Abstract:

This presentation examines a conflict that revolves around the use of a plot of land in the Air France 3 neighbourhood in Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire. After a chronological description of the Air France 3 market conflict, I provide a mapping of the various social actors invovlved in the conflict, then end with their discourses and practices’ analysis.
The multiplicity of social actors with individual or collective, similar or diverging interests, pointed at what I coined as the (in)convenient gray zone. The convenient and inconvenient adjectives address the constant balance that social actors try to find, in their attempts to reach for their respective goals, which change over time. The gray zone, which represents both a physical and a social space, illustrates the complexity surrounding land tenure in Bouaké, which is intrinsically characterised by the diversity of land regulations on which dwellers draw to secure their land properties.

Dr. Sanogo is a Research Fellow at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa, University of Ghana as well as lecturer and researcher in Social Anthropology, at the Centre Universitaire de Manga, Burkina Faso. Rooted in the fields of political and urban anthropology, drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, her current research project looks into the intertwined links between urban dwellers’ discourses and practices related to land tenure in Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire and Kumasi, Ghana.