Geographies of Fascism & Authoritarianism in Global Africa

From militarised border regimes to racialised technologies of policing, from extractive geopolitics to nationalist media and electoral campaigns, the grammar and practice of fascism is global. This interdisciplinary conference examines how fascism and global Africa are entangled politically, economically, and imaginatively across time and space. By foregrounding geographies of anti-Blackness and imperial capitalism as core dimensions of fascist rule, we set out to look at how racial capitalism, colonial legacies, and authoritarian formations intersect in the making of global fascist orders.

The concept of global Africa builds upon contemporary Pan-African thought and practice as generative and contested geographies of thought, solidarity, resistance. We are witnessing a revival of Pan-African solidarities in activist, intellectual, and cultural spaces, including transnational campaigns against state violence, police brutality, constitutional amendments, arbitrary detainment, mobilisations for liberation, and more in Burkina Faso, Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, DRC, Senegal, South Africa (and so many more!), signalling renewed possibilities for anti-imperial, anti-fascist, and (potentially) anti-capitalist futures. Across the Americas, from Brazil and Colombia to the United States and the Caribbean, Black and Afro-Indigenous movements continue to confront police killings, environmental dispossession, and authoritarian repression while forging alliances that link struggles on the African continent.

We are particularly interested in bringing geographers into conversation with scholars of politics, history, anthropology, and media studies. Geographers, with our attention to spatiality, mobility, territory, and networks, possess a valuable toolkit for examining how fascism travels and operates transnationally - through shared ideas, international activist and organisational networks, capital (including surveillance capital, far-right tech investors and platform owners, and artificial intelligence systems), militarised technology, and the legal, activist, intellectual, and political struggles that resist it.

We welcome abstracts that engage with the following themes:

1. Histories of Fascism in Global Africa
   • Colonial authoritarianism and proto-fascist regimes in Africa
   • Liberation movements and their confrontations with fascist states
   • Memory, historiography, and silenced narratives
   • Encounters with Fascism in Europe and the Americas, including but not limited to Chile, Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador
      
2. Minerals, Extractivism, and Fascism
   • The geopolitics of resource extraction under authoritarianism
   • Global supply chains, military regimes, and extractive violence
   • Collaborations across fascist and authoritarian states, past and present
      
3. Policing and Shared Technologies of Repression
   • Surveillance technologies, drones, AI, and biometric control
   • Police militarisation and cross-border training programs
   • The racial logics of digital nationalism and online fascist mobilisation
      
4. Comedy, Resistance, and Fascism
   • The politics of humour in resisting authoritarianism
   • Memes, satire, and digital counterpublics
   • Cultural expressions as forms of enduring dissent and critique

Please send the following to globalafricaoxford@gmail.com by 16 January 2026:

• Title of paper
• Abstract of 250–300 words
• Author(s) name(s), institutional affiliation(s), and short bio (max. 100 words)

Applicants will be notified of decisions by early February 2026.

Travel bursaries are available for scholars travelling internationally. If you wish to be considered, please indicate this in your submission. Social scientists have documented the ways in which UK immigration policies, including the so-called 'hostile environment', often make travel requirements for African researchers more stringent than for those from other regions, and we will work closely with selected applicants to support timely visa applications. Please see guidance here: https://www.gov.uk/standard-visitor/visit-as-an-academic

For questions or further information, please email: Dr Amber Murrey (amber.murrey-ndewa@ouce.ox.ac.uk), Professor Patricia Daley (patricia.daley@geog.ox.ac.uk), and Charden Pouo Moutsouka (charden.pouomoutsouka@sjc.ox.ac.uk). 

Supported by:

• Independent Social Research Foundation
• Political Worlds Research Cluster, Oxford School of Geography and the Environment
• John Fell Fund, Oxford University