Benedetta Rossi

Revisiting Foucauldian Approaches: Power Dynamics in Development Projects

This article sets out to rethink the usefulness of some aspects of the work of Michel Foucault to the study of development. Drawing on the detailed ethnography of a development consultancy, it focuses on how change was induced in an important and long-standing rural development project in West Africa. Foucauldian approaches provide a valuable conceptual framework for unravelling the regimes of rationality underpinning development institutions and practices. However, they fail to address satisfactorily the relation between discourse and agency within hierarchically stratified contexts. This article attempts to integrate the notion of discourse in an analytical framework specifically aimed at studying dynamics of power and hierarchy in development.

Order and Disjuncture: Theoretical Shifts in the Anthropology of Aid and Development

Anthropologists and other social scientists met at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London September 26–28, 2003, to explore some of the themes which have emerged since the mid-1990s in the study of aid and development. The occasion was marked by a heuristic approach and did not reflect attempts to consolidate any existing paradigm, but there were some shared points of departure. There was a general effort to overcome a number of dated controversies which pose obstacles to the advance of theory and research. The distinction between pure and applied anthropology was replaced by an enquiry into the relations between policy and knowledge production, accompanied by a critical assessment of the role of the researcher. Both ideological populism and radical deconstructive critique were seen as biases that hindered the analysis of the interactions between different categories of actors in development (see Oliver de Sardan 1995, Robertson 1984). Participants thought that while the anthropology of development could make specific contributions to anthropological theory, it shared its methodology and research object with mainstream anthropology. “Development” is studied as an institution which influences, directly or indirectly, the majority of the world’s population. It is interpreted differently by different groups and generates a multitude of culturally rooted practices. As do kinship, ritual, and religion, it plays a major role in the everyday life of people, especially in non-Western societies, which have been and continue to be the primary focus of anthropological research. Development contexts are examined through empirical research methods, fieldwork, and participant observation. Because “aid” is, more evidently than kinship and religion, the target of governmental regulation

Migration and Emancipation in West Africa's Labour History: The Missing Links

Strategies of emancipation included projects of migration conceived and unfolded by migrants of slave descent. This article suggests that looking at how these migrants chose to move when they could control their mobility, and at the obstacles they faced, reveals aspects of the experience of enslavement and emancipation that have not yet been fully explored in the relevant historiography. While historians of African slavery have described the large-scale movements of ex-slaves that followed legal status abolition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, only few studies provide detailed analyses of these trajectories from the perspective of the enslaved. Outside the field of slavery studies, both West African labour history and migration studies have been emphasising ethnicity over status, thereby underestimating how slave descent shaped the practices and aspirations of a large proportion of labour migrants. The autobiographic testimonies of migrants of slave descent provide insights into their strategies and expose differences across gender, age and location. Through an analysis of these sources, this article highlights the missing links in our reconstructions of the history of West African workers.

Freedom under Scrutiny

The objective of this special issue is to decenter discussions around freedomby focusing on “freedom from below, i.e. from the perspective of those who have lost their freedom and struggled... to regain it.”1 It brings together seven contributions that portray the struggles of enslaved and unfree persons in different places and moments in time. Together, these articles show that the strugglers do not share the same perspectives, aspirations, and strategies. Responses to oppression are fragmented and diverse. They range from accepting unfreedom while negotiating for better treatment; to trying to move away from sites of unfreedom and seeking opportunities elsewhere; to openly voicing resistance. Perhaps paradoxically, what brings these articles together is the spread of an abolitionist discourse that made available a particular way of imagining and pursuing freedom. Abolitionist freedom—the freedom that Alice Bellagamba sets out to deconstruct—runs across all of the contributions and exposes the singularity of myriads of individual projects of freedom “from below.” That the aspirations of dominated and unfree persons do not coalesce into a unified, visible, andpublic political agenda is a corollary of their powerlessness. Their visions of freedom, whatever they may be, do not shape policy. John Christman is correct when he points out that “standard notions of freedom in the liberal democratic tradition have been defined to describe the condition of those who enjoy it, and have not paid sufficient attention to the aspirations of those to whom it is denied.”2 This, however, is not by chance. If a positive

What 'Development' Does to Work

This article introduces an Africa-focused special issue showing that the rise of development in its modern form coincided with the demise of the political legitimacy of forced labor. It argues that by mobilizing the idea of development, both colonial and independent African governments were able to continue recruiting unpaid (or underpaid) labor—relabeled as “voluntary participation,” “self-help,” or “human investment” —after the passing of the ILO’s Forced Labor Convention. This introduction consists of two parts: the first section summarizes the main findings of the contributions to the special issue. The second part advances preliminary considerations on the implications of these findings for our assessment of international development “aid.” The conclusion advocates that research on planned development focus not on developers-beneficiaries, but rather on employers-employees. Doing so opens up a renewed research agenda on the consequences of “aid” both for development workers (those formally employed by one of the many development institutions) and for so-called beneficiaries (those whose participation in development is represented as conducive to their own good).

From unfree work to working for free:: labor, aid, and gender in the Nigerien Sahel, 1930-2000

This article focuses on the consequences of twentieth-century developmentalism for labor practices in the Nigerien Sahel under French rule and in the postindependence period. It examines labor regime transformations at the desert’s edge; the ways in which state-led developmentalism influenced labor relations; and gender disparities in the history of emancipation from slavery. Following the abolition of forced labor in 1946, the rhetoric of human investment was used to promote the “voluntary” participation of workers in colonial development initiatives. This continued under Niger’s independent governments. Seyni Kountché’s dictatorship relabeled Niger “Development Society” and mobilized Nigeriens’ “voluntary” work in development projects. Concurrently, drought in the Sahel attracted unprecedented levels of international funding. In the Ader region this led to the establishment of a major antidesertification project that paid local labor on a food-for-work basis. Since most men migrated seasonally to West African cities, the majority of workers in the project’s worksites were women who welcomed “project work” to avoid destitution. In the name of development, it continued to be possible to mobilize workers without remuneration beyond the cost of

Dependence, unfreedom and slavery in Africa: Towards an integrated analysis

The three books reviewed in this article seek to provide interpretations of dependence, unfreedom and slavery in African societies. But they reach different conclusions; bring different methodological frameworks to bear on the circumstances they examine; and – when they are concerned with policy questions – propose different remedies. A comparison of these books is useful not only for understanding African dependence and unfreedom, but also for rethinking critically the approaches of some of the main contemporary strands of research on these phenomena.

John Parker and Richard Rathbone, African History: a very short introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press (pb £6.99 –978 0 19280 248 4). 2007, 144 pp.

an interesting and useful examination of the lives of these men, but one would have liked the analysis to be expanded by a closer look at the data about class, caste and gender issues within the tariqa and a more comprehensive application of Benedict Anderson’s concepts in Imagined Communities. In his conclusion Professor Glover returns to the themes of the strengths of Murid modernizing ideology and the construction of the Murid identity which assisted its members in building a viable community in the twentieth century, a community that has transcended ethnic and national boundaries. The expansion of Muridiyya as a global movement validates his use of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities as an analytical tool and his emphasis on the adaptive and innovative ideas of Amadu Bamba and Maam Cerno, for, as the author points out, ‘There is a discernible process of Murid historical identification that incorporates and situates historical changes and events into their sense of modernity . . . . For the Murids, the eternal was not a static notion from a reactionary fundamentalist point of view; rather it was the Sufi mystical path that had a link to the past, local and global relevance for the present, and a way to the future’ (p. 192). For those who are interested in contemporary global Islam this study by John Glover and the other fine, recent examination of Muridiyya by Cheikh Anta Babou provide stimulating data and analysis.