Workshop:
Pastoral Livelihoods, Markets and Mobility: Emerging Orders in Sudan

03.-06.10.2009

Workshop organized by D9 and A4: Khartoum (Sudan)

Call for Papers

Pastoral societies are increasingly shaped by external forces and dynamics, in which local territorialities materialize as globally-contested arenas. Pastoral production systems are integrated into global markets and supply chains, connected with diasporic communities and related transmittances, embedded in transnational (Islamic) solidarities, and are characterized by new forms of consumerism. In the context of economic restructuring, resource entitlements are privatized, markets liberalized and profits are extracted. In Sudan such processes have fundamentally transformed pastoral livelihood systems, but they are not limited to recent neo-liberal restructuring. Rather, these processes reach back into the Ottoman Empire. The main agents are no longer imperial powers or the state, but rather international financial agencies, the development industry and UN organizations. Hence, from the Ottoman and British empires to the Asian economic cooperation, the foreign agents aimed at extracting resources from Sudan. Each of these agents applied a distinct rhetoric, claiming to bring civilization, development, progress or prosperity, while often contradicting these claims in their practices by aggravating insecurity, displacement, poverty and hunger. Subsequently, present Sudan is a product of interferences of external interventions in different phases and the perpetual societal reconfiguration, which manifests itself in the fragmented and contested territories that pastoral societies inhabit. In course of these processes, new economic exchanges (e.g. new forms of entrepreneurship), new patterns of mobility and participation, and contested livelihood strategies (e.g. autochthonous land claims), are unfolding, fostering new orders of domination and legitimation.

The proposed workshop aims at bringing together scholars with current engagements in Sudan studies to share their experiences, critical observations and analyses. Papers should concentrate on aspects of the emerging pastoral livelihoods, market institutions, and mobility patterns.

A list of potential contributors is attached below. Please confirm your participation until March 15, 2009. Contributors should submit an abstract of 300 words until May 30, 2009.

List of invited scholars