‘Africa Rising’ revisited: African states and the politics of emergence

Abstract

The notion of Africa’s emergence has become a dominant framework through which governments, international organisations and development actors imagine the continent’s future. While existing scholarship has largely assessed whether African economies are genuinely ‘emerging’ by relying on macroeconomic indicators, this article adopts a different perspective. It asks how the discourse of emergence reshapes state formation, governance and political authority across contemporary Africa. We argue that emergence should not be understood as a stage of development but as a governmental rationality that simultaneously operates through discourse, infrastructure and institutional reform. This process gives rise to what we conceptualise as ‘states of emergence’: hybrid political formations in which renewed state planning coexists with neoliberal policy instruments, infrastructure-led development, diversified external partnerships and intensified presidential centralisation. Rather than marking a rupture with postcolonial trajectories, the dynamics of emergence recomposes older logics of extraversion and dependency through new financial arrangements, specialised agencies and the political management of what we term an emergence rent . The article contributes to debates on African political economy by moving beyond the opposition between ‘Africa Rising’ and Afro-pessimism and by showing how emergence functions as a technology of government that transforms the organisation of the state while renegotiating, rather than overcoming, structural dependency.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Global Social Challenges Journal, 2026 · DOI ↗