The paper reports on the collaborative and comparative research project "African Political Cultures". Research started from the assumption that political culture is a key to understand and to explain processes of creativity  in dealing with political orders. Political culture includes political actors, institutional arrangements, discourses, rituals, symbols, ‘basic narratives’ and ‘travelling models’. Power, legitimacy, and violence are at the core of political culture. Looking into these dimensions on a comparative basis, the project studies the political cultures of five different African countries, south as well as north of the Sahara. The countries differ along the lines of the power of the state, the presence of 'heterarchical figurations', the role and meaning of violence, magic, witchcraft, the local translation of globally ‘travelling models’, modes and institutions of conflict resolution, and the kind of leaders and power groups that shape political cultures. The project aims to make a valuable contribution to the analysis of contemporary politics in Africa and to contribute to the development of the concept and general theory of political culture from an anthropological and sociological perspective.