Crystallizing contention : a cumulative dissertation on youth, politics, and urban violence in Conakry, Kampala, and beyond

This PhD thesis analyzes specific cases of how urban protest movements arise, how they grow in size and political significance, and how observation, description, and reality of protest movements are entangled. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Conakry (Guinea) and Kampala (Uganda), and also touching upon the England riots in 2011, the author employs comparative and relational methods to ultimately trace a new perspective on urban protests: the so-called crystallization approach. Based on the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989), it suggests seeing protest movements as crystallization processes, emerging from heterogeneous urban contexts and dynamically concretizing into ‘social movements’, ‘demonstrations’, ‘protests’ or ‘riots’ — terms that tend to absorb the diverse relations that gave rise to what they describe. The cumulative thesis comprises five distinct articles, preceded by an integrative synthesis in which the author reflects on his shortcomings during the research process and on why he failed to answer the research questions that he had started out with.