This book brings together conceptual debates on the impact of youth-hood and gender on state building in Africa. It offers contemporary and interdisciplinary analyses on the role of protests as an alternative route for citizens to challenge the ballot box as the only legitimate means of ensuring freedom. Drawing on case studies from seven African countries, the contributors focus on specific political moments in their respective countries to offer insights into how the state/society social contract is contested through informal channels, and how political power functions to counteract citizen¿s voices. These contributions offer a different way of thinking about state-building and structural change that goes beyond the system-based approaches that dominate scholarship on democratization and political structures. In effect, it provides a basisfor organizers and social movements to consider how to build solidarity beyond influencing government institutions.

Chapters 3, 5, and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Awino Okech is a Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), UK.

Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Youth-hood, gender and feminist dissent.- Chapter 3. Student movements and autocracies in Africa.- Chapter 4. Fallist feminist futures in South Africa.- Chapter 5. A revolution deferred: sexual and gender based violence in Egypt.- Chapter 6. The revolution continues: Sudanese women's activism.- Chapter 7. Women and the anglophone struggle in cameroon.- Chapter 8. Democratic reversals in Burundi.- Chapter 9. The rise and demise of the "new dispensation" in Zimbabwe.- Chapter 10. Embodying protest: feminist organising in Kenya.