scholarly journals Duty and Defiance: Women in Community-based Armed Groups in West Africa

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakana Thomas

This desk report explores how West African community-based armed groups (CBAGs) facilitate women’s engagement with politics, create avenues for female expressions of anger, commitment to community values and national identity, and enable women to push for change in their communities by opening spaces for female participation. Assessing the formal and informal contributions women make to armed community mobilization and hybrid security reveals opportunities for gender-specific engagement and cautions that unidimensional considerations of where and how women intersect with conflict and security have the potential to undermine violence reduction and post-conflict peacebuilding efforts.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rahmane Idrissa ◽  
Bethany McGann

The border area of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso is a site of endemic violence. The area is punctuated by anti-state attacks, the targeted killing of traditional chiefs, and attacks on markets and other socioeconomic convening locales that otherwise serve as central mechanisms for the preservation of normalized intercommunal interactions. In addition, foreign military interventions and asymmetric insurgent warfare pit multiple state and non-state actors equipped with heavy weaponry against one another, adding another level of insecurity and threat to local communities. Community-based armed groups (CBAGs) of Fulani and Tuareg ethnicity have aligned themselves with outside actors carrying out operations in the region out of choice, coercion, or in some cases both. Building on other research reports in RESOLVE’s Community-Based Armed Groups Series, this report explores local perceptions regarding the nature and impact of the violence in southwestern Niger. The report provides a summary of understanding of ongoing conflict dynamics from the most impacted communities and an insight on the knowledge and attitudes around actors participating in the violence. It hopes to inform efforts to bring an end to the violence and increase understanding of participating actors.


Author(s):  
Ben Cislaghi

How can we best empower people living in the most economically disadvantaged areas of the world to improve their lives in ways that matter to them? This book investigates work of the NGO Tostan as a working model of human development. The study is grounded in the ethnographic study of the actual change that happened in one West African village. The result is a powerful mix of theory and practice that questions existing approaches to development and that speaks to both development scholars and practitioners. Divided into three parts, the book firstly assesses why top-down approaches to education and development are unhelpful and offers a theoretical understanding of what constitutes helpful development. Part two examines Tostan's community-based participatory approach as an example of a helpful development intervention, and offers qualitative evidence of its effectiveness. Part three builds a model of how community-led development works, why it is helpful, and what practitioners can do to help people at the grassroots level lead their own human development.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 35-63
Author(s):  
Robert Agres ◽  
Adrienne Dillard ◽  
Kamuela Joseph Nui Enos ◽  
Brent Kakesako ◽  
B. Puni Kekauoha ◽  
...  

This resource paper draws lessons from a twenty-year partnership between the Native Hawaiian community of Papakōlea, the Hawai‘i Alliance for Community-Based Economic Development, and the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Hawai‘i. Key players and co-authors describe five principles for sustained partnerships: (1) building partnerships based upon community values with potential for long-term commitments; (2) privileging indigenous ways of knowing; (3) creating a culture of learning together as a co-learning community; (4) fostering reciprocity and compassion in nurturing relationships; and (5) utilizing empowering methodologies and capacity-building strategies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-156
Author(s):  
Исаак Олумайова Они

This paper focuses on the social relationships of West African migrants living in Moscow. It investigates the factors to which West African migrants are exposed that promote or limit their social involvement in the new environment in which they find themselves. Although the African community in Russia is rather small, it is gradually increasing. It is, therefore, the aim of this research to examine the effect of the host environment on their perception of the society and how they try to blend in, or not, with social activities there. The article is based on qualitative methods, namely eleven interviews and participant observation of West African migrants. This research revolves around themes such as their communicative language skills, formation of networks among the host community, and sociability. Findings from the research show that West African migrants in Moscow have been attached to their ethnic landscapes, which has limited their sociability in their host society. Since sociability is not mono-directional, the state needs to do more to create both public awareness of the need to recognize and accept the presence of other races and also to create regulations that will guide the smooth integration of migrants in the country.


Author(s):  
Moustapha Ndour

This paper articulates the interactions between a traditional and modern world as embodied by the colonizer and the colonized, focusing on Ousmane Sembène’s God’s Bits of Woods (1960) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between (1965). It argues that both narratives can be read as realist novels that counter the hegemonic power of the European empire. While Sembène engages in critiquing imperialism and its social and cultural effects in the West African community –Senegal, Mali and Niger – Ngugi concentrates on the internal problems of the Gikuyu as they respond to the contact with the Western culture. The essay claims that the sociopolitical agendas in these novels should be understood within the context of French and British colonial regimes concerned with finding a legitimizing basis and control in an era when social and political forces of the colonies were energetically asserting themselves.


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