Leadership in Africa (NeMLA)
Newport, RI, USA
Organization: NeMLA
Event: NeMLA
Somewhere in Morocco, a woman wakes up before dawn to open her cooperative. Somewhere in Africa, a young entrepreneur pitches his logistics startup to investors who have never been to his neighborhood. None of these people would see themselves as leaders in the usual way. Yet, each of them is doing something important: they are changing the conditions of their communities from within.
Across Africa, leadership is not waiting to be brought in, trained, or certified. It is already happening in markets, cooperatives, informal networks, diaspora remittances, and communal land agreements that existed before the modern state. Scholarship has often overlooked these practices as forms of leadership. Yet, these are legitimate, complex, and politically significant forms of collective action.
Africa's recent history is troubled, layered, and full of setbacks. Between periods of forced dependency and moments of self-creation, societies have continuously negotiated their own change. Today, as African economies are rapidly growing, an old question returns: who holds power during this transformation, under what conditions, and for whose benefit? The term "empowerment" is common in development reports, corporate responsibility frameworks, and policy documents, but the communities it claims to help are rarely the ones that define it.
This panel aims to view business leadership not as a technical or managerial issue, but as a site of power. We understand leadership in its broadest sense: not as something limited to boardrooms or institutional hallways, but as a practice found in cooperatives, informal markets, women's savings networks, youth entrepreneurial groups, diaspora investment networks, and communal governance structures that have existed for generations.To study business leadership in Africa is, in this sense, to study the very fabric of social change.
We invite papers from management studies, development economics, gender studies, anthropology,etc. that engage with the following questions: Who leads, and at what cost?
This panel does not treat Africa as a single story. It insists on the specificity of places, languages, and histories . Papers focusing on national or regional contexts are as welcome as comparative perspectives.
Abstracts, in English or French, should not exceed 300 words.
Proposals are to be submitted via the portal:https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22551
Salsabil Fakkar