Resilience in West African Frontier communities

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Small-scale communities in the border regions of Southern Senegal, Western Mali and Eastern Guinea have developed longstanding strategies allowing them to adapt to recurrent deep changes in political structure and social stratification that are typical of Frontier societies. Yet, from a national and international development perspective, these communities are seen as marginalised; their mobility patterns as an obstacle to civic participation in nation states and their multilingualism in small languages as a barrier to participation in education.This project aims to generate a better understanding of resilience strategies and local knowledge as developed in those frontier communities to respond to ongoing ecological, economic and political stresses. By looking at mobility, multilingualism and social stratification reconfigurations as interrelated resilience strategies, the project aims at improving development initiatives in the region. The overarching research question is: how have frontier societies responded to situations of ecological, economic and political stress on a micro level by developing specific resilience strategies, notably by sharing their own ideas and practices and producing specific knowledge?Our project team brings together a unique combination of expertise in African history, social anthropology, sociolinguistics, law and literary studies for the first time and aims at constructing a synergistic approach with transformative and catalyst effect by collecting local knowledge that can be harnessed for development activities located at the intersections between poverty, environmental sustainability and conflict and fragility. The transformative aspect of this research relies on building knowledge networks across borders between frontier communities' stakeholders who otherwise would have little chance to connect and to share and compare their experiences and local knowledge. This cross-border knowledge networks will be facilitated by the organization in partnership with the organisation "Quand le village se réveille" of three training workshops with all stakeholders in each case study country, and the development of a mobile and accompanying website where historical and contemporary local knowledge data will be uploaded and made accessible to a wider local and international audience.