Short Abstract

How can research partnerships endure amid authoritarianism, insecurity, funding cuts, and unequal mobility? Drawing on the Sahel and wider African experiences, this roundtable examines academic freedom, fieldwork ethics, and more equitable ways to produce and circulate knowledge.

Long Abstract

In the past 15 years, armed conflict in the Sahel reshaped the conditions under which knowledge is produced. Beyond insecurity, military rule and shrinking civic spaces in several West African countries led to new pressures on researchers, students and professors alike: interrupted fieldwork, the closure of research sites, policed teaching, threats and self-censorship have become an all-too-common experience. Yet these pressures are not confined to authoritarian settings. Globally, funding cuts, political intervention in universities, rising tuition fees, restrictive visa regimes in Europe and North America, or the targeting of Area Studies limit who can study, speak, publish and, thus, produce knowledge on Africa.

Taking the Sahel as an entry point in a complex system of global shifts, this roundtable asks how academic collaboration can be reimagined amid political realignment, sovereigntist claims and renewed demands for decolonisation. As new hierarchies, divisions of labour - including new methodologies related to insecurity and field access -, and asymmetries emerge alongside longstanding structural constraints, how can we rethink “localisation,” the displacement of risk in the field onto locally based colleagues, and solidaries that can exist between Africa-based and other colleagues?

The discussion aims to compare institutional and individual responses to both long-standing and emerging challenges weighing on knowledge production on and in Africa, including through collaborative research design, equitable authorship, remote or distributed methods, protection mechanisms, and support for regional networks and infrastructures for knowledge circulation, as well as other principles academia needs to keep in mind for safer, more reciprocal knowledge partnerships.

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