Conflicts over land and mining in Senegal

Description

Visiting scholar Louisa Prause presented a talk about her doctoral research. Since the early 2000s, we have witnessed a global land rush in reaction to food, energy, climate and financial crises as well as demands for resources from rising economic powers. This land rush has transformed large areas of land for a variety of purposes, prominently amongst them is agro-industrial crop production and mining. In this talk, Louisa explored differences and similarities in the contentious dynamics that accompany these two types of land transformations. Louisa explained how affected communities react differently to land transformations depending on the purpose of the transformation, leading to differences in conflicts around agro-industrial projects and mining. Using two case studies from Senegal, conflicts around the Senhuile agro-industrial project and the Sabodala gold mine, Louisa identified three main mechanisms through which the respective resource influences contentious reactions by the affected communities.

Period	16 Mar 2017
Event type	Conference