Denis Retaillé

Sahara or Sahel? The Fuzzy Geography of Terrorism in West Africa

Since the mid-2000s, terrorism has pushed the peripheries of West Africa into the news and the public eye. While the political implications of this phenomenon have been extensively documented, most commentators have adopted a zonal approach to terrorism in which the Sahel and the Sahara are usually confused. This paper assumes that this confusion dramatically highlights the failure of academic and common geography to think beyond territories in West Africa, and to move away from a ‘sedentary’ vision of West African societies. The paper contributes to an understanding of the geographical locations of terrorism in West Africa by showing, firstly, what the main reasons behind the current confusion between the Sahel and Sahara are. Secondly, we show that this confusion arose from a territorial vision of space, which has important implications not only for local economic activities, but also for our own understanding of the spatiality of networks in West Africa.

De l'espace nomade à l'espace mobile en passant par l'espace du contrat: une expérience théorique

The paper retraces both a scientific itinerary and what might be described as a stratification and a history of the dominant social forms of structuring space: nomadism, sedentariness, mobility. It argues against a possible evolutionist interpretation of this scheme by privileging a synchronic observation of the various intersecting spatial forms in what might be called the truth of the place (which is the stage of intersection). The theoretical idea of a mobile space is thus schematized by opposing it to the paradigm of fixedness which dominates classical as well as modern spatial analysis. The rapprochement of nomadic space (being the source of reflection) and mobile space (being the result of reflection) is presented as a “methodological” space avoiding metaphorical vagueness.

New ways of conceptualizing space and mobility: Lessons from the Sahel to the globalized world

To date, geographers have conceptualised the increased mobility of contemporary societies in terms of conflicting or complementary relationships between spaces of places and spaces of flows. These approaches are, however, influenced by a ?sedentary? vision of geography, in which mobility is conceived of as movement between relatively fixed locations. Building on earlier work, this article offers a conceptual alternative to this view in which places are predominantly defined by the crossing of flows and are defined as mobile as well. Our aim is to show how the model of the mobile space, originally developed in Sahelian Africa, could be possibly applied to the globalized world. Our model is based on a paradigm in which mobility is considered as the primary driving force of the production of geographic space. This allows us to reconsider both the production of space through movement and the control of space through borders. The paper argues that the way Sahelian societies comprehend space shares similarities with new currents in the globalized world, most notably because mobility and uncertainty have become the foundation of contemporary social organization.