Youth between state and rebel (dis) orders: contesting legitimacy from below in Sub-Sahara Africa

The Sahel has gained attention in international politics as one of the central theatres in the war on terrorism. International actors in this war seek alliances with states in the region, reinforcing the latter’s military strength and their legitimacy from outside. At the same time, increasingly-connected young populations question the legitimacy of their states, and contest that legitimacy from within and below. In the absence of states delivering any reasonable form of social contract, young people become torn between different governing orders and find themselves in a liminal space. In this article we present the cases of youth in Mali and Chad, who find themselves in a period of re-definition of their position in society and hence search for legitimate structures representation. In this search they may frame their belonging in terms of ethnicity, religion or political opposition – and increasingly also in adherence to global citizenship. New information flows and connectivity among young people in these regions, and between them and the diaspora, has given a new turn to their search for citizenship/belonging and rightful representation. However, whether their search will be successful in this geopolitical context is questionable.ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Connecting the data landscape of long-term ecological studies: The SPI-Birds data hub

The integration and synthesis of the data in different areas of science is drastically slowed and hindered by a lack of standards and networking programmes. Long-term studies of individually marked animals are not an exception. These studies are especially important as instrumental for understanding evolutionary and ecological processes in the wild. Furthermore, their number and global distribution provides a unique opportunity to assess the generality of patterns and to address broad-scale global issues (e.g. climate change). To solve data integration issues and enable a new scale of ecological and evolutionary research based on long-term studies of birds, we have created the SPI-Birds Network and Database (www.spibirds.org)\u2014a large-scale initiative that connects data from, and researchers working on, studies of wild populations of individually recognizable (usually ringed) birds. Within year and a half since the establishment, SPI-Birds has recruited over 120 members, and currently hosts data on almost 1.5 million individual birds collected in 80 populations over 2,000 cumulative years, and counting. SPI-Birds acts as a data hub and a catalogue of studied populations. It prevents data loss, secures easy data finding, use and integration and thus facilitates collaboration and synthesis. We provide community-derived data and meta-data standards and improve data integrity guided by the principles of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR), and aligned with the existing metadata languages (e.g. ecological meta-data language). The encouraging community involvement stems from SPI-Bird's decentralized approach: research groups retain full control over data use and their way of data management, while SPI-Birds creates tailored pipelines to convert each unique data format into a standard format. We outline the lessons learned, so that other communities (e.g. those working on other taxa) can adapt our successful model. Creating community-specific hubs (such as ours, COMADRE for animal demography, etc.) will aid much-needed large-scale ecological data integration

Conflict legacies: Understanding youth’s post-peace agreement practices in Yumbe, north-western Uganda

A dissertation about research in Yumbe District in north-western Uganda is likely to start with reference to the ruins that are found scattered across Yumbe’s landscape, and by narrating past episodes of violence. These physical legacies that stem from the time of Amin’s presidency in the 1970s (a time in which many men from the region fought alongside Amin, for which the population was later collectively punished) are powerful and speak to the imagination. However, they are not innocent images that circulate. They risk reinforcing the stereotypes that have so long dominated the image of the region and its people as violent, the roots of which go much farther back in time, to colonial and pre-colonial times. In this dissertation, I question the legacies of decades of conflict for the younger generation in Yumbe. I have looked at how young people (age 20 to 35) who themselves grew up in times of conflict—now engage with this particular past and with the peace that was signed in Yumbe in 2002. The ruins are an important reference point for the younger generation who grew up next to such ruins and now pose proudly in front of the dilapidated buildings when they take their own pictures. The results of this ethnographic research lay bare intricate dynamics and show, through a focus on young people’s practices, how legacies of conflict still operate in present-day Yumbe’s social, economic, and political fabric

Introduction. Understanding Experiences and Decisions in Situations of Enduring Hardship in Africa

The enduring experience of hardship, in the form of layers of various crises, can become deeply ingrained in a society, and people can come to act and react under these conditions as if they lead a normal life. This process is explored through the analytical concept of duress, which contains three elements: enduring and accumulating layers of hardship over time, the normalization of this hardship, and a form of deeply constrained agency. We argue that decisions made in duress have a significant impact on the social and political structures of society. This concept of duress is used as a lens to understand the lives of individual people and societies in Central and West Africa that have a long history of ecological, political, and social conflicts and crises.NWOW 0170600001Colonial and Global Histor

''Ceux qui combattent beaucoup sans peur, qui tuent sans pitié": effets du recrutement d'enfants de moins de 15 ans par les Anti-Balaka (2013-2014)

ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Slaves, virgin concubines, eunuchs, gun-boys, community defenders, child soldiers: the historical enlistment and use of children by armed groups in the Central African Republic

ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde