[JOURNAL ARTICLE] Greco, E., Wiegratz J. and Zeilig L., « Not quite post-political » in Review of African Political Economy, vol. 46 (160), 2019
The urgent tasks to undertake now … revolve centrally around inventing new modes and practices of collective political organisation … and the mobilisation of a wide range of new political subjects who are not afraid to imagine a different commons, demand the impossible, stage the new and confront the violence that will inevitably intensify as those who wish to maintain the present order realise that their days might be numbered.
(Swyngedouw 2014, 134)
This issue goes to press while the ongoing mobilisation in Sudan is being repressed with bloodshed. As of today, this courageous act of defiance and radical political practice and imagination of a people that has been suffering the most brutal political repression calls not only for further analysis: it calls for our immediate and sustained solidarity.
Writing during the crackdown on the Egyptian mobilisation in 2014, Swyngedouw insisted on the importance of prioritising collective political practices of organisation around the question of how to sustain the mobilisation of new political subjects emerging from the politics of Tahrir Square (Swyngedouw 2014). Since 2011, the waves of mass mobilisations in the streets and squares – with Egypt first and then Turkey giving way to a wave that has continued in Tunisia, Algeria and now Sudan – has signalled the ‘incipient return of the political’ (Ibid.).
Relearning what grassroots politics outside and beyond parties is about is an enormous task. On our website Roape.net, Janet Bujra introduced the film about the Connections workshops held across Africa in 2017–2018 (Bujra 2019). Writing about these unusual gatherings of left activists and intellectuals and the debates on radical…
Greco, E., Wiegratz J. and Zeilig L., « Not quite post-political » in Review of African Political Economy, vol. 46 (160),pp.171-181, 2019
