Bringing Pan-Africanism back in: why the way we study it matters
Daniel Mulugeta
24 April 2026
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Pan-Africanism is everywhere in contemporary African and diasporic political life. It underwrites continental and regional institutions and their programmes, from the African Union's Agenda 2063 to the integrationist ambitions of regional economic communities (RECs). It animates the rhetoric of heads of state, informs the demands of activists, and shapes the cultural self-understanding of communities from Lagos to London. Yet, for all its presence, what Pan-Africanism actually means is surprisingly difficult to pin down.
The most common response, in scholarship, public discourse, and institutional practice alike, has been to ask whether Pan-Africanism has succeeded or failed, whether its institutions have delivered, and whether unity has been achieved. These questions seem reasonable, but they share an assumption that is more limiting than it first appears. They take Pan-Africanism to be a fixed project with a defined destination, and cast the task of analysis as measuring how far we have travelled towards it.
The problem of studying Pan-Africanism through its own language
The deeper problem is that much of what passes for analysis of Pan-Africanism is derived from the very sources that produce it. In academic scholarship more broadly, the challenge is often to bridge the gap between research, policy, and practice. Pan-Africanism presents the opposite problem. In this case, that gap almost completely collapses. The concept circulates so freely across all three domains that the categories scholars use to study it are often the same categories that political and institutional actors have already shaped for their own purposes.
When scholars take their primary cues from these institutional and public understandings, they import categories that those sources have themselves generated. This is not simply a failure of scholarly vigilance. Pan-Africanism is simultaneously an object of study and a living political practice, which means that studying it and participating in how it is defined are not always easy to separate. In research, however, the task is to resist that pull and to hold received categories at a sufficient critical distance to follow political practice wherever it leads.
The consequence is a scholarly debate that has become caught in a loop, returning repeatedly to the same questions about existence, essentialism, and unity without finding a way out of the terms in which those questions were first posed.
Beyond the existence question
Take the debate over whether Pan-Africanism exists. It is continually made and remade through political practice, institutional negotiation, and everyday discourse, yet the debate keeps returning to unproductive alternatives: either it is real because it has built institutions, or it is merely rhetorical because those institutions have disappointed. This misses the point.
Indeed, Pan-Africanism exists as a social fact, as an institutional reality, and as a lived practice across the continent and its diasporas. However, asking whether it exists (ontology, or what things are) distracts from asking how we can better know it (epistemology, or how we come to understand what exists). The more productive question is not whether Pan-Africanism exists, but how it exists, in what forms, under what conditions, and with what political effects.
Essentialism or strategic solidarity?
The essentialism debate follows a similar pattern. Pan-Africanism is frequently criticised for reducing diverse African experiences to a single, homogenising identity. But this critique tends to misread what Pan-Africanist thought has actually done. Just as feminist movements have used the category of women not as a description of a uniform social group but as a political abstraction for mobilising solidarity and challenging structural inequality, Pan-Africanism has used Blackness and African identity in similarly strategic ways.
Even Marcus Garvey, whose rhetoric was often explicitly racialist and whose vision of African redemption drew on a strong sense of racial purity, mobilised Blackness as a political condition forged under racial domination rather than a fixed biological essence. Padmore and Nkrumah went further still, building Pan-Africanism around anti-imperialist and socialist struggle, in which what united people was not a shared identity but a shared experience of domination and a shared political project of liberation. The question is therefore not whether Pan-Africanism is essentialist, but how its claims to commonality are constructed, by whom, and in whose interest.
Pan-Africanism is more than unity
The unity debate is perhaps the most consequential. In continental African discourse, especially, unity has become so central that it is often treated as synonymous with Pan-Africanism itself. This narrows a rich and plural tradition into a single aspiration and crowds out much of what gives it political force.
When unity becomes the primary measure of success, disagreement and divergence can only appear as failure, and other forms of solidarity, such as grassroots, diasporic, and movement-based, are pushed to the margins. Yet Pan-Africanism has always been marked by contestation and competing visions. A more productive approach takes that seriously, examining how different actors invoke Pan-Africanism to advance distinct and sometimes opposing projects.
What the fieldwork shows
My fieldwork across Addis Ababa, Accra, Abuja, Johannesburg, and London, drawing on over 100 interviews conducted between 2019 and 2025, bears this out. In the corridors of the African Union, Pan-Africanism functions as a legitimating discourse, a shared language through which institutional reforms and continental ambitions are framed and justified.
Among activists and civil society actors, it is a language of critique, tied closely to demands for justice, mobility, and economic equality, and directed as much against African states as against external powers.
In everyday contexts, it surfaces as something closer to common sense, expressed through cultural identification, popular narratives, and informal solidarities that rarely announce themselves in explicitly political terms.
Most revealing is what has happened to Pan-Africanism within professionalised civil society. Many of the think tanks and community organisations I encountered in Addis Ababa, London, and elsewhere operated under a Pan-African banner while orienting their work towards donor priorities rather than grassroots demands. The language of solidarity was quietly giving way to the language of capacity-building and policy workshops.
This is what Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, former General Secretary of the Global Pan-African Movement, warned against: a Pan-Africanism stripped of its anti-imperialist politics and made acceptable to development donors, in which mobilisation gives way to consultation and dissent is absorbed into policy. Together, these varied and often conflicting expressions reveal Pan-Africanism not as a unified doctrine but as a dynamic field of political practice whose meanings shift depending on who is speaking, in what context, and for what purpose.
Why it matters how we study Pan-Africanism
Pan-Africanism, approached as an analytical category, opens up questions that go to the heart of how African politics works and how it is understood. It draws attention to forms of political organisation and imagination that state-centric frameworks cannot easily see, including transnational connections, the historical legacies of colonialism, and ongoing struggles over sovereignty and belonging.
Perhaps most importantly, it reframes the relationship between ideas and institutions. Pan-Africanism does not simply describe or reflect political realities. It helps shape them by defining what is possible, what is legitimate, and what kinds of collective action make sense. Ideas, in other words, do not just describe politics. They shape what becomes thinkable. For a continent whose political possibilities have so often been defined from the outside, that is not a minor point.
Author bio
Daniel Mulugeta is a Senior Lecturer in the International Politics of Africa at SOAS University of London. This piece is based on the article "Bringing Pan-Africanism back in as an analytical category," published in African Affairs (2026). The full article is available open access.
