Michelle Engeler

• Dr.
• Lecturer at University of Basel

The wives of (former) heads of state form an important part of the political elite in Guinea, considerably shaping the country’s sociopolitical and economic past and present.

The notion of migration as being at least partly about ‘choice’ is deeply rooted in both academic thought and public policy. Recent contributions have considered migration choice as step-wise in nature, involving a separation between ‘aspiration’ and ‘ability’ to migrate, whilst stressing a range of non-economic factors that influence migration cho...

By combining an ethnographic study of youth with an analysis of the local state in the making, this research monograph introduces the perspective of »meandering lives« to grasp being young and growing up in the Guéckédou borderland, a remote space approximately 700 kilometers southeast of Conakry, Guinea's capital. This history-sensitive perspectiv...

Using the notion of Afropolitanism, which refers to highly mobile and well-connected “Africans of the world,” this article examines the relative privileges of university graduates within Burkina Faso across generational divides. Comparisons emerge between cohorts graduating in the 1970s and the 2010s. While graduates of the 1970s enjoyed access to...

The time to come - as well as the exploration thereof - remains elusive for social actors and social scientists alike. The contributors accept the challenge to depict young men and women's future-creating activities in urban contexts of sub-Saharan Africa. Very consciously, they study young graduates having obtained a university degree and provide...

The time to come - as well as the exploration thereof - remains elusive for social actors and social scientists alike. The contributors accept the challenge to depict young men and women's future-creating activities in urban contexts of sub-Saharan Africa. Very consciously, they study young graduates having obtained a university degree and provide...

The time to come - as well as the exploration thereof - remains elusive for social actors and social scientists alike. The contributors accept the challenge to depict young men and women's future-creating activities in urban contexts of sub-Saharan Africa. Very consciously, they study young graduates having obtained a university degree and provide...

The time to come - as well as the exploration thereof - remains elusive for social actors and social scientists alike. The contributors accept the challenge to depict young men and women's future-creating activities in urban contexts of sub-Saharan Africa. Very consciously, they study young graduates having obtained a university degree and provide...

The time to come - as well as the exploration thereof - remains elusive for social actors and social scientists alike. The contributors accept the challenge to depict young men and women's future-creating activities in urban contexts of sub-Saharan Africa. Very consciously, they study young graduates having obtained a university degree and provide...

This paper is a contribution to a better understanding on what it means to be young and to grow up amidst political transformation processes in Guinea in the 2000s. It focuses on students and graduates in Guéckédou, a border town in the Guinée Forestière. How do these youths gain a living and participate in a complex and turbulent socio-political l...

Introduction to a specical Issue of Stichproben. Guinea: One Revolution at a Time

The population of Guinea, a Muslim dominated West African country of about ten million inhabitants, is currently facing challenging times: After a permanent fall in standards of living and a rise in poverty in the last ten years, the country’s economy has additionally been ravaged by the recent Ebola crisis. Guinea’s current real food prices are am...

This thesis is a contribution to the broad body of literature discussing youth and the state in Africa and beyond. Most importantly, this thesis brings these two topics together by adopting a socio-anthropological approach based on fieldwork. Hence it brings together a holistic approach to youth-state relations: it doesn’t neglect being young and g...

http://transformations-blog.com/living-the-reaspora-afropolitans-back-home/

In recent years, research on youth in Africa and elsewhere has focused attention on the relationship between youth and time, especially the future. Current debates tend to describe young people as only passing time (Jeffrey 2010) or as the “waithood generation” (Honwana 2012). In other words, the youth is depicted more generally as being trapped in...

50 Jahre Unabhängigkeit. Kontinuitäten, Brüche, Perspektiven edited by ThomasBierschenk and EvaSpiesKöln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2012. Pp. 572. € 58·00 (pbk) - Volume 51 Issue 4 - MICHELLE ENGELER

This article elaborates a heuristic approach to understanding the geography of warscape from a theoretically informed perspective. It argues that agency in protracted civil war emerges at the ambiguous interface of different, competing systems of power and authority. In order to account for the multiple trajectories of threat and opportunity that w...

Guinea’s political transition seems never ending. In 2008, strikes, riots and clashes affected country and state. In the light of the events of 2006 and 2007, it is a question of interpretation whether the « revolution » finally came to a close in 2008 or if it is still going on. Within and beyond these interpretations, the Guinean military play an...

In his Hettner-lecture, Michael Watts asserted that violence might be understood as ´struggle over geography´. Surprisingly, geography is largely missing in the contemporary debates on the incidence of civil wars, the dynamics of war economies and "new" wars. These debates have produced universalistic, nomothetical statements about the causes and d...

In his Hettner-lecture, Michael Watts asserted that violence might be understood as 'struggle oer gigeography'. Surprisingly, geography is largely missing in the contemporary debates on the incidence of civil wars, the dynamics of war economies and "new" wars. These debates have produced universalistic, nomothetical statements about the causes and...

Summary This paper argues that the social figurations of violence cannot be detached from their spatio-temporal topographies, i.e. the geography of war. Or, in other words, we need to differentiate between the rationale of governable orders (as social "space") and their manifestation in a specific place and time as governable space (as territoriali...