Laurence Marfaing

Nomadism and mobility in the Sahara-Sahel: introduction

The articles compiled in this issue are based on contributions to the workshop “Nomades et migrants dans l’espace Sahara-Sahel: Mobilité, ressources et développement”, held in Bamako, January 2011. The aim of the workshop was to foster an interdisciplinary debate about systems of mobility and resource utilisation, and about their recent transformations in the Sahara-Sahel region. This region seems particularly well suited for considering these issues and the related questions of local development and regional integration. The present compilation of articles is informed by the question of what empirical studies of different types of “movement” in this particular geographical area can contribute to the on-going and lively discussion on “mobility” in various academic fields.

Quelles mobilités pour quelles ressources

In West Africa, where the available natural and financial resources are not always sufficient to support a family for a whole year, mobility has become a strategy for accessing the resources of the region as a whole. Daily life is based on a mixed sedentary and mobile logic which responds to opportunities at greater or lesser distances, for longer or shorter periods of time, and with greater or lesser regularity of movement, and which enables survival or a better livelihood to be secured. Mobility requires mobilisation – of social networks, individual capacities and sociabilities, elements we can also refer to as resources, only this time social resources. This article explores the notion of resources and its connotations to show how populations in the West African Sahelian space seek a balance of survival and livelihood through mobility.