ABSTRACT
This chapter is a theoretical discussion around the three main axes on which this book is centered: connectivity, governance, and labor. Critically reviewing the literature that has tackled such notions with regard to Africa—and more specifically to the Sahel and the Lake Chad Basin—this chapter aims to engage intellectually with scholarship on the labor and informality in labor practices, using it as a lever to disentangle the relationship between governing practices, human mobility, and resource control in the Sahel. Major attention is devoted to the lines of accumulation and dispossession and on how these have been underpinned, in historical and geopolitical narratives, to racial, cultural, and ultimately civilizational boundaries whose reproduction is, under many aspects, still at the core of governing techniques in the Sahel macro-region. Entire networks of power and alliances have been developed over such boundaries, allowing the establishment of kingdoms, empires, and military complexes whose governing repertoires are still visible in how modern governments aim to master circulation over the space. Boundaries, however, have also been employed by the weak sides to set up networked alliances allowing them to bypass their structural lack of capitals and power. Most importantly, boundaries have also been challenged by the magnitude of new sociabilities to which the experiences of marginality, dispossession, or disenfranchisement lived by subaltern groups have given birth.
