Author: Rama Salla Dieng (University of Edinburgh) | Published: 17 March 2026 | Source: Review of African Political Economy (roape.net) — Long Read
The Event and Its Framing
On 12 March 2026, Senegal's National Assembly voted to raise the maximum prison sentence for same-sex relations to ten years and to criminalise the "promotion" or "apology" of homosexuality. The standard commentariat offered familiar explanations — religion, culture, African values. Dieng argues these explanations are not just insufficient; they are a deliberate distraction.
Her core argument is stated at the outset:
"This is a story about a patriarchal government drowning in debt, unable to keep its electoral promises and protect its students from police violence, and reaching for the oldest tool in the postcolonial playbook: govern and police the bodies of the most vulnerable when you cannot govern anything else."
This framing — governing bodies as a substitute for governing the economy or delivering justice — anchors the entire piece. The anti-gender backlash is not a culturally authentic expression of Senegalese values. It is a political manoeuvre by a government in crisis.
The Postcolonial Carceral Architecture
Dieng situates the March 2026 legislation within a longer genealogy of postcolonial carceral power in Senegal. The carceral state, in her framing, is not simply about prisons. It is about the ongoing project of identifying and regulating bodies — particularly bodies that are already constructed, through patriarchal logic, as legitimate objects of state discipline.
A key analytical move in the article is the distinction between fiscal crisis as trigger and patriarchy as pre-existing architecture:
"Fiscal crisis does not create moral governance from nothing. It exploits a patriarchal architecture that pre-exists it. Queer people do not become available for state discipline when the economy fails. They are already available because patriarchy has constructed them as legitimate objects of state regulation independent of any economic conjuncture. The current fiscal crisis only intensifies that logic."
This is crucial. The government's turn to anti-gender legislation is not simply opportunism — it activates a deep structure of patriarchal control that has always been available to postcolonial states as a governing tool. Anti-gender backlash is, in Dieng's reading, cheaper than structural reform: legislating morality costs less than restructuring an economy or holding police accountable.
Police Brutality on Campus and the False Promise of Change
The article connects the anti-gender legislation to a separate but linked crisis: ongoing police violence on Senegalese university campuses. The author documents the death of Abdoulaye Ba on campus and situates it within a quarter-century pattern of campus police violence.
The SAES (the Senegalese academics' union) has documented six student deaths on campuses since 2001, with the government consistently responding to campus unrest with security force deployment rather than structural reform. Students were not paid their scholarships and could not access the campus restaurant. IMF negotiations are ongoing. The government, in Dieng's analysis, needs its citizens to look somewhere else.
"A young man is dead on campus. IMF negotiations are ongoing. And the government needs its citizens to look somewhere else."
The pattern running from 2001 to 2026 — six student deaths, a university system in structural crisis, a government that consistently responds with security force deployment — is connected to the anti-gender backlash. Both are expressions of a government that cannot deliver on its promises and governs by regulating vulnerable bodies rather than transforming unjust structures.
The Foreign Hand: MassResistance, Trump's America First, and the Price of Senegalese Bodies
This section is the article's most geopolitically significant intervention. Dieng argues that Senegal's anti-gender backlash is not merely domestic politics — it is one of the most troubling geopolitical exchanges currently taking place on the African continent.
The author names the involvement of MassResistance — an American Christian nationalist organisation — in the strategic coordination of anti-gender legislation in Senegal, drawing a parallel to its documented role in Ghana. She argues that the Senegalese law was strategised in part with American Christian nationalists.
More concretely, the article connects the anti-gender legislation to a health cooperation agreement signed under Trump's "America First Health Strategy." Dieng argues:
"A health cooperation agreement signed in the context of Senegal's anti-gender backlash is not a neutral public health instrument. It is a political document that reflects and reinforces the same geopolitical alignment that emboldened the legislation in the first place."
The consequence is a public health architecture deliberately designed to exclude the most vulnerable — specifically queer Senegalese people and those living with HIV, who face both criminalisation and exclusion from bilateral health agreements. Dieng's claim is stark: "This is not policy failure. It is policy design and the bodies paying the price are already dying."
Two Sets of Bodies, One Governance Crisis
The article's conceptual and structural move is to read these two streams — student deaths from campus police violence and the criminalisation of queer bodies — as manifestations of the same governance failure. They are, Dieng writes, "not separate stories. They are the same story told from different angles, across different geographies of power and bodies."
The anti-gender backlash adds a new dimension to the pattern of campus violence without breaking it. Both involve a government that:
- Cannot reform structural problems (debt, university underfunding, scholarship disbursement failures)
- Responds to political pressure with security force deployment
- Disciplines and polices the most vulnerable rather than the most powerful
- Invites and accepts foreign political intervention (from American Christian nationalists and from the IMF) that reinforces, rather than challenges, these dynamics
Key Arguments
- Anti-gender backlash as governance displacement: When governments cannot deliver economically or protect citizens from state violence, they govern by disciplining marginalised bodies.
- Patriarchy as pre-existing infrastructure: Anti-gender legislation activates already-existing patriarchal structures of regulation. Fiscal crisis is the trigger; patriarchy provides the target.
- International dimensions of domestic backlash: American Christian nationalist organisations and Trump-era health diplomacy are materially implicated in Senegal's anti-gender turn.
- The carceral state as postcolonial continuity: Current events are situated within the long history of colonial governance — controlling mobility, surveilling bodies, disciplining populations — as a mode of rule that postcolonial states have inherited and adapted.
- Intersectional feminist political economy: Dieng insists on an approach that links fiscal crisis, debt, IMF conditionality, campus violence, patriarchy, queer criminalisation, and US foreign policy within a single analytical frame.
Conclusion
Dieng's conclusion is explicitly political and normative. She writes that Senegal's students deserve their scholarships, functional universities, and their lives. Queer Senegalese people deserve dignity, safety, and full citizenship. Those living with HIV deserve treatment, not criminalisation and exclusion from bilateral health agreements designed to erase them.
"Senegal deserves democratic governance and international cooperation serious enough to confront its actual crises: debt, patriarchy, and empire — rather than manufacturing new ones, with foreign assistance, on the bodies of those least able to fight back."
This article summary is prepared by the IOCSS Journal Monitor. The original long-read article is available at roape.net.