Panel 79: Transport System Development and Increasing Circulations in Western Africa: Which Perspectives for Whose Interests?
Panel organisers: Jerome Lombard (L’Institut de recherche pour le développement, IRD, France) and Olivier Ninot (National Center for Scientific Research, France)
Contact: jerome.lombard@ird.fr
| In western Africa, the development of the transport systems was fast, concomitant with an acceleration of the local, continental and international circulations. This development results from a differentiated evolution of the mobility, considered as an element of freedom, of imagination, of a way of living, and/or a solution of a lack development and a way of surviving. In this panel, we will be wondering about the relations between development, transport systems and the acceleration of circulations on one hand, and the contemporary economic, political, social and territorial evolutions on the other hand. Who have been the strengthened and emergent actors of the mobility (in which the international migrations are only a small part) since the adoption of the structural adjustment policies in the 1990s ? By which economic and political interests are guided the policies? Who actually circulates today, how and for which motives? Which territories are outlined and / or redraw by circulations? Here, transport and circulation will be seen as marks and significant revelations of the African constructions as well as the inscription of Africa in the big dynamics shaping the contemporary world. For this panel, we invite authors to present communications with varied dimensions, on themes / subjects such as the road projects, the international corridors of landlocked countries, the international operators of transport, the routes of trade and goods traffics, the pattern and the routes of people circulations. We will also focus on the concomitance of those different processes, in western African territory which becomes both more consolidated and more differentiated, where the differentiations are increasing and where ancient and new territorial structures are combining. |