Migration and development. Nexuses and detachment processes in rural Gambia (from the late colonial period to the 2020s)

Migration and development are historically interrelated in Senegambian societies. Following the gradual consolidation of colonial economies, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the introduction of large-scale development schemes in rice cultivation areas along the Gambia River. While promoted by external actors with an agenda of social and economic engineering, these initiatives were appropriated into localized cultural, moral, economic and micro-political apparatuses of ideas and practices. These frameworks evolved as forms of village-level management of social transformations, in particular of different types of mobility from and to the area. Combining ethnographic research with the analysis of secondary sources, this article outlines how the prolonged agricultural crisis, the decline of external development interventions, and the twenty-first century consolidation of disadvantaged migration trajectories – the so-called “backway” migration to Europe – have deeply reconfigured these inherited forms of representing and governing development.