Mahamadou Bassirou Tangara is assistant professor of development economics at the University of Social Sciences and Management in Bamako (USSGB). His research focuses on poverty, informal economy and armed conflicts. He has done extensive fieldwork in Mali (Segou, Mopti, Gao and Bamako). His main contribution in development studies is the understanding of the role of hydro-agricultural developments in poverty reduction. For more than 3 years, he has been interested in issues of armed conflict with the objective of contributing to the understanding of the relationship between armed conflict and the informal economy. In this area, his work focuses on understanding the economy in times of armed conflict. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and has been the recipient of several research grants and awards. For example, he has been awarded the African Peacebuilding Network Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council; the MIASA Individual Fellowship Research 2022; and he is a recipient of the Pilot African Postgraduate Academy (PAPA) for the period 2020 - 2023. Furthermore, he has participated and co-organized several international workshops and conferences.

MIASA Project:

In his MIASA project, Tangara is studying market agents’ behavior and decision processes at the market of Bamako through the theory of rationality. His research is interdisciplinary and relates to economic and social sciences. It analyzes social practices and values to understand market functioning as an autonomous institution of economic activity regulation. This study is contributing to the literature on the concept of “market” which is a contested one, first in the discipline of economic science itself and second between economics science and others social sciences. By studying the case of the market of Bamako, this project discusses the “purely economic model of the market” and analyzes the interdependences between the economic and social spheres in the exchange process. For more information about Tangara’s work please see: https://sites.google.com/mesrs.ml/mbtangara