Being and Becoming Ethnic in Europe and Africa: State and the Politics of Recognition in Nigeria, France and the UK

The fellowship examines how state institutions in Africa and Western Europe generate identity discourses and political behaviours among young people from minority groups.
First it updates and disseminates the results of research (doctoral and postdoctoral) on Nigeria on the relationship between the politics of oil, ethnic group identity formation and political mobilisation amongst members of a minority group - the Ijaw.
Second it refines its empirical and theoretical conclusions and tests their applicability to two countries of Western Europe; France and the UK, where it advances and completes ongoing research on how different approaches to 'integration' and public policy practice influence identity formation amongst young 'minority' citizens of West African descent; Senegalese origin in the case of France and Nigerian origin in the case of the UK.
The methodology is comparative, historical and multi disciplinary. It draws on theoretical approaches from political sociology and history which emphasise the socially constructed nature of ethnicity and which have been tested out in Nigeria, to analyse new qualitative data generated from case study research amongst minority communities in Paris and London, using anthropological tools (participant observation and semi structured interviews) and drawing from existing quantitative data sets.