Issue 10, 2025

This special issue of Global Africa opens with a dual challenge: to conceptualize protective knowledge as situated forms of resistance, and to question our collective capacity to establish an ethics of protection. For protection is not merely a humanitarian reflex or an abstract moral imperative: it is a political act, a situated posture shaped by power dynamics, historical legacies, contemporary contacts, and differentiated vulnerabilities. Protective knowledge, as discussed here, are neither mere technical skills nor rigid traditions. They emerge from social bricolage, everyday tactics, and forms of communal intelligence which, within contexts of structural violence, institutional precarity, and democratic fragility, serve to safeguard life, dignity, and memory. They are often rendered invisible, marginalized, even criminalized forms of knowledge—precisely because they escape…