The authors introduce communaucratic populism as a novel conceptual framework for understanding a form of political mobilization in which electoral competition is structured less by ideological programs than by competing claims of communal belonging—ethnic, regional, or identitarian—to a state conceived as a collective patrimony. Drawing on Cameroon’s 2025 presidential election, the commentary argues that the dominant ideational, discursive, and strategic approaches to populism capture only fragments of postcolonial African electoral dynamics. Situated between ethnic populism and clientelism, communaucratic populism describes a moral economy of intercommunal rotation through which both incumbents and challengers seek legitimacy. The article identifies four constitutive dimensions of the concept, illustrates them empirically, and outlines a broader comparative research agenda on postcolonial democratic pluralism.
By Yves Valéry Obame*, Salomon Essaga Etémé** & Armand Leka Essomba***
Across sub-Saharan Africa, three decades of multiparty competition have produced a paradox that mainstream populism theory still struggles to name. Elections are held; oppositions mobilize; voters turn out, and yet executive turnover remains rare, while political contestation increasingly maps onto communal cleavages rather than programmatic ones. Cameroon offers an unusually clear instance of this puzzle. Since the 1990 return to multipartyism, no presidential alternation has occurred. The 2025 presidential election, which renewed the mandate of an incumbent in power since 1982, again unfolded along a familiar grammar: candidates summoned regional, ethnic, and identitarian solidarities; voters interpreted the state apparatus less as an instrument of policy delivery than as a collective resource to be conquered or defended; and post-electoral disputes were framed less as procedural grievances than as zero-sum struggles over communal access to power.
Such dynamics resist the standard analytical vocabulary of populism studies. They cannot be reduced to the binary opposition between “the people” and “the elite” (Mudde, 2004), nor fully captured by discursive theories of antagonism (Laclau, 2005), nor by strategic accounts centred on the unmediated personal leader (Weyland, 2001). Nor are they exhausted by the literature on ethnic politics or neo patrimonial clientelism. This commentary proposes a new analytical category – communaucratic populism – to designate this distinctive mode of political mobilization, and to begin specifying what its study requires.
Why African Electoral Politics Requires a New Conceptual Vocabulary
The three leading approaches to populism—ideational, discursive, and strategic—each illuminate a distinct facet of African electoral politics. Yet none adequately accounts for its defining feature: the routinized framing of elections as contests among communities for control of the state. The ideational approach (Mudde, 2004; Müller, 2016; Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017) defines populism as a thin-centred ideology pitting a “morally pure people” against a “corrupt elite.” But in many postcolonial African contexts, the morally charged unit of political contestation is not “the people” as singular sovereign but a plurality of communities, each laying claim to representation. The Manichean cleavage runs not vertically (people against elite) but horizontally (community against community) with the state positioned as the contested prize.
The discursive approach (Laclau, 2005) is more accommodating: its emphasis on the construction of equivalently chains and antagonistic frontiers allows for the emergence of a “people” out of heterogeneous demands. Yet Laclau’s framework still presupposes that successful populist articulation generates a singular popular subject. Communaucratic mobilizationworks differently. It does not seek to dissolve communal particularities into a higher unity; it preserves them, and indeed instrumentalizes them, as the very currency of electoral legitimacy. Each candidate becomes a community’s standard-bearer; coalitions take the form of inter-communal arithmetic rather than ideological synthesis.
The strategic approach (Weyland, 2001) emphasizes the unmediated personalistic appeal of a leader to an atomized mass. This captures certain aspects of postcolonial leadership cultures, but overlooks what is most salient in cases such as Cameroon: the leader is not unmediated. He is, on the contrary, deeply mediated by community elders, regional notables, diaspora figures, customary chiefs, and digital opinion-makers who function as relays of communal endorsement. The leader is not “of the people” in Weyland’s sense, he is of his people, and recognition by other communities must be politically negotiated. To these blind spots one might add a fourth: existing accounts of ethnic populism (Brubaker, 2017) and African ethnopolitics (Posner, 2005; Lynch, 2011) treat communal mobilization either as a derivative of ethnicity or as an effect of strategic elite manipulation. Communaucratic populism, by contrast, designates a logic of political signification in its own right.
The Four Constitutive Dimensions of Communaucratic Populism
Communaucratic populism is here understood as a mode of political mobilization in which electoral competition is structured around competing claims of communal belonging (ethnic, regional, religious, generational, or identitarian) to a state apparatus conceived as a collective patrimony to be distributed among groups. The concept articulates four constitutive dimensions.
The first is communitarian: Politics is organized around morally bounded we-groups that pre-date the electoral moment and persist beyond it. Communities are not residual identities awaiting modernization (Chabal & Daloz, 1999); they are political units in their own right, mobilized strategically but anchored in long-running histories of belonging (Nyamnjoh, 2006; Geschiere, 2009).
The second is identitarian: Communal claims do not function as raw expressions of ethnic interest but as moral narratives of dignity, recognition, and historical reparation. The demand is not merely for redistribution but for symbolic acknowledgment, the recognition that one’s community has been excluded long enough and deserves its turn.
The third is governmental: The state is figured not as a programmatic apparatus delivering public goods, but as a res communis, that is a common good to be circulated among communities. Incumbency by a single community is delegitimized over time not because policies fail, but because rotation has not occurred. Conversely, the incumbent’s coalition defends continuity through a symmetrical communal grammar: the defence of “our turn,” the avoidance of “their revenge.”
The fourth is discursive: Communaucratic mobilization deploys a distinctive vocabulary of patrimony, balance, equilibrium, and “the turn of others.” It produces a moral economy of electoral expectation in which losing is not merely defeat but exclusion, and winning is less mandate than custodianship. Communaucratic populism is therefore neither reducible to clientelism – which describes a transactional logic of patron-client exchange (Bach & Gazibo, 2012) – nor to ethnic populism in Brubaker’s (2017) sense, which presupposes a discursive construction of the people as ethnically delimited. It names a populism whose “people” is plural, whose antagonism is horizontal, and whose telos is rotation rather than rupture.
Cameroon’s 2025 Election as a Case of Communaucratic Mobilization
Cameroon’s 2025 presidential election illustrates each of these dimensions. With more than 250 ethnic communities and a long-standing regional cleavage structure – Northern, Centre-South, Western, Anglophone (Konings & Nyamnjoh, 2003) – electoral politics has long operated as a tacit accounting of communal weight. The incumbent’s longevity is itself read communaucratically: a particular regional constituency is perceived to have “had its turn” for too long, while others have not. This perception fuels mobilization not principally against authoritarianism per se, but against the retention of communal access to state power.
Three patterns observed during the 2025 electoral cycle substantiate the concept. First, alliance formation among opposition candidates followed a logic of inter-communal pooling: when a prominent Anglophone figure was excluded from the ballot, segments of his regional base redirected support not on ideological grounds but on the calculus of which alternative candidate could best aggregate non-incumbent communities. Second, digital political discourse – captured through nethnographic observation of social media debate – was saturated with communal markers: regional naming, ancestral references, and historical claims about precedence and exclusion. Third, post-electoral contestation, while invoking procedural irregularities, was decoded by participants and observers alike through a communaucratic frame: which group had been overrepresented in the tally, which underrepresented, and how the result would be received in each region.
Crucially, this is not “mere” ethnic politics. The communal grammar is articulated in the language of democratic legitimacy itself: rotation as fairness, balance as inclusion, alternation as the test of pluralism. Communaucratic populism does not reject democracy, it reinterprets it as a procedure for inter-communal distribution of state office (Bayart, 1989; Mbembe, 2001). This reinterpretation enriches existing analyses in three respects. i) Against the trope of failed transitions (Cheeseman, 2015), it specifies a coherent – if costly – logic of democratic operation under conditions of pluralism without programmatic differentiation. ii) Against the diagnosis of ethnic voting as informational shortcut, it highlights the moral and historical depth of communal claims. iii) And against the assumption that populism is a Northern import to be measured by Northern criteria, it foregrounds an indigenous configuration with its own conceptual demands (Resnick, 2014).
The Scope, Limits, and Future of the Concept
Communaucratic populism is not a universal key. Its analytical purchase depends on three contextual conditions: a politically salient pluri-communal structure; a state apparatus historically central to redistribution; and a democratic procedure understood – across the political spectrum – as a vehicle of inter-communal recognition. Where these conditions hold, the concept should travel productively: across the Gulf of Guinea (Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Gabon), into the Great Lakes region, and into postcolonial democracies beyond Africa where communal pluralism intersects with statist political economies.
Several limits should be acknowledged. The concept does not, on its own, account for coercion, electoral manipulation (Schedler, 2002), or the international determinants of incumbency. It works best in combination with – not as a replacement for – institutional and political economy analyses. Nor does it claim that ideology and policy are absent from African electoral life; it claims only those communal frames are routinely the dominant idiom through which they are translated. The agenda this opens is comparative and methodological: how to measure communaucratic intensity across cases? How to distinguish it operationally from clientelism and ethnic populism? And how to register its mutations under conditions of urbanization, digital mediation, and generational change?
Communaucratic populism is offered here as a working concept, not a finished theory. It seeks to render intelligible a political grammar that resists translation into the dominant categories of populism studies, and to do so without reducing African pluralism to deviation from a Northern norm. If populism describes, in its most general sense, a politics that makes the construction of “the people” its central operation, communaucratic populism names a variant in which that construction is irreducibly plural: where “the people” is always already a “people of peoples,” and where the democratic question is less who governs than whose turn it is to govern. The wager of the concept is that postcolonial pluralism deserves its own categories rather than borrowed ones. The discussion is only beginning.
The case of Cameroon is just a display of this reality since 1990. The initial idea has been that the Northern communities, through president Ahidjo have passed a turn to the Southern population of Cameroon through President Paul Biya. According to them, political power is supposed to go back to the North after Biya. In the year 1992, the ideology behind the Biya must go slogan was that it is the turn of the Anglophones. The Francophones have been managing power since independence. In 2018, the Bamileke populations, with in mind the ideology of Dongmo, the author of the Bamileke dynamism, stating that the Bamileke population must grab the power by demography, actually were convinced that it was their turn. The score of Issa Tchiroma Bakary in 2025, was partially due to a communaucratic coalition between the Bamileke and some Northern population, and some communacratic allies, who thought that communaucratic alliance could be the solution to overthrow the power of the Fang-Beti and Bulu. Politics in Cameroon has almost always been a matter of which is the new community to get into power? Whose turn is it?
(*) Dr. Yves Valéry Obame is affiliated with the University of Bertoua, the Cameroonian Laboratory for Studies and Research on Contemporary Societies (CERESC), and the Geneva Africa Lab (GAL).
(**) Dr. Salomon Essaga Etémé is affiliated with the University of Yaoundé I and the Cameroonian Laboratory for Studies and Research on Contemporary Societies (CERESC).
(***) Professor Armand Leka Essomba is affiliated with the University of Yaoundé I and the Cameroonian Laboratory for Studies and Research on Contemporary Societies (CERESC).
References
Bach, D. C. & Gazibo, M. (Eds.). (2012). Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond. Routledge.
Bayart, J.-F. (1989). L’État en Afrique: La politique du ventre. Fayard.
Brubaker, R. (2017). “Why Populism?” Theory and Society, 46(5), 357–385. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9301-7
Chabal, P. & Daloz, J.-P. (1999). Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument. Indiana University Press
Cheeseman, N. (2015). Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures, and the Struggle for Political Reform. Cambridge University Press.
Dongmo, J-L. (1981). Le dynamisme Bamiléké. Yaoundé: CEPER.
Geschiere, P. (2009). The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. University of Chicago Press.
Konings, P. & Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2003). Negotiating an Anglophone Identity: A Study of the Politics of Recognition and Representation in Cameroon. Brill.
Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. Verso.
Lynch, G. (2011). I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya. University of Chicago Press.
Mbembe, A. (2001). On the Postcolony. University of California Press.
Mudde, C. (2004). “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x
Mudde, C. & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
Müller, J.-W. (2016). What Is Populism? University of Pennsylvania Press.
Dongmo, J.-L. (1981). Le Dynamisme Bamiléké. (Vol. 1-2). Université de Yaoundé.
Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2006). Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa. Zed Books.
Posner, D. N. (2005). Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. Cambridge University Press.
Resnick, D. (2014). Urban Poverty and Party Populism in African Democracies. Cambridge University Press.
Schedler, A. (2002). “The Menu of Manipulation.” Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 36–50. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2002.0031
Weyland, K. (2001). “Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics.” Comparative Politics, 34(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/422412
Communaucratic Populism: Rethinking Identity-Based Electoral Mobilization in Postcolonial Africa
The authors introduce communaucratic populism as a novel conceptual framework for understanding a form of political mobilization in which electoral competition is structured less by ideological programs than by competing claims of communal belonging—ethnic, regional, or identitarian—to a state conceived as a collective patrimony. Drawing on Cameroon’s 2025 presidential election, the commentary argues that the dominant ideational, discursive, and strategic approaches to populism capture only fragments of postcolonial African electoral dynamics. Situated between ethnic populism and clientelism, communaucratic populism describes a moral economy of intercommunal rotation through which both incumbents and challengers seek legitimacy. The article identifies four constitutive dimensions of the concept, illustrates them empirically, and outlines a broader comparative research agenda on postcolonial democratic pluralism.
By Yves Valéry Obame*, Salomon Essaga Etémé** & Armand Leka Essomba***
Across sub-Saharan Africa, three decades of multiparty competition have produced a paradox that mainstream populism theory still struggles to name. Elections are held; oppositions mobilize; voters turn out, and yet executive turnover remains rare, while political contestation increasingly maps onto communal cleavages rather than programmatic ones. Cameroon offers an unusually clear instance of this puzzle. Since the 1990 return to multipartyism, no presidential alternation has occurred. The 2025 presidential election, which renewed the mandate of an incumbent in power since 1982, again unfolded along a familiar grammar: candidates summoned regional, ethnic, and identitarian solidarities; voters interpreted the state apparatus less as an instrument of policy delivery than as a collective resource to be conquered or defended; and post-electoral disputes were framed less as procedural grievances than as zero-sum struggles over communal access to power.
Such dynamics resist the standard analytical vocabulary of populism studies. They cannot be reduced to the binary opposition between “the people” and “the elite” (Mudde, 2004), nor fully captured by discursive theories of antagonism (Laclau, 2005), nor by strategic accounts centred on the unmediated personal leader (Weyland, 2001). Nor are they exhausted by the literature on ethnic politics or neo patrimonial clientelism. This commentary proposes a new analytical category – communaucratic populism – to designate this distinctive mode of political mobilization, and to begin specifying what its study requires.
Why African Electoral Politics Requires a New Conceptual Vocabulary
The three leading approaches to populism—ideational, discursive, and strategic—each illuminate a distinct facet of African electoral politics. Yet none adequately accounts for its defining feature: the routinized framing of elections as contests among communities for control of the state. The ideational approach (Mudde, 2004; Müller, 2016; Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017) defines populism as a thin-centred ideology pitting a “morally pure people” against a “corrupt elite.” But in many postcolonial African contexts, the morally charged unit of political contestation is not “the people” as singular sovereign but a plurality of communities, each laying claim to representation. The Manichean cleavage runs not vertically (people against elite) but horizontally (community against community) with the state positioned as the contested prize.
The discursive approach (Laclau, 2005) is more accommodating: its emphasis on the construction of equivalently chains and antagonistic frontiers allows for the emergence of a “people” out of heterogeneous demands. Yet Laclau’s framework still presupposes that successful populist articulation generates a singular popular subject. Communaucratic mobilizationworks differently. It does not seek to dissolve communal particularities into a higher unity; it preserves them, and indeed instrumentalizes them, as the very currency of electoral legitimacy. Each candidate becomes a community’s standard-bearer; coalitions take the form of inter-communal arithmetic rather than ideological synthesis.
The strategic approach (Weyland, 2001) emphasizes the unmediated personalistic appeal of a leader to an atomized mass. This captures certain aspects of postcolonial leadership cultures, but overlooks what is most salient in cases such as Cameroon: the leader is not unmediated. He is, on the contrary, deeply mediated by community elders, regional notables, diaspora figures, customary chiefs, and digital opinion-makers who function as relays of communal endorsement. The leader is not “of the people” in Weyland’s sense, he is of his people, and recognition by other communities must be politically negotiated. To these blind spots one might add a fourth: existing accounts of ethnic populism (Brubaker, 2017) and African ethnopolitics (Posner, 2005; Lynch, 2011) treat communal mobilization either as a derivative of ethnicity or as an effect of strategic elite manipulation. Communaucratic populism, by contrast, designates a logic of political signification in its own right.
The Four Constitutive Dimensions of Communaucratic Populism
Communaucratic populism is here understood as a mode of political mobilization in which electoral competition is structured around competing claims of communal belonging (ethnic, regional, religious, generational, or identitarian) to a state apparatus conceived as a collective patrimony to be distributed among groups. The concept articulates four constitutive dimensions.
The first is communitarian: Politics is organized around morally bounded we-groups that pre-date the electoral moment and persist beyond it. Communities are not residual identities awaiting modernization (Chabal & Daloz, 1999); they are political units in their own right, mobilized strategically but anchored in long-running histories of belonging (Nyamnjoh, 2006; Geschiere, 2009).
The second is identitarian: Communal claims do not function as raw expressions of ethnic interest but as moral narratives of dignity, recognition, and historical reparation. The demand is not merely for redistribution but for symbolic acknowledgment, the recognition that one’s community has been excluded long enough and deserves its turn.
The third is governmental: The state is figured not as a programmatic apparatus delivering public goods, but as a res communis, that is a common good to be circulated among communities. Incumbency by a single community is delegitimized over time not because policies fail, but because rotation has not occurred. Conversely, the incumbent’s coalition defends continuity through a symmetrical communal grammar: the defence of “our turn,” the avoidance of “their revenge.”
The fourth is discursive: Communaucratic mobilization deploys a distinctive vocabulary of patrimony, balance, equilibrium, and “the turn of others.” It produces a moral economy of electoral expectation in which losing is not merely defeat but exclusion, and winning is less mandate than custodianship. Communaucratic populism is therefore neither reducible to clientelism – which describes a transactional logic of patron-client exchange (Bach & Gazibo, 2012) – nor to ethnic populism in Brubaker’s (2017) sense, which presupposes a discursive construction of the people as ethnically delimited. It names a populism whose “people” is plural, whose antagonism is horizontal, and whose telos is rotation rather than rupture.
Cameroon’s 2025 Election as a Case of Communaucratic Mobilization
Cameroon’s 2025 presidential election illustrates each of these dimensions. With more than 250 ethnic communities and a long-standing regional cleavage structure – Northern, Centre-South, Western, Anglophone (Konings & Nyamnjoh, 2003) – electoral politics has long operated as a tacit accounting of communal weight. The incumbent’s longevity is itself read communaucratically: a particular regional constituency is perceived to have “had its turn” for too long, while others have not. This perception fuels mobilization not principally against authoritarianism per se, but against the retention of communal access to state power.
Three patterns observed during the 2025 electoral cycle substantiate the concept. First, alliance formation among opposition candidates followed a logic of inter-communal pooling: when a prominent Anglophone figure was excluded from the ballot, segments of his regional base redirected support not on ideological grounds but on the calculus of which alternative candidate could best aggregate non-incumbent communities. Second, digital political discourse – captured through nethnographic observation of social media debate – was saturated with communal markers: regional naming, ancestral references, and historical claims about precedence and exclusion. Third, post-electoral contestation, while invoking procedural irregularities, was decoded by participants and observers alike through a communaucratic frame: which group had been overrepresented in the tally, which underrepresented, and how the result would be received in each region.
Crucially, this is not “mere” ethnic politics. The communal grammar is articulated in the language of democratic legitimacy itself: rotation as fairness, balance as inclusion, alternation as the test of pluralism. Communaucratic populism does not reject democracy, it reinterprets it as a procedure for inter-communal distribution of state office (Bayart, 1989; Mbembe, 2001). This reinterpretation enriches existing analyses in three respects. i) Against the trope of failed transitions (Cheeseman, 2015), it specifies a coherent – if costly – logic of democratic operation under conditions of pluralism without programmatic differentiation. ii) Against the diagnosis of ethnic voting as informational shortcut, it highlights the moral and historical depth of communal claims. iii) And against the assumption that populism is a Northern import to be measured by Northern criteria, it foregrounds an indigenous configuration with its own conceptual demands (Resnick, 2014).
The Scope, Limits, and Future of the Concept
Communaucratic populism is not a universal key. Its analytical purchase depends on three contextual conditions: a politically salient pluri-communal structure; a state apparatus historically central to redistribution; and a democratic procedure understood – across the political spectrum – as a vehicle of inter-communal recognition. Where these conditions hold, the concept should travel productively: across the Gulf of Guinea (Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Gabon), into the Great Lakes region, and into postcolonial democracies beyond Africa where communal pluralism intersects with statist political economies.
Several limits should be acknowledged. The concept does not, on its own, account for coercion, electoral manipulation (Schedler, 2002), or the international determinants of incumbency. It works best in combination with – not as a replacement for – institutional and political economy analyses. Nor does it claim that ideology and policy are absent from African electoral life; it claims only those communal frames are routinely the dominant idiom through which they are translated. The agenda this opens is comparative and methodological: how to measure communaucratic intensity across cases? How to distinguish it operationally from clientelism and ethnic populism? And how to register its mutations under conditions of urbanization, digital mediation, and generational change?
Communaucratic populism is offered here as a working concept, not a finished theory. It seeks to render intelligible a political grammar that resists translation into the dominant categories of populism studies, and to do so without reducing African pluralism to deviation from a Northern norm. If populism describes, in its most general sense, a politics that makes the construction of “the people” its central operation, communaucratic populism names a variant in which that construction is irreducibly plural: where “the people” is always already a “people of peoples,” and where the democratic question is less who governs than whose turn it is to govern. The wager of the concept is that postcolonial pluralism deserves its own categories rather than borrowed ones. The discussion is only beginning.
The case of Cameroon is just a display of this reality since 1990. The initial idea has been that the Northern communities, through president Ahidjo have passed a turn to the Southern population of Cameroon through President Paul Biya. According to them, political power is supposed to go back to the North after Biya. In the year 1992, the ideology behind the Biya must go slogan was that it is the turn of the Anglophones. The Francophones have been managing power since independence. In 2018, the Bamileke populations, with in mind the ideology of Dongmo, the author of the Bamileke dynamism, stating that the Bamileke population must grab the power by demography, actually were convinced that it was their turn. The score of Issa Tchiroma Bakary in 2025, was partially due to a communaucratic coalition between the Bamileke and some Northern population, and some communacratic allies, who thought that communaucratic alliance could be the solution to overthrow the power of the Fang-Beti and Bulu. Politics in Cameroon has almost always been a matter of which is the new community to get into power? Whose turn is it?
(*) Dr. Yves Valéry Obame is affiliated with the University of Bertoua, the Cameroonian Laboratory for Studies and Research on Contemporary Societies (CERESC), and the Geneva Africa Lab (GAL).
(**) Dr. Salomon Essaga Etémé is affiliated with the University of Yaoundé I and the Cameroonian Laboratory for Studies and Research on Contemporary Societies (CERESC).
(***) Professor Armand Leka Essomba is affiliated with the University of Yaoundé I and the Cameroonian Laboratory for Studies and Research on Contemporary Societies (CERESC).
References
Bach, D. C. & Gazibo, M. (Eds.). (2012). Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond. Routledge.
Bayart, J.-F. (1989). L’État en Afrique: La politique du ventre. Fayard.
Brubaker, R. (2017). “Why Populism?” Theory and Society, 46(5), 357–385. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9301-7
Chabal, P. & Daloz, J.-P. (1999). Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument. Indiana University Press
Cheeseman, N. (2015). Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures, and the Struggle for Political Reform. Cambridge University Press.
Dongmo, J-L. (1981). Le dynamisme Bamiléké. Yaoundé: CEPER.
Geschiere, P. (2009). The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. University of Chicago Press.
Konings, P. & Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2003). Negotiating an Anglophone Identity: A Study of the Politics of Recognition and Representation in Cameroon. Brill.
Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. Verso.
Lynch, G. (2011). I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya. University of Chicago Press.
Mbembe, A. (2001). On the Postcolony. University of California Press.
Mudde, C. (2004). “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x
Mudde, C. & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
Müller, J.-W. (2016). What Is Populism? University of Pennsylvania Press.
Dongmo, J.-L. (1981). Le Dynamisme Bamiléké. (Vol. 1-2). Université de Yaoundé.
Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2006). Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa. Zed Books.
Posner, D. N. (2005). Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. Cambridge University Press.
Resnick, D. (2014). Urban Poverty and Party Populism in African Democracies. Cambridge University Press.
Schedler, A. (2002). “The Menu of Manipulation.” Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 36–50. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2002.0031
Weyland, K. (2001). “Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics.” Comparative Politics, 34(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/422412
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