Contenu du sommaire : Les Suds, aujourd'hui

As a link to Jugutha, king of Numidia and considered as a dangerous heathen in Roma and as a hero in Africa, the name of this project intended to recall that one of its goals was to adopt a point of view on urban issues from the Souths, and particularly from Africa. The originality of the general reflection comes therefore from the fact that it is linked to research fields that are usually tackled with a “development” point of view. The claim here is to give to these fields the ability to feed the theoritical debates. Particularly the concept of “spatial justice”, i.e. the spatial approach of social justice (in its wide meaning from fair supplying to “recognition”), has been at the core of the study of 30 researchers who were specialised in different fields, who were working on different themes and who were coming from different countries and generations. In a time rather tense for academic research in France, a funded programme as Jugurta was a sort of isolation bubble, out of time. This article intends to describe the creation of this bubble, its operating system and the various ways to make it last. It will broach the ways of researching (in a network and in an isolation bubble) and the results thus granted but also the methods and the temporalities of research and their consequences on what is usually called “results”.

We propose in this article to conduct a critical revision of the distinction between North and South: or, to put it another way, to compare the institutional and epistemological positions that provided a framework for our research. The project, Religious Transnationalization of the Souths: Between Ethnicizing and Universalizing (Transnacionalización religiosa de los Sures: entre la etnización y la universalización, Relitrans), which brought together 22 researchers from seven countries, aimed to test a methodology which included various innovative elements, such as the production of multi-situated ethnographies, in which students of “the Souths” could counduct their field work operations in the “North”, thus following a trajectory in the opposite direction to that taken by the colonization and Christianizing of African and American populations; to establish the dynamics of working together in an attempt to break with polarizations of the North and different types of South, and thematic and national specializations, preferring to emphasize transversal processes rather than specific objects; and finally, to direct attention towards the consequences of transnationalization on the decentralizing of production, and on the circulation and validation of religious practices. However, during our research we came up against difficulties deriving from the historical direction taken by colonialism, which, like the religions focused on, still produces effects on the “opposite directions” of transnationalization, and these difficulities now lead us to ask the following questions: to what extent does the distinction between the North and various Souths still permeate the conceptual categories and epistemological positions of our researchers? Is academic discourse capable of overcoming or recomposing these interpretations? And how are we to find a common language, a “multicentrism” in the production of knowledge, according to the example set by the actors we have observed?

Searching together: the bumping road of interdisciplinarity, mixed methods and multiple partnerships. This paper describes the fabric and the implementation of a research project which was interdisciplinary (economics/anthropology), used mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) and implied multiple partnership (India, Mexico, Madagascar) with a view to learning lessons in terms of knowledge production. Epistemological divides (which reality do we observe and how knowledge is produced?) and confusions in the use of the terms « quantitative », « qualitative » and « partnership » have been recurring points of contention. Some findings are innovative but result from a complicated process of adaptation, creativity and trade-offs on the grounds of scientific production, partnerships and human relationships.

Within the Moboua Project, three quantitative collections of data have been carried out between 2009 and 2011, in order to found a broad and up-dated measurement of migration and urban movements in the capitals of Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali. The article first reconsiders the objectives of these surveys as they had been formulated upstream of the project: promoting a fine territorial comprehension of mobility, comparing its measurements according to the demographic, urban and migratory changes that concern West Africa today, connecting the quantitative and qualitative sets of investigation. It examines then the compromises that the implementation of these surveys imposed in the constrained time of a three-year project, the heuristic work of re-discussion which it caused in each fieldwork and for their comparison. Finally it considers what remains of this impressive and innovative data collection, in terms of the partnership and multidisciplinarity initially sought, and of prospects of analysis after the project.

This paper provides a first assessment of the Middas project. Dedicated to the links between migrants originating from Senegal and their origin households, its originality lies in the matched data that it produced. They have allowed original analyses on various questions relating to the decision-making and to the circulation of information and financial resources within transnational and “multi-sited” households. After a detailed presentation of the survey design, the paper provides an overview of the main results of the research. It then discusses some of the limitations of the collected data and points out directions for future research.

Representations, Conflicts and Memory in the Mediterranean: From Nation-States to Communities. The nexus between history and memory and the issue of cultural identities lie at the heart of academic, social and political debates for many years. Researches lead in the framework of Imasud program funded by the ANR, Telemme laboratory and the Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l'Homme (Aix-en-Provence, France) between 2008 and 2010 addressed again this question through various focus cases within the Mediterranean area. Their comparison has highlighted the raise of new players/actors involved in the shaping of Mediterranean memories, in line with the general trend of fragmentation of discourses on the past, between « heritagization » and political claims of minorities.

This paper aims to analyse the evolution of the rural peripheries of 6 global cities of the South. We assume that the evolution of these spaces is a good indicator of the specific aspects taken by the metropolisation process in the South. In order to avoid the risk of a meaningless comparison of very diverse spaces in different contexts, we focused on the analysis of ongoing processes in each city. Thus, beyond the various situations and dynamics (agriculture evolutions, land pressure, new activities, etc.), the relations between centre and periphery appears as the key factor of the evolution of the rural fringe in the cities studied. Directly related to urban sprawl issue, « green » spaces conservation, as well as urban plans and citizen participation and claim, the rural peripheries are the object of conflicting interests and political arbitration.

This article compares how Brazil and Vietnam set-up and implement intellectual property rights on plant innovations. These two case studies show how it is challenging for the emergent countries to develop legal framework that meet both international requirements and their national needs. A strong protection of intellectual property rights limits the access to genetic resources, knowledge and foreign technology for national scientists and industries without meet their needs to protect their own innovations. The rights of the farmers are also very challenging especially the rights to produce farms saved seeds. To tackle those issues, the article propose to explore how the Elinor Ostrom's theory of commons allows to rethink genetic resources as common pool resources (CPR) in order to thoroughly review their exclusive appropriation in the form of innovations.