Development and Territorial Restructuring in an Era of Global Change

Development and Territorial Restructuring in an Era of Global Change
Author: Elisabeth Peyroux
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2023-07-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1394230001

Thinking about development and the environment simultaneously is one of the biggest scientific and societal challenges of the 21st century. Understanding the interactions between biophysical systems and human activities in an era of global change requires overcoming disciplinary divides and opening up new epistemological perspectives. This book explores these challenges using a territorial lens. Combining various scales of analyses (from global to local) and contexts (both urban and rural) in the North and in the South, it analyzes the relationships between environment and development through a variety of geographical objects (i.e. cities, rural and agricultural areas, coastlines, watershed), themes (i.e. ecological transitions, food, energy, transport, agriculture, mining activities) and methodologies (i.e. qualitative and quantitative approaches, modeling, in situ measurements). By engaging in a dialogue between social science and natural science disciplines, within different fields and with a variety of forms of knowledge production, this book provides essential information for understanding and reading the complexity of a globalized world. This book is targeted at academics and students in social sciences and at stakeholders in the field of territorial and environmental management.

Political Reform In Francophone Africa

Political Reform In Francophone Africa
Author: John F Clark
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2018-02-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429966733

Most African states experienced only a few fleeting years of democratic rule after independence before succumbing to authoritarianism. During the 1970s and 1980s, Africans and Westerners alike came to view dictatorship to be as much a part of the region’s social landscape as its grinding poverty. Yet the end of the Cold War and the sharpening of the economic crisis at the end of the 1980s have breathed new life into campaigns for democracy in Africa, shaking the foundations of many long-standing autocracies. In some cases, dramatic transitions took place, though the fate of the new democracies is far from certain. This volume explores the origins and evolution of political reform movements in several states of francophone Africa. The authors first make the case for the distinctiveness of francophone Africa, based on the influences of colonial history, language, and France’s contemporary role in Africa, then survey the challenges of reform, including the problems of transition from authoritarianism and consolidation of democratic regimes. Case studies of thirteen former French and Belgian colonies follow, organized by level of reform achieved: peaceful regime change, incremental reforms, repressed reform efforts, and reform in the midst of war.

Urban Displacement and Trade in a Senegalese Market

Urban Displacement and Trade in a Senegalese Market
Author: Gunvor Jónsson
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2024-03-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 180008630X

The Malian market at the railway terminus in Dakar was bulldozed in 2009 and, following privatisation of the railway, passenger services in Senegal soon ceased altogether. The consequences were felt especially by women traders who had travelled the line since its inauguration, making the terminus in Dakar the centre of a thriving network of traders and migrants. To examine the fates of those whose livelihoods were destroyed or disrupted, Gunvor Jónsson spent a year with the women evicted from the terminus. Urban Displacement and Trade in a Senegalese Market explores what happens at ‘the end’ of urban displacement, when it is all over, so to speak – when the dust has settled and people find themselves scattered in sometimes unfamiliar surroundings, trying to pick up the pieces and create something meaningful. This book argues that rupture and ensuing displacement do not produce a clean slate where identities, networks and histories must be produced from scratch. Traders and their markets do not simply vanish into thin air when they are evicted. The book examines not only what is lost but what emerges when a dense node, such as the terminus, is dissolved and fragmented. The ethnography of the traders reveals that the aftermath of eviction in cities may lead to diasporic forms of consciousness and identity formations. Displacement, whether on a local or global scale, demands difficult adjustments and people’s capacities to adapt to new circumstances and environments vary. This book uncovers some of these different capacities and variations in traders’ reactions to displacement. Praise for Urban Displacement and Trade in a Senegalese Market 'Jónsson's book is a masterful study of the aftermath of displacement in a major African city. Through deep ethnographic engagement, the book shows how displacement is about more than leaving a place; it is also about how people rebuild livelihoods, and how the space left behind continues to haunt their imagination of a meaningful life.' Hélène Neveu Kringelbach, UCL 'This book is an inspiring tribute to the Malian women traders of Senegal. ‘Emptied out’ from their old market stalls by a vainglorious development scheme, they bravely regrouped to recover their livelihoods and protect their families. Gunvor Jónsson challenges the idea that displacement only involves refugees. Instead, she creatively marries studies of migration and urbanization, providing fresh insights to both fields.' Robin Cohen, University of Oxford

Convergences and Interferences

Convergences and Interferences
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2016-09-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004333207

How does one imagine plurality? How does one find new strategies for writing diversity and polyphony? How does one read the most challenging creative and critical works of the present time? This bi-lingual volume of twelve English and eight French papers proposes to breach linguistic critical frontiers by placing careful analysis of texts from different language traditions in a multi-lingual and multi-cultural dialogue. In this collection of theoretically and politically aware close readings of contemporary cultural production, the focus of analysis rests on the multiple and complex global convergences and interferences of cultural influences. The collection foregrounds the work of innovative writers who seek to express the ungraspable presence of cultural “newness” at the same time as situating themselves in the richness of detail of local lives. This volume, most particularly, finds a balance of critical approach between the everyday attempts at negotiation and survival, and the insight brought to the reader by postcolonial, syncretic and feminist theoretical analysis.

A Man among Other Men

A Man among Other Men
Author: Jordanna Matlon
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2022-05-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501762877

A Man among Other Men examines competing constructions of modern manhood in the West African metropolis of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Engaging the histories, representational repertoires, and performative identities of men in Abidjan and across the Black Atlantic, Jordanna Matlon shows how French colonial legacies and media tropes of Blackness act as powerful axes, rooting masculine identity and value within labor, consumerism, and commodification. Through a broad chronological and transatlantic scope that culminates in a deep ethnography of the livelihoods and lifestyles of men in Abidjan's informal economy, Matlon demonstrates how men's subjectivities are formed in dialectical tension by and through hegemonic ideologies of race and patriarchy. A Man among Other Men provides a theoretically innovative, historically grounded, and empirically rich account of Black masculinity that illuminates the sustained power of imaginaries even as capitalism affords a deficit of material opportunities. Revealed is a story of Black abjection set against the anticipation of male privilege, a story of the long crisis of Black masculinity in racial capitalism.

The Transnational Middle East

The Transnational Middle East
Author: Leïla Vignal
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2016-10-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1315535637

The Middle East has been undergoing new crises since the powerful socio-political uprisings known as the Arab Spring took place in several countries in 2011. Some countries are experiencing a long-term collapse of their political and social structures out of internal conflicts and external interventions. The Transnational Middle East posits that, in the Middle East, the development of regional dynamics, of processes and circulations of all kinds, can be documented. In this regard, the approaches it develops — ‘bottom-up’ regionalisation, ‘globalisation from below’ — allow for a better understanding of the ways in which the Middle East is part of global transformations. The book analyses how, through their practices, Middle East societies elaborate a regional space which is not institutionalised. Based on fieldwork in the Middle East, the book provides venues for further theoretical elaboration on globalisation and contemporary societies, as well as on processes of regionalisation. It draws on the emergence of genuine regional spaces of culture, art, economic activity, human circulation — which supplement and do not contradict other infra-national, national, or global social processes. As in other areas of the world, these transformations are to a large extent the mode of the Middle East’s insertion into globalisation. In this respect, they go against standard narratives of the supposed ‘exceptionalism’ of the region. This book will be a great contribution to comparative politics, Middle Eastern studies, globalisation and international relations.

Traites et esclavages en Afrique orientale et dans l'océan Indien

Traites et esclavages en Afrique orientale et dans l'océan Indien
Author: Henri Médard
Publisher: KARTHALA Editions
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2013
Genre: Abolitionists
ISBN: 2811109137

"Aucune région au monde n'a connu une histoire aussi longue de la traite et de l'esclavage que l'Afrique orientale et l'océan Indien. Très loin des modèles simplificateurs du complexe atlantique, les sociétés de l'océan Indien ont éprouvé des modalités de traites et des situations serviles très diverses, dans lesquelles tous les systèmes esclavagistes, européens, orientaux et africains se sont mêlés. Les Africains et les Malgaches sont majoritaires parmi les esclaves, mais ils côtoient des compagnons d'infortune d'origines géographiques extrêmement variées, en particulier des Asiatiques. Les esclaves sont redistribués et vendus aux quatre coins de l'océan Indien mais aussi vers l'Atlantique, alors que se développent en Afrique de façon croissante les logiques serviles qui connaissent leur apogée à Zanzibar au XIXe siècle. Cet ouvrage complète magistralement une historiographie qui demeure largement dominée par les études sur l'Atlantique. Par le biais d'une approche globale, océanique comme continentale, il renouvelle en profondeur les questions de la traite et de l'esclavage ainsi que de leurs mutations complexes du XVe au XXIe siècle dans l'espace de l'Afrique orientale et de l'océan Indien. Il offre ainsi au public francophone une approche novatrice et percutante à partir d'études de cas originales et fouillées, menées par les meilleurs spécialistes de ces questions."--P. [4] of cover.