This newspaper—what we’re calling a “special issue”—is on the long decade of mass protest that gripped the world following the 2008 global financial crisis. This fifteen-year period, roughly from 2009 to 2024, saw convulsions and mobilizations stretching almost every corner of the planet. As noted by many, this stretch of human history witnessed the largest number of protests ever recorded. And yet, despite this scale of mobilization, popular forces are still caught in the bind John Holloway described in 2002: “Changing the world without taking power.”

Many of the decade’s most iconic protest movements—from Brazil to Egypt, Hong Kong to Chile—followed a similar arc: massive mobilization, a surge of collective power, and then… defeat. In many cases, revolt led not to liberation, but to repression, coups, or elite reshuffling. Since at least 2011, scholars, theorists, and activists have been trying to map what these movements meant, and why they seemed to rise—and fall—in such a similar rhythm across the world. The result is a rich and often conflicted body of analysis: some writing from within the barricades, others from the comfort of university departments or policy institutes. Their work forms the scaffolding for how we understand the last fifteen years—and how we might think about the next fifteen.

Before mapping these narratives, it’s worth asking: what made this protest wave different? After all, the 1990s and early 2000s were not without their own cycles of dissent—most visibly in the alter-globalization and “new social movements” of that era, which often emphasized symbolic resistance, horizontal forms of organization, and ethical consumption. But the post-2008 wave emerged on different terrain. A new mood took hold—not only among radicals, but across the political spectrum. Disillusionment with elites and institutions hardened into anti-politics: a diffuse, often contradictory fury that refused the political class but rarely offered a coherent alternative. In this way, the mass protest decade marked a break: more ideologically scrambled, more antagonistic toward institutions, more technologically mediated, and more attuned to crisis. It wasn’t simply that there were more protests. The protest itself had changed.

Across the last fifteen years, at least four broad narratives have emerged to explain the arc of global protest. One locates the unrest in a deep legitimacy crisis: neoliberalism, once triumphant, no longer delivers rising living standards or political hope, leaving disillusionment to fester into revolt. A second centers on austerity and economic brutality, tracing how working-class rage and demands for public goods gave the decade its slogans and shared enemies—financialization, privatization, debt. A third examines how digital technologies reshaped mobilization: social media made protests visible but harder to sustain, favoring spectacle over structure and horizontalism over strategy. The fourth turns to aftermath—reflecting on exhaustion, co-optation, and the absence of clear visions for power. Taken together, these accounts suggest that mass protest after 2008 was both a symptom of breakdown and a search for something beyond it. The tension running through them is between rupture and reconstitution, between the fires of collective refusal and the challenge of building something durable in their wake.

Despite the intellectual ferment surrounding the global protest decade, one region is often left at the margins: Africa. The Arab uprisings of 2011 (in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and beyond) rightly receive considerable attention in academic and journalistic accounts. But, even these are rarely treated as African events. Instead, they are absorbed into narratives of the “Middle East and North Africa,” reproducing the old divide that renders sub-Saharan Africa analytically separate, even invisible. Elsewhere, scholars may engage with isolated protest moments in Nigeria, Sudan, or South Africa—but these are rarely woven into the global story. Africa is acknowledged in fragments, but not as a historical agent in the broader arc of the mass protest decade.

To speak of a “mass protest decade” without Africa is to speak in abstraction. It is to overlook the continent where some of the boldest, most creative, and most consequential mobilizations occurred. Africa’s inclusion in this story does not need to be justified by demographic projections or development statistics, such as the oft-cited prediction that by 2050 over a quarter of the world’s population will be African. Nor should we treat Africa as a place where things merely happen—a site of crisis or charity, of ngo interventions and military bases, or even neocolonialism and imperialism—rather than a generator of political thought and historical momentum. As the source of everything from the raw material and labor that fuel the 21st century global economy to novel ideas about how to organize (digitally networked) humanity, Africa remains at the center.

We’ve structured this special issue to trace a broad arc—from the structural forces driving protest, through the formation of political subjectivities, to the dilemmas of organization and the question of what comes next. Each contribution adds a distinct angle, but together they reflect a set of interlocking questions: Why did so many take to the streets in this period? What visions of change animated them? And why did so few of these moments consolidate into durable gains?

We begin with Sa’eed Husaini, whose essay lays out the terrain of African neoliberalism and the puzzle of its persistence. Why, Sa’eed asks, did Africa not experience its own Pink Tide—a wave of left-populist governments like those that emerged in Latin America? Drawing on Nigeria as a case study, he shows how neoliberalism has remained hegemonic in many African democracies despite its discrediting elsewhere. His piece introduces the core tension of the issue: between protest and politics, revolt and reform. It reminds us that the failure of transformation is not due to a lack of rebellion, but to the structural insulation of the state from popular pressure.

From this analytical starting point, we move to Maher Mezahi’s rich portrait of Algeria’s stadiums as political training grounds. Here, we see how protest subjectivities are formed not just in formal political spaces, but in the vernacular life of fans and chants, of banners and bodies. Maher’s essay brings texture to the idea of “pre-political” space, showing how collective vision and tactical imagination can germinate in unexpected corners. It takes us from the structural to the affective, from the logic of hegemony to the rhythm of song.

Khanya Mtshali brings us to South Africa’s universities, and to one of the most iconic movements of the past decade: Fallism. Her essay reckons with the promise and contradictions of that moment—a movement led by the most politically literate section of youth, yet constrained by the elite institution in which it was born. Khanya interrogates the romantic myths that surround Fallism and probes its absorption into cultural and professional politics. Her piece is the issue’s first encounter with aftermath—the afterlife of mass mobilization when it collides with class aspiration, media performance, and the limits of elite institutional spaces.

We then shift terrain with Wangui Kimari, whose essay draws the green transition into sharper view. In Kenya, climate politics have become a new frontier of dispossession, a site where elite “development” projects wrap themselves in the language of sustainability while reproducing inequality on the ground. Many might not immediately link the #EndFinanceBill and #RutoMustGo protests to climate change. But months before these uprisings erupted, devastating floods tore through the country, laying bare a government more attuned to carbon markets than to basic public infrastructure. Wangui shows how this pattern is not incidental but systemic: global climate governance recycles the same logics of exclusion and extraction long familiar across the continent.

Shamira Ibrahim’s contribution zooms out further still. She traces the long afterlife of empire in the Francophone world—from the Sahel to the Caribbean—and how the postcolonial order is being reconfigured through both rebellion and reaction. Whether in the form of junta-led nationalism or citizen-led protest, Shamira shows how the contradictions of Francafrique are reaching a breaking point. Her sweeping analysis reminds us that what often looks like fragmentation may in fact be a new form of regional realignment.

We close the issue with Razaz Bashier, whose essay returns us to Sudan. Razaz reflects on the country’s unfinished revolution and the fate of its resistance committees. In Sudan, as elsewhere, the question became: what happens after the square is emptied? How do movements move from eruption to organization, from euphoria to endurance? Her piece, like Sa’eed’s, circles back to the question of power—not just how to oppose it, but how to hold it, build it, and transform it. It’s a fitting conclusion that leaves the door open rather than closed, pointing us not toward answers, but toward the work that remains.

We’re publishing this as a print issue, not out of nostalgia, but necessity. In a time when discourse is flattened into algorithmic feeds and political memory lasts the length of a scroll, print offers resistance. It insists on duration, on presence, on the tactile. A newspaper moves through hands, sits on tables, travels in bags. It can be returned to, marked up, argued with, passed on. It slows things down. It demands more than a click. In a landscape where meme logics have overtaken moral imagination, where political discourse is fragmented and depoliticized, and where Africa is too often treated as a stage rather than a speaking subject, we wanted to offer something different.

This special issue is an invitation, not just to reflect, but to conspire. To join us in building a different kind of public culture: one that insists Africa is not the afterthought of history but one of its authors. The mass protest decade may have ended without resolution, but it left behind questions that still demand answers, solidarities that still need tending, and fires that haven’t gone out. Africa Is a Country is one place we gather to keep them alive. If this work speaks to you, help sustain it—subscribe, share, support. We’re just getting started.