“I’m really pleased that the Centre for Asian Studies in Africa (CASA) has expanded the remit of its work to also encompass making spaces for emerging young scholars.” So says CASA director Prof Alf Gunvald Nilsen about the 4-day doctoral course Insurgent Democracies in Asia and Africa, which took place at UP’s Future Africa campus from 19 to 22 May.

The doctoral course brought together 14 PhD scholars, most of them from Asian and African universities, whose research focuses on the role of popular protest in resisting authoritarianism and reimagining democracy across the two continents.

“We live in which political life worldwide is shaped by two key trends,” says Nilsen. “One is the rise of authoritarianism and democratic backsliding; another is the proliferation of popular protests that seek to push back autocratization and deepen the practices and meanings of democracy. States in Asia and Africa are no exceptions from this pattern, which warrants critical scholarly attention.”

Towards that end, in late February this year, CASA, in collaboration with the Innovation Foundation for Democracy, issued a call for papers for what was initially envisioned as a three-day doctoral course focused on the intersection between authoritarianism and insurgency in Asia and Africa.

“I was keen to curate a space in which emerging scholars could present draft papers based on their work, received feedback from expert scholars in this field of research, and also be mentored in academic publishing by senior academics.” Prof Nilsen tells us that the initiative met with an overwhelming response. “We received more than 60 applications, most of which were very strong. After careful assessment, we selected 14 participants and expanded the doctoral course to last four days in total.”

Across the four days of the course, the participants presented and discussed their papers, receiving feedback from scholars from UP, Wits University, and the University of Johannesburg, as well as from each other. They also attended three expert lectures given by Dr. Smriti Upadhyay from Dartmouth College, Prof Wangui Kimari from the American University Center in Nairobi, and by Prof Nilsen himself.

In addition, CASA research associate and associate professor in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore Prof Junjia Ye contributed a rigorous mentoring session on academic writing and academic publishing.

“And it doesn’t end there. We are now moving forward to develop a special issue project based on the proceedings from the doctoral course,” Prof Nilsen tells us. Over the next year, the participants will rethink and redraft their papers based on the comments they received during the doctoral course, and these will be published with a prominent international academic journal in the field of development studies.

“If we are serious about making critical knowledge from the global South, we also have to be serious about enabling our young and emerging scholars to plant their flags, so to speak, in key scholarly domains, such as the academic journals that serve as key platforms for the dissemination of academic research. We need to ensure that they have the skills to do so, and that they receive the mentorship that is necessary to succeed. I’m happy that CASA can serve as one nodal point for such efforts, and I look forward to organizing more initiatives like these in the future”, Prof Nilsen says.