As young people increasingly deploy digital platforms to articulate political grievances, mobilise protest, monitor elections, and contest state authority, an evolving body of African policy research and scholarship documents the regulatory environments within which these movements unfold. By systematically juxtaposing these bodies of work, this annotated bibliography aims to reconcile theoretical tensions, identify underexplored mechanisms linking digital mobilisation to democratic change, and inform the hypotheses for its wider project, Youth Digital Activism and Democratic Change in the Sahel, which examines youth digital activism in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Guinea, Mali, Niger and Togo. The research is situated at the intersection of political communication, African politics, youth studies, and critical internet scholarship, and seeks to understand how digitally mediated activism reshapes political participation and democratic trajectories in fragile and hybrid regimes.
Analysing 24 interdisciplinary papers, this bibliography finds that digital activism is not a purely technological phenomenon, but a socio-political practice embedded within historical, institutional, and transnational contexts. Its major findings include:
- Youth digital activism is reshaping political participation, particularly where formal political channels are constrained. Networked social movements and connective action demonstrate how personalised, digitally mediated engagement enables rapid mobilisation without reliance on hierarchical organisations.
- While digital platforms can amplify dissent, expose state violence, and broaden political discourse, they also generate fragility and volatility. This ambivalence is particularly pronounced in the Sahel, limiting the translation of online mobilisation into sustained institutional change.
- The global and regional rise of digital authoritarianism shows how states adapt to digital contention through legal, technological, and discursive strategies. Internet shutdowns, cybersecurity laws, surveillance partnerships, and content moderation are increasingly used to regulate youth political activity and shape electoral environments.
- Political narratives and protest tactics circulate across borders, producing regional digital publics that challenge state-centric analyses of political change. This is particularly relevant for the Sahel, where youth movements draw inspiration from mobilisations such as Nigeria’s #EndSARS and Senegal’s #FreeSenegal.
- There is a need for interpretive, comparative, and ethically grounded approaches to studying digital politics in fragile contexts. Digital ethnography, archival research, and relational comparison are identified as essential for capturing the complexity of digitally mediated activism beyond platform metrics or decontextualised data.
