Dan Paget

My research focuses on the ideas through which the legitimacy of autocracy is contested.

 

I am the principal investigator for NEWREPUBLIC, a €1.5 million Starting Grant funded by the European Research Council

 

In NEWREPUBLIC, I investigate what ideas, as messages, can most effectively mobilise mass movements against autocrats, and autocrats in the making.

 

I investigate, in parallel, what ideas animate anti-autocratic movements.

 

The empirical site of this research is Africa, but I am focused on generating conclusions of significance to anti-autocratic actors around the world.

 

The project begins in January 2026, and runs for five years. I will be assembling a six-person team to deliver it. It will consist of a post-doc, two PhD students, an administrator, a teaching-oriented assistant professor, and of course, myself.

 

Anti-autocratic movements

 

I have spent more than a decade chronicling the struggles of anti-autocratic movements in Tanzania and beyond.

 

I have published at length on the success on Tanzania’s leading opposition party, Chadema, in building a mass movement.

 

I have written about the ideas that animate Chadema and the anti-autocratic movement in Zimbabwe.

​

Justifications of autocracy

​

I have written extensively about the authoritarian turn led by Presidents Magufuli in Tanzania, and how this turn has been, ultimately, consolidated by his successor, President Hassan.

 

I analyse how Magufuli presented his presidency as a restoration of a past struggle to transform the nation through a progamme of national development.

 

I analyse how he constructed it not as a populist struggle below against ‘the elite’ above, but instead a struggle from an all-powerful leadership above against conspiring bureaucrats and profiteers below.

 

I tease out how, in so doing, he and other autocrats elsewhere, are reviving ideas of guardianship.

 

Mass rallies and political communication

​

I also focus on the extraordinary importance of mass rallies in political communication. The rally is often relegated to the past, but I argue that in much of the world, it plays a crucial role in face-to-face and mediated political communication alike.

 

I analyse what meanings are made at and mediated through rallies by parties, speakers, audiences and media alike.

 

In my publications analyse the changing ways in which rallies are produced, how they are used in opposition ground organising, how they inflect the meanings made at and through them, and how notions of representation are performed at rallies.

​

Get in touch

​

I am confident that my ongoing research will generate findings of immediate and real-world significance to those confronting how to fight autocrats, around the world. I am determined to bring this research to these practitioners. If you would like to be a part of that in some way, then please get in touch by emailing me at d.paget@sussex.ac.uk.