Publications
Explore here the latest publication of the Unruly team.
At the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Ghent University Conflict Researh Group, Karen Büscher, Stéphanie Perazzone and Ayehu Bacha discuss the cities of Dire Dawa (Ethiopia) and Rubaya (DRC), to demonstrate the politicized urbanisation processes of secondary towns.
The essay adds to the debates on spatial translations of war in a context of fast global urbanisation.
Violent conflict and the centrality of African peripheral urbanities
In this paper, Kristof Titeca and Albert Malukisa Nkuku discuss the politics of football in Kinshasa, with a particular focus on the ways this manifested itself during the regime of Joseph Kabila.
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Authors questions how football can be used as a way to extend government control; while at the same time showcasing patterns of resistance and dissent towards the government.
The politics of football in Kinshasa: power, profit and protest
In this open access book, David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers and Michael Woolcock explore conversations between global development knowledges in social sciences and popular culture. While academic social science or policy-oriented research documents have been predominant modes of communication for engaging with international development, authors interest in theatre, music, photography, video games, radio, journalism, novels or blogs as alternative forms of knowledge about development.
New Mediums, Better Messages?
Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighbourhood in Managua, Nicaragua, Dennis Rodgers' article explores the conflicts that emerged between different generations of gang members following the gang’s transformation from a vigilante self-defence group to a predatory drug-dealing organisation, and what these might mean for the notion of gang governance.
¡A Nosotros, nos Tienen que Respetar!
The book invites the reader to follow bags of cement from production plant to construction site, along the 1000-kilometre urban corridor that links Abidjan to Accra, Lomé, Cotonou and Lagos, combining the perspectives of cement tycoons, entrepreneurs and political stakeholders, but also of ordinary men and women who plan, build and dream of the Concrete City. With this innovative exploration of urban life through concrete, Armelle Choplin delivers a fascinating journey into and reflection on the sustainability of our urban futures.
Concrete City: Material Flows and Urbanization in West Africa
The Covid-19 pandemic has become an actor in the electoral jousts that occupies the field and structures the long-distance struggles between the party in power and the political opposition. In Côte d'Ivoire, calls for donations, initiated at the summit of African states, have had the effect of cushioning the shocks due to the confinement and social distancing measures, in a context of socio-economic, political and security fragility. However, in the context of a pre-electoral campaign, do the donations linked to Covid-19 not call for a 'contre-don' with an electoral aim?
Covid-19 en Côte d’Ivoire : Les dons au cœur des batailles électorales
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Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research carried out over two-and-a-half decades in Managua, Nicaragua, this article explores how legal and illegal economic activities are socially legitimized, and more specifically, how certain illegal economic activities can end up being seen as legitimate, and certain legal ones perceived as illegitimate. It aims to showcase how the social legitimization of an economic activity has less to do with whether it is legal or illegal, but rather the future aspirations it embodies.
(Il)legal Aspirations: Of Legitimate Crime and Illegitimate Entrepreneurship in Nicaragua
In 2017, a wave of mutinies shook Côte d’Ivoire, calling into question the country’s ability to rebuild a divided army after the post-electoral crisis of 2010 and 2011. These events showed a confrontation of divergent interests and interactions between formal and informal actors in the Ivorian security system. In our view, this situation reveals a “bric-à-brac” policy of the security sector in Côte d’Ivoire. The article analyses the meanings and limitations of this policy and use the political sociology of public policies in African contexts to discuss our opinion.
Transition sécuritaire et production « bric-à-brac » de l’ordre post-guerre en Côte d’Ivoire
This article aims to analyze the political stakes of the Ivorian government’s preventive communication in the face of the threat of Ebola virus disease (EVD) during the period from the beginning of March 2014 to the end of November 2016, considering the prevailing socio-political and epidemic context. The analyses show that in Côte d’Ivoire, the authorities choose their objects of communication with global health intervention tools, while rethinking certain measures for political purposes.
Ebola et politiques de communication préventive en Côte d’Ivoire (2014-2016)
This article explores how and to what extent it is useful to think about drug dealing through the conceptual lens of intimacy. Such an approach both complements and challenges mainstream views on drug dealing, which see the phenomenon as based on ‘formal-rational’ organisation and practices. The authors explore the intimacies of drug dealing along three axes: the involvement of kin and family, ‘governing intimacy’ and as embedded in culturally intimate models and ideas.
The intimacies of drug dealing: narcotics, kinship and embeddedness in Nicaragua and South Africa
As relevant today as ever, hooks’ work holds the emancipatory tools and revolutionary potential to end the violence – epistemic, structural, and physical – that still permeates human relations 40 years on from the book’s first edition. This review essay of hooks’s Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center explores these dynamics and their pertinence for studies of political violence and civil war.
Ending Global Violence Through Radical Feminist Theory: The Teachings of bell hooks on Power and Domination
This article explores how decentralisation policy and specifically the establishment of communes rurales in DR Congo turned into a profoundly destabilising juncture, shaking existing governance arrangements. In particular, we examine how this has led to a reshuffle of power and a renegotiation of public authoritiy in three Congolese towns – Rubaya, Minembwe and Fungurume.
Contested ‘commune rurales’: Decentralisation and the (violent) struggle for public authority in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Prof. Perazzone proposes an analysis of Jean-François Bayart's last book "L’énergie de l’État" which situates the contradictions and ambiguities of the State.
Book Review:
Bayart (Jean-François), L’énergie de l’État. Pour une sociologie historique et comparée du politique, Paris, La Découverte, 2022, 782 p. Par Stéphanie Perazzone
Find the contribution on corruption affecting police services in the Democratic Republic of Congo by Professor Malukisa in this dossier.
Réforme de la police de la circulation routière à Kinshasa : Stop à la "dose unique" contre la corruption !
The authors provide an in-depth analysis of an environmental peacebuilding project in eastern DRC, highlighting how the technomoral imaginary fails to grasp the complexity of local conflicts. To move beyond these limitations, the authors call for greater self-reflexivity within the field of environmental peacebuilding by interrogating the politics of knowledge production.
Dangerous environments: environmental peacebuilding’s technomoral imaginary and its power-knowledge effects
This paper explores how roadblocks in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo contribute to the production and reproduction of public authority. The authors adopt a political sociology approach and employ dramaturgical analysis to show that roadblocks are not merely physical barriers but stages where public authority is enacted.
Roadblock dramaturgy: How everyday encounters reproduce public authority
The article explores how colonial archives can challenge post-colonial policies of erasing imperial violence and contribute to decolonial futures. Based on research conducted in the African Archives in Belgium and fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the article complicates problematic portrayals of the post-colonial state in the DRC and Congolese women, often depicted as systematically victimized or silenced.
For the archive yet to come
The article explores how colonial archives can challenge post-colonial policies of erasing imperial violence and contribute to decolonial futures. Based on research conducted in the African Archives in Belgium and fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the article complicates problematic portrayals of the post-colonial state in the DRC and Congolese women, often depicted as systematically victimized or silenced.
For the archive yet to come
In this paper Hélène Blaszkiewicz & Armelle Choplin examine the role of building materials, particularly concrete, in understanding urban metabolism.
Using the case of Greater Geneva, one of the fastest-growing urban regions in Europe, they analyse the myriad flows on which the generalization of concrete is based, linking urban, peri-urban and rural places, on the two sides of the border with France.
Holes and towers
Spatialising the places of concrete in Greater Geneva’s metabolism
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What are the legacies of defeat? In this article Didier Péclard examines the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), a rebel movement which fought a 27-year long civil war against the Angolan state until its military defeat in 2002, and traces its strategies of legitimisation during and after the war.
The Legacies of Defeat: UNITA and the Changing Fortunes of Legitimacy in (Post-)War Angola
Africa is experiencing a construction boom, both in terms of infrastructure and housing, which translates into a high demand for concrete. In this chapter, Armelle Choplin proposes to explore the modes of urban production in Africa through its material make-up: cement and concrete. It highlights key actors, urban forms emerging along corridors and within cities, and the interplay between elite-focused private projects and government-led social housing initiatives supported by international donors.
Building Cities in West Africa
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Despite high hopes for improved governance under Félix-Antoine Tshisekedi’s presidency, large-scale corruption scandals persisted in DRC, driven by public actors benefiting from the very systems they are tasked to reform. In this article, Albert Malukisa explores how the efforts to combat corruption, including the establishment of new institutions like the APLC and IGF, have failed to deliver significant change, with political tensions and entrenched networks impeding progress.
Alternance politique de la corruption en RDC
This paper is based on long-term fieldwork that attempts to investigate globalisation in the most “discrete” spaces of the global world. This other view of globalisation focuses, from a geographical perspective, on its less visible but essential forms in interstitial spaces. In order to understand these other “Silk Roads”, we propose to take and follow these thousand and one roads in order to analyse a globalisation from below and from the point of view of the different actors that underpin it.
By Armelle Choplin & Olivier Pliez.
Inconspicuous geography of retail trade: reaching the Global South consumers
This article examines the evolution of youth gangs in urban Nicaragua over 30 years, focusing on the barrio Luis Fanor Hernández in Managua. By using Bourdieusian theory, Dennis Rodgers conceptualizes gangs as dynamic “social fields” shaped by processes of individual and collective capital accumulation. By analyzing how these processes interact and sustain social order, the article sheds light on the logic of "gang rule(s)" and the interplay of change and stability in their transformation.
Gang Rule(s): Towards a Political Economy of Youth Gang Dynamics in Nicaragua
In 2023, drug-related violence in Marseille claimed at least 49 lives and injured over 100, leading to the coining of the term “narchomicides.” While media coverage focused on the seeming incapacity of public authorities, anthropologists Dennis Rodgers and Steffen Jensen took a broader, contextualized approach, drawing on seven months of fieldwork in the Félix-Pyat neighborhood.
Série Marseille: immersion dans la cité Félix-Pyat
In this fieldwork report, Anzan Kouakou and Guy-Serge Bilé documents the first two months of fieldwork in Abidjan (October–December 2023), detailing the research team’s experience, methodological approaches, and key findings.