Public lecture with Dr. Delphine Manetta: Elections in Africa: Lessons learned from Burkina Faso

As local elections organized in Jàana villages in south-west Burkina Faso show, elections constitute a doubly heuristic interface between the “top” and the “bottom”. They enable to think about transformations both in the State and in the villages.

On the one hand, studying elections is to study the State from “below”, how it has been constructed in practice, beyond its legal and constitutional appearance. In this logic, the State would be a renewed form of local politics. Indeed, in Jàana villages, elections illustrate how practices of kinship, gender, friendship, gift-giving, as well as histories of settlement history and “customary”, colonial and post-colonial chieftaincies have shaped successive political regimes over time. Elections thus uncover social and historical roots of a State long dominated by President Blaise Compaoré until 2014, and since 2022 by a military regime.

On the other hand, studying elections means using the State to identify from the “top” local contemporary dynamics. In Jàana villages, elections reveal how the decentralization reform initiated in 1995 and, behind it, the creation of new places of power and new channels for the circulation of wealth and influence have affected local relations of kinship, gender and dependence in the villages. Elections thus allow us to understand how changes in the organization of the Burkinabe State have led to social transformations in Jàana villages.

Elections are a lens through which to examine national and local transformations, revealing the profoundly heteronomous nature of politics. Far from being an autonomous sphere with its own rules, politics is embedded in social, economic and religious spheres. But this heteronomy also poses a challenge: how to translate, through unified analytical categories, the transformations that can be observed both “top” and “bottom”? The example of elections in Jàana villages provides a possible answer: what if political transformations could be thought through mobilities, places and space?

Dr Delphine Manetta is an anthropologist and Deputy Director of IFRA-Nigeria, also associate researcher at LaSIC, Félix Houphouët-Boigny University in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. She was previously a lecturer at Paris Descartes University and a postdoctoral researcher at EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) and University of Paris. Author of publications on her fieldwork researches, including a book published in 2024 (Pouvoir, espace et transformations au sud-ouest du Burkina Faso. Une élection africaine, Paris, L’Harmattan), and on reflexivity in humanities and social sciences (Du contrôle social en Afrique. Réflexivités autour du genre et de l’origine “locale” du chercheur, Paris-Brazzaville, PAARI Éditions), she is a member of the editorial boards of Journal des Africanistes, Sources. Materials & Fieldwork in African Studies and the books series Africae. Her researches are rooted in West-Africa, in Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire and Nigeria, and cross three major fields of interest: power and politics, masculinities, and mobilities, places and space.