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Back to the 70s: How "Old" Ideas Within Peasant Studies Can Help Us Understand the Recent Jihadist Uprising in the Sahel.About the lecture
How can human geographers contribute to explaining armed resistance? This lecture will suggest that going back to theories within peasant studies from the 1970s combined with the contextual approach of political ecology will help such explanation.
Since 2012, so-called ‘jihadist’ groups have gradually taken control over large parts of rural Mali. In addition, this violent uprising against the state has gradually spread to other countries in the Sahel and West Africa. The main academic approach to explain this crisis has been dominated by international studies and political science. However, such an approach misses out on the micro-politics of land and peasant and pastoral motivations to join this rebellion.
While peasant rebellions in other the parts of the world have been explained through inequalities and injustices related to land, such an explanatory framework, that emerged within peasant studies in the 1970s, is rarely used in African studies or in relation to the current Sahelian crisis. Inspired by such ‘old’ neo-Marxist contributions to peasant studies, this lecture will argue that to understand the processes behind the recent uprising it is helpful to use the analytical lens of ‘moral economy’, which is focused on the values and ethics at stake among the peasantry who decide to join rebellions. More precisely, the lecture will combine this lens with a materialist political ecology approach returning to the field’s roots and origin at the interface with peasant studies with a focus on land dispossession.
Widespread and variegated processes of dispossession in central and northern Mali and beyond have created a moral economic anger against rent-seeking elites that provided the foundation of the jihadist uprising. To detonate this anger, two jihadist leaders, Iyad Ag Ghaly and Hamadoun Koufa, have played key roles in mobilizing popular support emerging from local grievances, while drawing on a social justice-based Islamic discourse.
This is decolonization in practice, far from any debates on ontology and epistemology. Curiously, this jihadist decolonial agenda competes and fights with military decolonization, represented by military governments in the Sahel that have an anti-western (and pro-Russian) approach. Both these agendas condemn elite capture related to land of previous democratic regimes supported by Western development aid and politics.
Biography
Tor A. Benjaminsen is Professor of Environment and Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). He has a Cand. Scient. in Resource Geography and Landscape Ecology (University of Oslo, 1988) and a PhD in Geography and Development Studies (Roskilde University, 1998). His research is framed within a broad political ecology perspective, and he is in particular interested in the material and discursive aspects of environmental change and land-use conflicts. The main themes he has worked on are ‘desertification’ in the West African Sahel; climate change and violent conflicts; the Jihadist insurgency in Mali; protected areas in Africa; agrarian change and pastoralism in Africa; formalisation of land rights; and Sámi reindeer pastoralism and state governance in northern Norway. He was for 6 years Associate Editor of the journal Political Geography and was also a Lead Author of the 6th Assessment Report of the IPCC. In 2016, he recieved a Toppforsk Grant from FRIPRO/Research Council of Norway for a five year project on Greenmentality: A Political Ecology of the Green Economy in the Global South. In 2022, he also received an ERC Advanced Grant for another five year project (Landresponse) to investigate the political ecology of conflict and migration in the West African Sahel. He also coordinates the Political Ecology Forum at NMBU.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Moltke Moes vei 31, 0851 Oslo, Norway, Moltke Moes vei 31, 0851 Oslo, Norge,Oslo, Norway
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