After 20 years of freedom in South Africa we have to ask ourselves difficult questions: are we willing to perpetuate a lie, search for facts or think wishfully? Freedom has been enabled by apartheid's end, but at the same time some of apartheid's key institutions and social relations are reproduced under the guise of 'democracy'. This collection of essays acknowledges the enormous expectations placed on the shoulders of the South African revolution to produce an alternative political regime in response to apartheid and global neo-liberalism. It does not lament the inability of South Africa's democracy to provide deeper freedoms, or suggest that since it hasn't this is some form of betrayal. Freedom is made possible and/or limited by local political choices, contemporary global conditions and the complexities of social change. This book explores the multiplicity of spaces within which the dynamics of social change unfold, and the complex ways in which power is produced and reproduced. In this way, it seeks to understand the often non-linear practices through which alternative possibilities emerge, the lengthy and often indirect ways in which new communities are imagined and new solidarities are built. In this sense, this book is not a collection of hope or despair. Nor is it a book that seeks to situate itself between these two poles. Instead it aims to read the present historically, critically and politically, and to offer insights into the ongoing, iterative and often messy struggles for freedom.

Drawing on case studies from the global South, this book explores the politics of mediated citizenship in which citizens are represented to the state through third party intermediaries. The studies show that mediation is both widely practiced and multi-directional and that it has an important role to play in deepening democracy in the global South.

Drawing on case studies from the global South, this book explores the politics of mediated citizenship in which citizens are represented to the state through third party intermediaries. The studies show that mediation is both widely practiced and multi-directional and that it has an important role to play in deepening democracy in the global South.

Examines the variety of mostly unorganized and informal ways in which Africans exercise agency and resist state power in the 21st century, through citizen action and popular culture, and how the relationship between ruler and ruled is being reframed. The recent eruption of popular protests across North Africa and the Middle East has reopened academic debate on the meaning and strategies of resistance in the 21st century. This book argues that Western notions of state and civilsociety provide only a limited understanding of how power and resistance operate in the African context, where informality is central to the way both state officials and citizens exercise agency. With the principle of informality as a template, the chapters in this volume collectively examine the various modes - organised and unorganised, formal and informal, urban and rural, embodied and discursive, serious and ludic, online and offline, successful and failing - through which Africans contend with power. Resistance takes place against the backdrop of deep fractures in state sovereignty, the remnants of colonial rule and the constraints of a global, neoliberal economic system. Ebenezer Obadare is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Kansas; Wendy Willems is Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Media Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.