Lamine Doumbia is a postdoctoral researcher (individual fellow) at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa – University of Ghana, Legon. His current research project is about urban land governance and bureaucratisation in Bamako, Ouagadougou and Dakar, Senegal – Mimicry and Hybridisation of logics. As an alumni of the University of Bayreuth (Social anthropology and African Studies), Lamine has been a postdoctoral fellow at the German Historical Institute Paris (DHIP) within the framework of the transnational research group “Bureaucratisation of African Societies”, based in Dakar at the Centre de Recherches sur les Politiques Sociales (CREPOS) – Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar.
MIASA Project: Urban land tenure and the pluralism of logics in Bamako, Ouagadougou and Dakar (Individual Fellowship)
The project studies the dynamics of legal pluralism such as tensions, transformations and hybridizations of logics in terms of regulating access and use of urban land. Within a legal anthropological and social movement framework this project describes and analyzes how and to what extend di!erent actors interact in the above explained dynamics. Access and use of urban land is a multidimensional source of social, political, juridical and economical tension as several actors are interested and a!ected by it. Each actor group has his perceptions and logics of which form to use to regulate the use of the stake. A big conflict potential sustains within the West African urban societies. This project asserts that land tenure the basis of people’s relations to the ground precisely an excellent legal anthropological research field. Di!erent grassroots people who seem to be weak and vulnerable vis-à-vis state civil servants, governors, mayors, etc. participate as activist associations to the regulation of land tenure with their perspectives. This happens in the everyday life in terms of contestations, confrontations, discussions, protests on the street, in the media, in the parliament, in municipalities or during the associations ‘weekly assemblies in Bamako, in Ouagadougou and in Dakar. These cities are still influenced by the French colonial and post-colonial politics, which is a highly interesting point for ethnographic analysis.
