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Paper short abstract:

The paper compares Beninese state policies on the pandemic of COVID-19 and on pastoralism: their logics, measures, responses and perceived outcomes. We argue that the long-term consequences of these paradoxical policies have the potential to deepen already existing social disparities.

Paper long abstract:

During the last two years, in the West African Republic of Benin we observe parallels of state efforts to control and restrict a) the mobility of the virus of SARS-CoV-2 and its descendants, and b) the mobility of pastoralists, that is, cattle herders living in the Northern part of the country. The mobility of the latter, being seen as a thread by colonial and postcolonial governments, became the object of intensified state efforts during the same period as the pandemic of COVID-19 turns the world.

In this paper we examine current Beninese state policies on the pandemic and policies on pastoralism: their logics, measures, responses and perceived outcomes by the population. Following James Scott (1998) we argue that state policies in these seemingly independent fields of state intervention follow comparable logics and they use partly comparable measures; both policies evoke “arts of resistance” (Scott 1990), while their long-term consequences have the potential to deepen existing social disparities. The contribution is based on empirical data collected in Benin between August 2021 and April 2022 in the framework of the DFG-financed project “COVID-19 and Pastoralism in a context of rupture and structural reforms in Benin: Learning from uncertainty management from below”. The project was developed and is realized in collaboration between researches from the University of Parakou (Benin) und the University of Goettingen (Germany).