The decision by Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger to leave Ecowas reflects the bloc’s failure to address security and humanitarian issues in the subregion. It is also a result of people losing faith in Ecowas’ leadership after years of complacency and inconsistency in championing its democratic principles. Pragmatic dialogue with the member states currently run by military regimes will be crucial if regional collaboration is to be revived. And defending democratic values will be crucial if civilian rule and popular trust are to be restored.
The analysis suggests an adaptation of the life history interview as a method in qualitative migration studies. By joining four analytical concepts into an overall methodological framework, the mobile life story is intended to guide the exploration of the subjective experiences of migrants at various stages of a migrant trajectory. The notion of ‘mobility’ evokes a holistic orientation in the study of migrant biographies; the unpredictability that characterises the social practice of migrants is captured through the concept of ‘hopefulness’; the concept of ‘vital conjunctures’ is argued to provide a temporal delimitation and a focus for the organising of a life history interview; and the spatial dimension of the methodology is delimited through the concept of ‘emplacement’. As opposed to a migration history, the mobile life story explores the significant transformations that have characterised the migrant’s past and relates these defining moments to the broader migration history.
Bridging European and African perspectives on migration governance will result in more sustainable migration policies. Under Sweden's EU presidency, Nordic decision makers have an opportunity to lead the way. They should adopt a holistic and long-term approach, informed by a research-based understanding of the dynamics of African migration that takes the aspirations of African migrants and the perspectives of policymakers more seriously.
African youth became a central research theme in anthropology and related disciplines in the early 2000s, drawing renewed attention to the lives and aspirations of a segment of the continent's population that, since the independence era, has become increasingly demographically dominant but socially and politically marginalised. Reflecting on an extended case study of male ex-combatants in urban Burkina Faso, this paper offers a critical reading of the anthropological scholarship on African youth, emphasising, first, that much of this literature is most usefully read as studies of diverse (West) African masculinities and, second, that the literature has underplayed the extent to which achievements of social progression tend to be acutely reversible in contexts of precarity or radical social change, throwing the unfortunate, as it were, back in youth.
The significant number of involuntary returns of labor migrants to Burkina Faso is a relatively neglected aspect of the armed confl ict in Côte d’Ivoire. Between 500,000 and 1 million Burkinabe migrants were forced to leave Côte d’Ivoire between 2000 and 2007, placing tremendous pressure on local communities in Burkina Faso to receive and integrate these mass arrivals, and causing those returning labor migrants an acute sense of displacement. Th is article analyzes the experiences of displacement and resettlement in the context of the Ivorian crisis and explores the dialectics of displacement and emplacement in the lives of involuntary labor migrant returnees; their young adult children; and Burkinabe recruits returning aft er their service in the Forces Nouvelles rebel forces in Côte d’Ivoire.
This chapter describes domestic politics, foreign policy and socioeconomic developments in Côte d’Ivoire during 2021. Following the turbulent electoral year of 2020, which had also posed the challenges of mitigating the effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the year 2021 is characterised as marked by political appeasement and socio-economic recovery. Politically, the most significant event was the legislative and Parliamentary election, which turned out to be much less fraught than the 2020 presidential vote. Nevertheless, an unforeseen government reshuffling and the emergence of a new alliance within the opposition suggested the new fault lines in Ivorian politics moving forward.
In the period 1999-2007, more than half a million Burkinabe returned to Burkina Faso due to the persecution of immigrant labourers in neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire. Ultranationalist debates about the criteria for Ivorian citizenship had intensified during the 1990s and led to the scapegoating of immigrants in a political rhetoric centred on notions of autochthony and xenophobia. Having been actively encouraged to immigrate by the Ivorian state for generations, Burkinabe migrant labourers were now forced to leave their homes and livelihoods behind and return to a country they had left in their youth or, as second-generation immigrants in Côte d’Ivoire, had never seen.
Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire, the thesis explores the narratives and everyday practices of returning labour migrants in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second-largest city, in order to understand the subjective experiences of displacement that the forced return to Burkina Faso engendered. The analysis questions the appropriateness of the very notion of “return” in this context and suggests that people’s senses of home are multiplex and tend to rely more on the ability to pursue active processes of emplacement in everyday life than on abstract notions of belonging, e.g. relating to citizenship or ethnicity.
The study analyses intergenerational interactions within and across migrant families in the city and on transformations of intra-familial relations in the context of forced displace-ment. A particular emphasis is placed on the experiences of young adults who were born and raised in Côte d’Ivoire and arrived in Burkina Faso for the first time during the Ivorian crisis. These young men and women were received with scepticism in Burkina Faso because of their perceived “Ivorian” upbringing, language, and behaviour and were forced to face new forms of stigmatisation and exclusion. At the same time, young migrants were able to exploit their labelling as outsiders and turn their difference into an advantage in the competition for scarce employment opportunities and social connections.
Create legal entry points into the EU and start recruiting labour through EU embassies in Africa. But don’t forget to take into account the individual aspirations and capabilities of the migrants. Here are some recommendations for policy makers seeking a solution to the Mediterranean crisis.
The overall message of this policy note is that negative public opinion in Europe is a major obstacle to holistic and sustainable policies relating to African migration. It argues for a shift in wording and perspective away from politicised opinions about immigration, or misplaced ideas of humanitarian responsibilities, towards a more constructive and pragmatic focus on labour migration management.
In the past decade Diaspo youths – second generation immigrants in Côte d’Ivoire who were forced to migrate to their parents’ country of origin, Burkina Faso, during the Ivorian civil war– have become a visible presence in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second largest city. By consciously displaying their Ivorian origins, they have provoked both the admiration and resentment of local youths, whose ambivalence towards the outspoken and colourful newcomers stems from Côte d’Ivoire’s central role as a destination for Burkinabé labour migrants since the colonial period. Regardless of this animosity, Diaspo youth culture has made its mark on the city.
This paper explores the response of Diaspo youths to their social stigmatisation and argues that their claims to recognition and access may be understood as a process of social branding. It may be seen as a self-aware performance of otherness, intended to evoke a collective identity that is mediated through a specific set of aesthetics to a well-defined audience.
A comprehensive zoning plan has been under way for more than a decade for an urban informal settlement in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. In this article I explore the narratives and strategies of its residents in response to the impending restructuring, suggesting that the continual postponements of the zoning plan's implementation may be understood as constituting an elusive form of urban governance that relegates strategies of both resistance and accommodation to formal governance to the sphere of micro-politics at the level of the neighbourhood. Urban governance is thus approached here neither as a set of formal policies nor through the day-to-day workings of the state bureaucracy, but as a much less tangible form of urban governance that is best studied through its perceivable effects instead of its stated intentions or institutionalized techniques. In the relative absence of the state in the everyday lives of urban residents, the main effects of the workings of the state bureaucracy in this context seem to be to discourage citizen involvement and to slow official procedures to a halt. I argue that the force with which impending evictions and yet-to-be-implemented urban zoning shape residents’ outlook and opportunities for negotiation and mobilization constitutes a form of governance through inaction.
This paper applies an impressionistic and reflexive genre of ethnography to understand the ethnographer’s meeting with the humanitarian aid workers in post-tsunami Sri Lanka. It offers an analysis of the political atmosphere in the country prior to the tsunami as a central framework for understanding current tensions and debates over the distribution of tsunami aid resources, and traces the emergence of what has been termed Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism. Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork from April to July 2005 among aid workers at the central level in Colombo and a careful attention to the rhetorics and arguments that characterized the writings in the Sri Lankan press during this period, the paper argues that while public debates over tsunami aid distribution has been entwined with political rivalries between the Sri Lankan government, and Sinhala and Tamil nationalist groups, the everyday reality of international humanitarians evolved around the forming of a common development language to categorise the demands of the aid intervention and on the performances of individual organisations, personified by a limited number of individuals in the professional fora of the humanitarians in Colombo.
During the past decade, Euro-African relations have once more revolved around borders, now in relation to irregular African migration towards Europe and the ensuing efforts by European powers to impose increasingly invasive policing of African state borders. African leaders and activists, in response, have reemphasised the centrality of free movement and exchange as core values of African unity and regionalisation. In light of this renewed struggle over the role and significance of African borders, this chapter offers a reflection on the notion of an Africa without borders as an alternative perspective on some of these current debates with particular attention to policies and practices relating to the free movement of persons. We take the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) as a main point of reference, given its historical commitment to the principle and implementation of free movement within the subregion. Our closing reflection suggests that, more than any political or epistemological differences, the discrepancies between principle and practice in the management of African borders should be a key field of investigation and analysis.
Contemporary forms of precarity, migration, connectivity, and sociality have transformed what it means to be a man in many African communities. Responding with agency and creativity to various incentives and constraints, Africans have adapted practices pertaining to labour, marriage, and sexuality to the exigencies of modern life amid the impacts of European colonialism, rapid urban growth, economic hardship, and political conflict. Drawing upon ethnographic and historical research to study settings in East, West, and Southern Africa, the articles in this special issue review the social changes that have taken place regarding men's roles and assess prospects for the emergence of counter-hegemonic masculinities.
Wars unsettle our commonsense understandings of movement and mobility. Simultaneously entropic and inertial, they conjure up images of rampant disorder and chaos as well as strained and crippled formations locked in negative tension. On the one hand, detrimental movement; on the other, deadly stalemate. Both mobility and immobility are, as such, associated with the iconography of warfare and conflicts. They may be presented as out of time through pictures of empty streets, ruins, trenches, and dead bodies frozen in contorted positions, yet, conversely, some of the most archetypical images of war connote speed, flows, and movement, seen in images of troop advances or retreats, rows of traveling refugees, and hauls of humanitarian aid shipped or flown into airports and harbors from afar. In temporal terms, conflict and violence are oft en represented in the lethargy of decay or the entropy of aggression.
In the upcoming elections in Burkina Faso, there’s a need for a clear democratic break with the three decades of de facto one-party rule. At the same time, a moderate approach is needed in dealing with the controversial legacy of the former regime, to avoid further polarisation in an already fraught political situation. These are the recommendations of Jesper Bjarnesen and Cristiano Lanzano, senior researchers at the Nordic Africa Institute, in a policy note on Burkina Faso’s one-week coup and its implications for free and fair elections.
The benefits of winning elections, and the disadvantages of losing them, must be reduced to avoid the violence that a winner-takes-all situation can trigger. Election observers should pay more attention to subtle forms of violence, intra-party tensions and incumbents playing the security card to justify increased use of force. This policy note considers how to curb the increase of violence in African elections.
African migrants have become increasingly demonised in public debate and political rhetoric. There is much speculation about the incentives and trajectories of Africans on the move, and often these speculations are implicitly or overtly geared towards discouraging and policing their movements. What is rarely understood or scrutinised however, are the intricate ways in which African migrants are marginalised and excluded from public discourse; not only in Europe but in migrant-receiving contexts across the globe.
Invisibility in African Displacements offers a series of case studies that explore these dynamics. What tends to be either ignored or demonised in public debates on African migration are the deliberate strategies of avoidance or assimilation that migrants make use of to gain access to the destinations or opportunities they seek, or to remain below the radar of restrictive governance regimes.
This books offers fine-grained analysis of the ways in which African migrants negotiate structural and strategic invisibilities, adding innovative approaches to our understanding of both migrant vulnerabilities and resilience.
African cities have long been perceived as emblematic of the vibrancy and contradictions that characterize public spheres in an African context – from breathtaking monuments of wealth and oppression to overwhelming destitution and despair; from vibrant market places and artistic expression to dilapidated infrastructures and rampant criminality. Through depictions of the hectic pace of different forms of movement – from the inner-city traffic that seems to be buzzing even in the midst of a complete standstill to public protests and food riots – African cities become lenses through which social and political life is assessed and synthesized; a canvas on which national politics and global inequalities are laid bare, for all to see. Indeed, the visual has long been the preferred prism for documenting and evoking the dynamism and decay of urban Africa. Many of these dualities hold some truths but have also contained the enduring simplifications of prejudice and exoticization. The ‘urban jungle’ is easily seen as the continent’s true Heart of Darkness; a pre-conceptualized dystopia (Robinson 2010); a micro-cosmos of the most frightening and fascinating facets of primitive humanity. This special issue challenges such simplifications by emphasizing everyday sociality, and by giving priority to the narratives and practices of urban residents themselves.
The ruling RHDP's victory in legislative elections in March 2021 has tightened incumbent President Alassane Ouattara's grip on political power in Côte d'Ivoire. Though Ouattara has taken a conciliatory stance towards the opposition since his re-election, his control of political institutions, low voter turnout, electoral violence and the president’s international status heighten the risk of further democratic backsliding in Côte d'Ivoire.
The unexpected death this summer of the front-runner in the upcoming elections and incumbent President Ouattara’s contested move to run for a third term in office have increased the risk of electoral violence in the ethnically divided Côte d’Ivoire. The threat of a return to armed conflict, as we saw after the 2010 elections, should not be excluded.