News & Events

The ASCL has recently started a scoping study focusing on regional trade integration in West Africa: ‘Improving the perspective for regional trade and investment in West Africa: the key to food security, economic development and stability in the region?’. The study has been commissioned by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The project will be carried out by a joint venture of knowledge institutions that, in addition to the ASCL, consists of the Agro-Economic Research Institute of the Agricultural University of Wageningen and the European Center for Development Policy Management.

This book, edited by ASCL researchers Akinyinka Akinyoade and Jan-Bart Gewald, brings together the results of studies of the various cultural, social, economic and historical aspects that are formative in African societies’ experiences of how people negotiated the spaces and times of being in transit on the road to prosperity. The book analyses the various outcomes of the process of mobility and the experience of spaces and times of transit across gender, generational, and class-differences. Many ASCL researchers have contributed to the book, that has been published by Brill.

On the occasion of the Stephen Ellis Annual Lecture 2015, to be given by journalist-photographer Howard French on 10 December, the ASC Library compiled a web dossier on the Africa-Asia relations. French is the author of China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants are Building a New Empire in Africa, and will address the China-Africa encounter. The relationship between Africa and China and other Asian powers features heavily in the Library's collection. The subject is also well represented in ASC research, including in the research collaborative group ‘Africa in the world’, that contributed to the web dossier. The introduction is written by ASC researcher Mayke Kaag.