Africa's media: democracy and the politics of belonging

status: publishe

Marching the nation: an essay on the mobility of belonging among militant youngsters in Côte d’Ivoire

This programmatic paper seeks to develop a new perspective on the military-political identity and performance of militias particularly in urban environments. The militia under consideration is the Groupement Patriotique pour la Paix (GPP), one of the oldest and most prominent of the southern militias. The GPP came into being as a civil society initiative in the aftermath of the September 2002 insurgency in Côte d’Ivoire a country which since then has lingered in a no-peace-no-war situation. The new perspective, here called ‘ludus pro patria’, looks at how the militias’ activity, organisation, and discourse is deployed in the urban public sphere and to what effect. Within the scope of this paper, this perspective serves to deconstruct the alleged process of ‘milicianisation’ as the combined effect of discursive appropriation and concrete insinuation of a subaltern youth initiative by national elites and international actors. In conclusion, this paper argues that the proposed approach is essential for a proper understanding of two main dimensions of the militias’ raison d’être and modus operandi: mobility and belonging

Belgian memories, African objects: colonial re-collections at the Musée africain de Namur

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Amselle, Jean-Loup & Sibeud, Emmanuelle, eds. – Maurice Delafosse. Entre orientalisme et ethnographie : l'itinéraire d'un africaniste (1870-1926). Paris, Maisonneuve & Larose, 1998*

In a recently published biography of Mary Douglas, Richard Fardon quotes, then, Mary Tew situating her early interest in anthropology in her pre-Oxford years at the Colonial Office, saying : "They [anthropologists] were the experts, while we civil servants were on the menial side, and I used to ask them, `How do you get to be an adviser and not a servant ?'". In post-WWII Britain (and France) where anthropology and colonial rule were relatively separately institutionalised, this quest..

Amselle, Jean-Loup & Sibeud, Emmanuelle, eds. – Maurice Delafosse. Entre orientalisme et ethnographie : l'itinéraire d'un africaniste (1870-1926). Paris, Maisonneuve & Larose, 1998*

In a recently published biography of Mary Douglas, Richard Fardon quotes, then, Mary Tew situating her early interest in anthropology in her pre-Oxford years at the Colonial Office, saying : "They [anthropologists] were the experts, while we civil servants were on the menial side, and I used to ask them, `How do you get to be an adviser and not a servant ?'". In post-WWII Britain (and France) where anthropology and colonial rule were relatively separately institutionalised, this quest..

Broadening the Urban Planning Repertoire with an ‘Arrival Infrastructures’ Perspective

In this article we propose an arrival infrastructure’s perspective in order to move beyond imaginaries of neighbourhoods as a ‘port of first entry’ that are deeply ingrained in urban planning discussions on migrants’ arrival situations. A focus on the socio-material infrastructures that shape an arrival situation highlights how such situations are located within, but equally transcend, the territories of neighbourhoods and other localities. Unpacking the infrastructuring work of a diversity of actors involved in the arrival process helps to understand how they emerge through time and how migrants construct their future pathways with the futuring possibilities at hand. These constructions occur along three dimensions: (1) Directionality refers to the engagements with the multiple places migrants have developed over time, (2) temporality questions imaginaries of permanent belonging, and (3) subjectivity directs attention to the diverse current and future subjectivities migrants carve out for themselves in situations of arrival. This perspective requires urban planners to trace, grasp and acknowledge the diverse geographies and socio-material infrastructures that shape arrival and the diverse forms of non-expert agency in the use, appropriation and fabrication of the built environment in which the arrival takes place