• Attentions to how political, historical, and economic analyses are suppressed or revived within various African curricula in moments of censorship, alienation, de-funding for critical scholarship, and depoliticisations of geographical pedagogies
• Cultural and political methodologies emerging from African movements, community research, arts, and more, including those that generate alternative epistemic and transformative methodological frameworks
• Critical examinations of how methods travel, including how methods developed elsewhere are transformed, resisted, or reinterpreted within African contexts, including rejections of ‘case study’ models, ambivalences and compromises of working within universities, research groups, and/or collectives

We accept contributions in the forms of short written reflections, interviews, photo essays, collaborative pieces, and we are open to listening to other creative ways for your contribution.