From 27 to 29 September 2024, the workshop "Representing the Countryside in Africa and Europe" took place at the University of Bremen, organized by project B09 "Social Policy and Rural Development in Africa". The workshop explored the question of how rural populations and regions are politically represented and whether there is a change or even a crisis in rural interest politics, as is often described and criticized in many contemporary and social diagnoses.
These questions of representation are crucial for sub-project B09, as they constitute the institutional context in which phenomena such as rural poverty and rural social change are negotiated and whether new resource flows or even social policies for rural populations could result from them. It turns out that very diverse actors and organizations can represent rural areas, their populations and their economies. This becomes all the clearer the more one departs from the usual comparisons and observes the question of rural social change and rural development and social policy in an interregional comparison - as in the CRC workshop.
The B09 team was thus able to attract a very diverse group of workshop participants and bring them to Bremen to critically examine the connections between rural identity and contestation, between protests and policies and between the various land targets in international politics, and to record how the life chances of rural populations in Africa and Europe are faring in the face of increasing commercialization of agricultural sectors, climate change and ecological destruction.
On European contexts, the participants presented their ongoing research on right-wing populism and farmers' protests in a European comparison (Natalia Mamonova, Ruralis, Oslo), the development of an EU rural policy (Christin Stühlen, University of Marburg), farmers' protests in Germany against the abolition of energy subsidies (Judith Müller & Birgit Peuker, University of Heidelberg) and the reception of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy by Polish agricultural associations (Michal Dudak, Polish Academic of Sciences, Warsaw).
The contributions on African countries included topics such as land and agrarian conflicts in Southern Africa (Boaventura Monjane, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town), new attempts to co-opt the rural poor in Tunisia (Kressen Thyen, B09), new land ownership conflicts in Morocco (Yasmine Berriane, CNRS-CMH, Paris), the exploitation structures and survival strategies of rural women workers in Tunisia (Dhouha Djerbi, Geneva Graduate Institute), the new land conservation agenda of the Botswana government and international conflicts over elephant hunting (Bontle Masilo, University of Botswana, Gaborone) and finally the efforts to implement sustainable agricultural policies in rural Zambia (Cleopas Sambo, Oslomet, Oslo).
Contact:
Dr. Roy Karadag
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy, Institute for Intercultural and International Studies
Mary-Somerville-Straße 7
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-67468
E-Mail: karadag@uni-bremen.de
