Critical approaches to politics, social activism and islamic militancy in the western saharan region

This project proposes an analysis of the reconfigurations established in the socio-political vocabulary of the western Saharan region from the post-empire to the contemporary period.

 

The project should produce an analysis of:

  • the social and political structures shared in the region
  • the local variations of those structures, based on case studies
  • their specific configurations, based on social markers such as gender, age, and class
  • the use of those structures in different historical periods.

All these will be under theoretical and ethnographic scrutiny in order to achieve its main goal:

  • to understand the recent articulation of the social and political structures of the Western Saharan region, with broader and often exogenous political vocabularies.
  • The methodology used in this project is based on readings associated with different social sciences, with a particular focus on anthropology, history, and political science. The members of the research team, with experience and linguistic competence in the different geographies involved in this project, are expected to conduct original field enquiries, enabling a significant enhancement of the theoretical and ethnographic knowledge associated with this region. The project’s main goal is to analyse the types of interplay established between pre-modern socio-political traditions and contemporary political expression and activism, in a particularly sensitive and academically disregarded region. Its effort to integrate a context that is usually compartmentalized, as well as to put together a group of researchers generally isolatedd in their particular areas of expertise, geographies, or nations, should also be valued. The project’s results should enable the different contexts under study to be integrated into the wider maps of current scientific research, providing, at the same time a dissemination of its outputs to an extended audience.

Francisco Freire

Principal investigator

Alberto Lopez Bargados

Senior Researcher

Benjamin Soares

Scientific adviser

Moustapha Taleb Heidi

Post-doc investigator

Yahya Ould el Bara

Senior Researcher

Maria Cardeira da Silva

Senior Researcher

Mariem Baba Ahmed

Researcher

Irina Branco da Silva

Project manager/Research assistant

Sebastien Boulay

Senior Researcher

Elemine Moustapha

Senior Researcher

Abdel-Wedoud Ould-Cheikh

Scientific adviser

Mariem Baba Ahmed

Post-doc investigator

Juan Gimeno

Senior Researcher

Enrique Tirado

Post-doc investigator

Leonardo Villalon

Ethics adviser

Mariem Baba Ahmed

Post-doc investigator

Francisco Freire

Principal investigator

Yahya Ould el Bara

Researcher

Sebastien Boulay

Researcher

Juan Gimeno

Researcher

Alberto Lopez Bargados

Researcher

Maria Cardeira da Silva

Researcher

Leonardo Villalon

Ethics adviser

Mariem Baba Ahmed

Post-doc investigator

Abdel-Wedoud Ould-Cheikh

Scientific adviser

Enrique Tirado

Post-doc investigator

Benjamin Soares

Scientific adviser

Irina Branco

Project manager

Av. de Berna, 26-C 1069-061 Lisboa Portugal

Tel +351 217 908 300 Fax +351 217 908 308

capsahara@cria.org.pt

Send

AMARELO pixel
Grant Agreement 716467
NovoLogo1_transparente FCSH
capsahara logo site final
1
© photographs by Francisco Freire