This proposed research, based on preliminary research conducted in Dakar, Senegal, seeks to merge sociolegal studies of law and development with anthropological explorations of time and the future in order to examine how neoliberal policies, discourses, and legal structures influence Senegalese conceptions of the nations future. In particular, this project compares the intersection of law and science-based development initiatives with the intersection of law and labor migration in Senegal. Since January of 1994, Senegal has adopted a series of reforms to modernize business laws and to protect and promote private sector activities. These regulatory changes have prioritized multinational investment and the creation of jobs in scientific and financial sectors, but have also prompted new flows of migrants out of Senegal in search of work abroad. This project places these two phenomena in the same ethnographic frame to better understand the contradictory effects of law and development. It focuses on two activities: the efforts of Petrosen, Senegals national oil company, to promote multinational investment in petroleum exploration (despite the fact that no significant oil deposits have been found); and Senegalese efforts to obtain foreign employment visas (even as few applicants are actually granted their requests). The research employs archival research, intensive interviewing, and participant observation in order to answer three questions: (1) What state policies and laws animate development in Senegal, and how have these regulatory schemes shifted through time?; (2) What effects do these legal changes and policy shifts have on which local strategies people consider worthwhile, feasible, or promising?; and (3) What conceptions of future possibilities and impossibilities do these changes inspire?. The intellectual merit of this proposal lies in its investigation of key issues at the intersection of law and development scholarship and anthropological studies of temporality and change. Various scholars have focused on the importation of foreign legal structures into Third World contexts and on the impacts these laws have on household production and structural inequality. Anthropologists have examined cultural configurations of time and have analyzed peoples conceptions of the future in order to better understand present phenomena. In contrast to many previous studies, this project focuses on two seemingly improbable development projects in order to better understand the complex and contradictory effects of global discourses and laws on local strategies and futures. This project will help re-theorize developments purported failure, as it asks: If people continue to participate in these strategies, what might this say about local understandings of development and national futures? The broader impacts of the research include its significant contribution to the training of the Co-PI and the incorporation of its findings into a doctoral dissertation. Renewed debates over African development and futures make this project particularly timely. This research would be of great interest to policy experts charged with drafting regulations regarding international migration or natural resource extraction, and to international practitioners who implement and evaluate development policy and practice, both in West Africa and elsewhere. Critics of neoliberalism have charged that development policies and legal structures imported from the West have ignored or oversimplified the complex challenges facing Third World peoples. This research will provide a solid empirical basis on which to assess future policy decisions and their likely effects on local populations.
