Youth and the Framing of the 2014 Popular Uprising in Burkina Faso

In mobilizing protesters for anti-government protests, the challenge of framing the socio-political reality arises acutely. In the case of Burkina Faso in 2014, protesters were moreover faced with a particularly long-standing regime—Blaise Compaoré had ruled the country from 1987 to 2014. Such a situation highlights the struggle for meaning via a contentious praxis of politics through the dissemination of frames (Benford and Snow, 2000; Contamin, 2010; Snow, 2011). In Burkina Faso, these frames were based on the distinctive moral logic between “them” and “us” to establish protest as a legitimate means for achieving social and political justice. Driven by civil society actors such as the Balai Citoyen collective, and disseminated especially via Facebook, this created an opposition against the state apparatus that had hitherto failed to materialize, let alone succeed in toppling the government.

The current paper highlights the biographies of certain members of the Balai Citoyen and emphasizes the latter’s significance as a youth movement. It reflects an Internet users-focused narrative analysis of the protest on the collective’s leaders experience of the protest combined with their biographies by Jaffré (2019).

The Balai Citoyen's activism intervenes in an academic context marked by a scientific debate on the globalization of the concept of youth (Philipps, 2018). Our present study is part of an examination of political protest praxis based on the framing of the concept “youth.” The paper argues that the aspect of age and generation was important to mobilize a population that had largely grown up under the rule of the Compaoré regime. It is based on ethnographic, archival and documentary data and utilizes the theoretical reference to Mannheim's “Problem of Generations” defined on the basis of the sharing of a common horizon within a generational whole under the action of a generational unit (Mannheim et al., 2011).