Unruly Project at ECAS 2025 – Prague

From 25 to 28 June 2025, members of the Unruly Spaces project participated in the 10th European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) held in Prague under the theme African, Afropolitan, and Afropean Belongings. As a major global gathering for scholars researching Africa, ECAS 2025 engaged with the complex trajectories, constructions, expressions, and performances of African, Afropolitan, and Afropean forms of belonging and positioning.

Professor Stéphanie Perazzone contributed to the high-level panel titled African cities as testbeds: experimental statecraft in transition. This panel examined African cities as dynamic sites of experimental governance, where state actors, private stakeholders, and international partners pilot socio-economic transformations, infrastructural reforms, and development interventions. Her presentation highlighted the Unruly project’s core objectives: to interrogate dominant understandings of public space by examining how urban spaces in Kinshasa and Abidjan become instruments of governance, exclusion, and resistance. She emphasised how the project reveals the contingent, negotiated, and unruly dynamics shaping African cities…