Resilience in West African Frontier communities

塞内加尔南部、马里西部和几内亚东部边境地区的小规模社区制定了长期战略，使他们能够适应政治结构和社会分层的周期性深刻变化，这是边境社会的典型特征。然而，从国家和国际发展的角度来看，这些社区被视为边缘化；他们的流动模式是公民参与民族国家的障碍，他们使用小语种的多语言是参与教育的障碍。该项目旨在更好地理解这些边疆社区为应对持续的生态、经济和政治压力而开发的复原力策略和当地知识。通过将流动性、多语言化和社会分层重新配置视为相互关联的复原力战略，该项目旨在改善该地区的发展举措。首要的研究问题是：前沿社会如何通过制定具体的恢复策略，特别是通过分享自己的想法和实践以及产生具体的知识，在微观层面上应对生态、经济和政治压力的情况？我们的项目团队首次汇集了非洲历史、社会人类学、社会语言学、法律和文学研究方面的独特专业知识，旨在通过收集当地知识，构建一种具有变革和催化作用的协同方法，这些知识可用于位于贫困、环境可持续性、冲突和脆弱性交叉点的发展活动。这项研究的变革方面依赖于在边境社区的利益相关者之间建立跨国界的知识网络，否则这些利益相关者几乎没有机会联系、分享和比较他们的经验和当地知识。本组织将与“Quand le village se rsameville ”组织合作，为这一跨国界知识网络提供便利，该组织与每个案例研究国家的所有利益攸关方举办了三次培训讲习班，并开发了一个移动和配套网站，上载历史和当代当地知识数据，供更广泛的当地和国际受众使用。

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.