Good evening, everyone,
and thank you so much for joining us today for our seminar on balancing social and environmental capital for sustainable development in Africa,
co-hosted by the Africa Oxford Initiative and the African House at Christchurch.
Well, the challenge refers to the paradox of sort of balancing universal access to goods and services also for the last mile with Universal,
while with this was the financial sustainability of actually delivering them.
And we'll hear a bit more about this today.
If launched this African House initiative at Christchurch earlier this year, and partly with a view to create a space for collaboration for knowledge,
exchange and partnerships with fellow, well, fellows and researchers from Africa.
So we are absolutely delighted to have the opportunity today to host three hour fox visiting fellows from West, Central and East Africa too.
And we'll be hearing or discussions around sort of inclusive water service delivery in water stressed
environments and about how decisions are made and very complex social and ecological systems,
and also how conflict interferes with the basic provision of services and the
development of rural public policies to advance the sustainable development agenda.
He's based at the African Studies Centre, and his research interests include the Great Lakes and region in Africa,
especially sort of post-conflict development and political ecology,
as well as sort of public policy development and guidelines in Africa more generally.
So now [INAUDIBLE] be presenting on on a sort of an a critical perspective on development and yeah,
fighting against poverty in the African Great Lakes region. A question of power and resistance over to you.
Thank you so much, Johanna. She forgot to say that I was a Francophone researcher, so please be patient with my my English.
Yeah, yeah. So I work on three topics the access to natural resources in Africa Great Lakes Region in Rwanda,
Burundian Congo based on true and armed groups in the same region, and the Afro diasporic critical thinking.
But today, I would present some hypotheses on my work on access to natural resources in Africa and which lakes region.
So in fact, on this topic, my research is best is based on a medical and political question.
And the question is, does people have only a choice between top down and often neo-liberal policies and being bound by poverty without a way out?
To what extent can such a starting point?
Give us another perspective on poverty reduction policies, and this arises the question of whether how those policies imposed,
it's accepted negotiators subverted or resisted, and those questions therefore require us to go beyond the moral needs to fight against poverty.
The call for a political vision of actions again against poverty because those actions actually question power relations, resistance and emancipation.
Finally, those issues can come with epistemological recall and methodological logistical challenges.
In this presentation, I will offer some hypotheses concerning the issue in these issues and in my research.
I will start from a bottom up approach, a push panel debate in French, and I will focus on the Rwanda case.
So since the year that early 2000,
the conceptualisation of the relationship between land and poverty is increasingly assimilated to the land use of as a resource for market production.
Today, donor discourse discourse. Causes more production on land in Africa to boost the economic growth, to be able to fight against poverty.
Indeed, in the past, the non-development of land was not seen as a legitimate reason for dispossession, but today it is.
It has been normal for state and local authorities to dispossess peasants who are not able to insert themselves into markets.
Orientation production shames this discursive churning has real consequences as it has opened up opportunities for state
and local authorities to dispossess the purists seen as unproductive or inefficient farmers as I have already said.
I study this phenomenon in the African Great Lakes region, but now I will, going to focus on the case of Rwanda,
which best illustrates the relationship between the fight against poverty and power and resistance.
Of course, my research in Rwanda is concerned with the way in which we have policies in
relation to the fight against poverty are conceived at the international level,
how they are decoded at the national level and how they are implemented at the local level, especially at the local level level.
My research is based on in this field of research in Rwanda,
I try to understand how local authorities managed to capture land within the new agriculture programme
and how resistance to his to the proceeded to the prescription of this programme took shape.
I propose here four points in terms of results related to the run Rwandan case.
First, in my research in Rwanda, I show how to the irrationality of the aquaculture programme has made possible land grabbing by the state
and local authorities at the expense of ordinary peasants using those land for subsistence production.
My research aims at shedding a theoretical light on the issue of those power relations.
I try to go beyond the caricature of African political space as characterised by an exclusive form of explicit and repressive power.
My arguments assume that another reflection upon paradise is possible.
There is certainly violence that explain the grabbing of of resources in Rwanda.
But beyond violence,
there is also discourses of legitimation and the system of differentiation that explains the grabbing of resources such as the social,
cultural, political and economical capitals.
The four culture concepts like venom, mentality, technologies of the self apparatus and the delusion concept of racism allow me to study the
social historical process that contributes to the possibility of land grabbing in in Rwanda.
Of those explanatory factors of source of resource and of land grabbing are often under researches in in the case of Runda.
Second, in my research,
my research I like highlight that most socio anthropological literature related to claim of a land in Rwanda is driven by an actor oriented approach.
Moreover, it is predominantly behaviourists in that it considers actors involved in power games as try Tajik acts
or fully conscious conscious of their interests and developing strategies to maximise their interests.
I propose a national team reflection, which implies that choice and decision of actors can be influenced by actors
awareness through internalised internalisation of a state of being in which.
Existing power relations are legitimised and seen as natural or logical.
Therefore, I consider Clem making, as should social practise that requires an understanding of actual strategies,
but also adds irrationalities in which they agreement are embedded.
I argue that in order to comprehend claim making over land in the specific context of Rwanda,
one has to understand the underlying power of this act in actual strategy, but also to the power relations that ship actual rationality.
In this way, one can understand the deep foundations of conflicts and the broader challenges in resolving them.
Third, in my research, understanding of resistance is very important.
The resistance against the land grabbing.
First of all, from an nipissing logical standpoint, my research a land to a nominal lease approach of the French critical sociology,
which allows us to understand resistance as a discursive element, which means should be understood through its genealogy.
I study. I study the possibility of performative and subversive agency in the lives of patients who use body.
But these are subject to the activists none of the new Agri Agriculture Programme in Rwanda.
In this way, I land to the idea that resistance should be studied, studied at as such not necessary in dichotomy to power.
Second, from a theoretical stand point,
my research showed that acts of resistance are commonplace and they and that they have
widely documented in the literature on post-genocide rural development in Rwanda.
However, there is sources have these sources have forecasts a lot upon the dichotomy between domination and emancipation,
between power and resistance to give to given norms.
This literature on resistance in Rwanda was strongly influenced by the work of
James Scott on his critique of Crime Xi in relation to the false concepts,
the consciousness of the dominant people.
In this way, this literature literature may overlook experiences of freedom that are born out of new ways to detach oneself from the norm.
As Judith Butler could say, there was agency in bodies of those subjects to the norm,
which which allows that food to subvert subversion of the name itself.
Such a theoretical framework allowed me to study whether and to to what extent extant the
action of the farmers contestations could subvert the agriculture programme more broadly.
Finally, with my team, we use Participatory Action Theatre to access the to access the structural violence and its meaning in relation to the states.
I work in a very sensitive contact with work while insecurity political troubles.
I also work on difficult topics such as land grabbing by elite conflict, armed groups and resistance.
People are often afraid to talk about it, about the issue of land and resistance.
So when they come to a village, I don't ask my question directly because that can be very dangerous for for me and for four people.
I ask what I do it to us, to young people to prepare a theatre on the land issue in the in general,
in the village and through the fiction of the theatre.
The. Milos Alos and Elway's tell us a lot about the problem.
Then we work on theatre fiction to make its comic.
And finally, I invits, let 20 people to the official theatre performance and then I give them the floor.
So the talks with the participants gives me a lot of information when even if we try to remain in the fiction and the anonymous anonymity,
so then we can start again with another group so that these in breath my my work and hope my English was like, Yes, thank you.