Marginal Saharan élites. Extra-African and intra-african students mobilities

The MARELS project aims to study the connections between Saharan pastoral minorities and the conflictual situation in Mali and Niger through the unusual prism of growing higher-education student mobilities.

Like other young Africans, Saharan students increasingly cross the borders in search of knowledge in another country for the purpose of gaining professional perspectives and acquiring global skills and languages, further weakening the number of highly trained Saharan professionals.

Saharan nomadic populations have been characterized in the past by difficult access and high drop-out rates across all levels of education, largely due to conflicts, poor infrastructure and economic vulnerability compared to urban regions in the Sahara-Sahel.

It is believed that student international mobilities have the capability of ushering in a new set of Saharan leaders who are competent to make the best use of human and material resources for the promotion of a peaceful, prosperous and integrated Sahara-Sahel in Africa.

The challenge of this project is to write the unknown histories of Saharan graduates and to revise the common narrative of the Sahara as isolated and disconnected from the rest of the world, following the “mobility turn” in anthropology.

Although much research has been produced on Saharan mobilities, scarce attention is given to student mobilities .The MARELS project aims to fill this gap and provide an answer to the following questions.

What role do Saharan professionals trained in international universities play in their home societies, given the sometimes conflicting expectations from the local community, traditional élites, institutions, government, companies, foreign actors (e.g., NGOs, military forces) etc?

How do Saharan graduate élites establish objectives and strategic actions oriented towards meeting these expectations when they are in a diaspora in the Global North?