Join our PhD course on Right Activism under Political Uncertainty and Repression !

This PhD course is a research initiative from the joint collaboration between
the Centre on Law & Social Transformation, Department of Government, University of Bergen
the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, (Wits)
In collaboration with LEDRIZ, Zimbabwe and the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway.

(Picture: Wikimedia Public Domain Pictures)

Extract:
This PhD course examines rights-based activism, legal mobilization, and civic strategy under conditions of political uncertainty, shrinking civic space, and legal autocratization. It is designed in alignment with an activist workshop on Prospects for a Revived Civil Society Movement in Zimbabwe and will combine joint plenary sessions with separate, theory-focused doctoral seminars. Zimbabwe and South Africa provide the main empirical anchors for the course. Zimbabwe has experienced repeated cycles of civic expansion and contraction, from ants onlyi-colonial mobilization and labour-based organizing, through the constitutional reform movement of the late 1990s, to the contemporary period marked by executive consolidation, regulatory constraint, and securitized protest. Rather than approaching this context as one of linear decline, the course treats it as an analytically rich site for understanding shifting opportunity structures, legalized repression, strategic adaptation, and the possibilities of civic renewal. South Africa provides a contrasting case, with different opportunities and constraints allowing students to gain empirical insights. The two first days of the course is for the PhD students only and is organized as a combination of lectures, plenary discussions, and presentation and discussion of the students’ own projects, The third day and the morning of the fourth are joint sessions with the Zimbabwe activist workshop, while the remaining of the forth day is a workshop session where the PhD students will integrate the insights for the course with their own work.

The course is organized by the University of Bergen, Centre on Law & Social Transformation (LawTransform) and Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS), University of the Witwatersrand.

For more information, you can find the formal course description and the Course outline and reading list here !

When :16-19 November 2026

Where : University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Lecturers:

Brian Raftopoulos, University of Cape Town
Busisiwe Kamolane-Kgadima, Centre for Applied Legal Studies at Wits (CALS)
Carlos Lopes, University of Cape Town
Christopher Gevers, University of the Witwatersrand, CALS.
Godfrey Kanyenze, LEDRIZ
Justice Mavedzenge, ICJ