Displacement at seascapes: Senegalese fishermen in between state power and foreign fleets

Abstract

Through semi-structured interviews with Senegalese fishermen, this article examines their displacement following the depletion of fishing stocks in Senegalese waters owing to the activities of European and Asian industrial fleets over the last two decades. While there has been some recognition in scholarship that extractivism leads to dire precarity and displacement within local populations, it has not been demonstrated how exploitations at sea are dependent on the displacement of the indigenous people for corporate gains. Thus, this article conceptualizes displacement of local Senegalese fishermen as the product of an active, arguably deliberate process, solely motivated by corporate gains to the detriment of their communal and human life. Furthermore, the article shows that displacement can take on multiple forms such as economic and temporal as well as physical movement. Data is drawn from eighteen semi-structured interviews with fishers from three fishing villages.