Côme Salvaire, “Debris of sovereignty: discards and territorial domination in a popular neighbourhood of Lagos, Nigeria”, Territory, Politics, Governance, 2023

Côme Salvaire has published an article entitled “Debris of sovereignty: discards and territorial domination in a popular neighbourhood of Lagos, Nigeria” in the journal Territory, Politics, Governance.

Abstract

In Lagos’s popular neighbourhoods, the economic transformations of the 1980s have brought about the emergence of popular economies of urban mining centred on discards. In the district of Mushin, discards have at the same time sustained the emergence of powerful street lords. Based on an ethnography of the neighbourhood of Sàkani, this article details associations between local powerholders and garbage, while analysing the central role played by waste in the agglomeration and stabilisation of an alternative local sovereignty. For its symbolic, economic and spatial value, garbage is enlisted by local leaders in the maintenance of a system of territorial domination that hinders the functionalisation of urban space and generates chronic socioenvironmental suffering while mediating the conditions of economic, social and political marginality pressed onto its dwellers.