Conducted by USR 3336, GLOBAFRICA is an ambitious history programme for rethinking Africa’s long term integration into the rest of the World. This multidisciplinary project intends to establish new tools to give a balanced vision of connections between Africa and the other continents before the slave trade and colonialism, in the 18th and 19th centuries respectively. This vision is as remote from the simplistic view of an isolated Africa as from the excessive reification of still fairly unknown connections. Phenomena such as dynamics of populations, demographic and epidemiological crises as well as increasing social complexity and State or cultural formations, are tackled from the angle of intercontinental exchanges. As such, the project will focus on the relations between oceanic and Saharan interfaces on the one hand, and inland political and social configurations on the other. Up to what point, from which period must we consider the African continent as being integrated into the rest of the world? Examining the intensity and actual forms of exchanges will be conducted on the basis of special detailed cases in the said project. 1. Analysis of the economic, political and cultural relations between the Swahili Coast and the political formations of Eastern and Southern Africa from the 11th to the 17th centuries. While we know that this region saw the emergence, at the interface between Indian Ocean networks and the African continent, followed by the spreading of Swahili culture, we know much less about the way it was linked to political and cultural bodies as important as the monarchies of the Great Lakes in the East or the Great Zimbabwe in the South. In this light, the idea is to realign the study of this littoral society by turning the perspective around and observing it from inland. 2. The study of the spreading and impact of the bubonic plague in Sub-Saharan Africa, is taken here as evidence of the continent’s integration into global exchanges before the 15th century. For if Africa experienced a demographic crisis and deep transformations of its socio-political organisation, in the 14th century, in relation to the black plague, our current knowledge on the way this continent took part in a global system that was restructuring fully from the 15th century onwards, will have to be reconsidered radically. 3. Finally, the third case will need to specify the role of exogenous plants in the arrival of new human settlements in the Great Lakes Region, with new economic, social and cultural organisations, by following cultural diversity and comparing this geochronology with historical and archaeological knowledge. From a theoretical point of view, GLOBAFRICA seeks to go beyond the sole commercial pattern of exchanges through a new multidisciplinary approach, by combining a reading and detailed examination of ancient written sources, a study of existing archaeological collections (or collections under elaboration), and input from the hard sciences (paleo-botany, genetics and chemistry). Making our tools more complex in order to grasp “connections” with new elements, such as material culture and environmental elements, or new evidence such as epidemics, all demolishing the idea of isolation. By shifting the focus on inland societies and their interactions with the continent’s interfaces, GLOBAFRICA will also make it possible to go beyond the major Euro-, Indo- and Islamo-centred narratives of external stimuli, which are all too often the elements through which African historical dynamics are explained, so as to change them for a balanced vision and periodisation specific to “African globalisation”.

Small and medium-sized cities account for more than half of Asia's population, yet they remain largely unstudied, especially when compared to large cities. Looking at hill stations founded during the colonial period in India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia, URBALTOUR intends to fill this gap by analyzing the overlap between urban and tourist dynamics in mountainous areas. Historically, hill stations were designed as new frontiers of colonization. Today, this function is reactivated by the pivotal role they play in the expansion of globalized urban societies into mountains. In many cases, their permanent resident population has risen, their economy has diversified, and their tourist frequentation is now primarily driven by a domestic clientele. In addition, the combined effects of COVID and global warming are currently reinforcing their appeal, bringing back their historical sanitary function and turning them into places of refuge from the heat and diseases associated to lowland cities. This interaction between tourism and urbanization in vulnerable areas like mountains raises obvious environmental, social and economic sustainability issues, as evidenced by the intensified commercial exploitation of natural resources, the pollution that comes with the land's artificialization and the inter-ethnic tensions over the sharing of wealth between local actors. URBALTOUR's intersectional approach to inequalities in the access to tourism resources will enable us to assess the inequalities and discriminations at work, and push forward sustainable alternatives. By doing so, URBALTOUR fully contributes to the scientific axis "Urban societies, territories, constructions and mobilities", and more specifically to theme 1, "City Territories", addressing issues on growth, morphology and urban planning, urban practices of tourist mobility, governance and citizen engagement, as well as management and revival of heritage. URBALTOUR poses two fundamental hypotheses: 1/ Tourism is a vehicle for new urban models, whether in terms of means of transport, architecture, urban expansion or management. 2/ Tourism contributes to profound restructuring of stakeholder systems, leading to renewed modes of governance and legitimizing forms of violence in urban production. The methodology of the project is hybrid, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. On a macro level, the intention is to establish an inventory of hill stations and measure the ties between tourism and urbanization through GIS and spatial analysis. On a micro scale, a comparative methodology will be deployed across 6 research field selected for their representativity according to 4 comparative dimensions: a/ the tools of urban production by and for tourism, b/ the distinctive use of colonial heritage, c/ the reclaiming of mountains through the design and practice of tourist sites, and d/ a digital ethnography of online city branding and tourist practices. Covering the three largest European colonial empires, the novelty of URBALTOUR is double: 1/ it theoretically supports the concept of subaltern urbanization within neglected fields, thus contributing to a new epistemology of the urban, and 2/ it focuses on domestic tourist flows, rather than international ones, thereby decentering knowledge in a postcolonial perspective. Finally, the URBALTOUR project strengthens inter-UMIFRE collaborations between the Institute of Research on Contemporary Southeast Asia (IRASEC), for the Vietnamese, Malaysian and Indonesian part of the project, and the French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP), for the Indian and Sri Lankan part.

The ALTER project brings together researchers from different disciplines of human sciences that share a common interest in working on the processes of social formations that emanated from the universe of slavery, diaspora and postcolonial settings, all based on the Caribbean experience. The ALTER project bears on the constitution and the transmission of alternative oral histories of characters, places and events on the margin of historiographies and authorised provisions, in Haiti, the French Caribbean and some other areas of these territories, from the XIXe to the XXIe centuries. Its main objective is to reconstruct the historical accounts of actors by the careful examination of oral histories testifying to the construction of reference characters and the perception of breaking points, past peculiarities of which now aliment the study of contemporary socio-political situations. From this objective, ALTER has the intention of pushing into the scientific field the analysis of knowledge and the practices that they engender, through their capacity to construct, transmit and mobilise memorial narratives. Through the dynamics of recomposition, the postulate of this project is to envisage this knowledge as productions in the forms of strategies, resources and competences, and spreading through the circulation of subjects, ideas and systems of values and meanings. The corpus of knowledge so produced and activated will be understood as a community of experiences and discourses formed by individuals acting within enduring competitive and coercive contexts. ALTER relies on a comparative approach between alternative oral histories emerging from these contexts that share a common colonial and imperial heritage. The demonstration draws from various research fields: slavery and post-slavery, engagism, migratory situations, ideological circulations, political registers, plastic creations, professional competences. Their common denominator is this special interests in oral histories and in the heritage that they transmit and initiate. The transversal question, that of the temporality of memorial knowledge is an invitation to consider the relation to politics, through the echo of ancient experiences of colonial power, ultimately leading to the construction of narratives dedicated to characters, places and events. As such, the links of the past in the present will be treated in the first axe through the different forms of circulation, both imposed and chosen, individual and collective. The study will focus on how the various situations that were induced and created by and in mobility and immobility, can cause the emergence of personalities of reference or counter-narrations. This circulation of subjects, ideas and knowledge, is analysed in the second axe through the emergence and reappropriation of specific characters, constituted from and in the course of precise events and historical periods. The enquiry will then focus on the development of characters in situations that are marked by modes of both oppression and resistance. This development of models will be, in the third axe, embodied in professional trajectories: artisans, athletes, artists, doctors. Their activities, and the ethos that they embody, will be investigated based on the transmission of narratives and media, vectors of leadership, auto-heroisation and social recognition. The partnership between three research units, specialised on societies that are the product of colonisation, migrations and interethnic relations, and the positioning of the coordinating unit of the Caribbean, optimise the conditions required for the effective implementation of ALTER. The strategy of valorising results will develop actions that are directed towards a large audience – experts, students, scholars, civil society associations – while contributing to debates triggered by the intensity of questions relating to history and memoir in these societies.

Archaeology produces, as a corollary to its investigation of the remains of past societies, significant material and immaterial traces in the environment where it is practiced. The archaeologist reshapes our representations of historical otherness and literally disrupts the landscape and the spatiality of the territories in which he or she intervenes, as well as the lives of those who inhabit them. He is therefore the producer of a scientific economy acting on the world of her time and ours. Her activity "produces" meanings, but also new monuments, collections of objects, archives, in other words: vestiges. Born of archaeological activity, these remains can be considered as an object of study in their own right. By combining the skills of specialists in the history and anthropology of knowledge, law and heritage, without depriving itself of the contributions of a reflexive archaeology, ArchArch questions what is archaeology after archaeology. It aims to develop and test a hermeneutic of the remains of archaeology, which aims to think about the different types of remains concerned: archaeological sites, artefacts, archives, infrastructures, and the learned and unlearned memory of archaeology. This meta-archaeology is based on two case studies located in Muslim countries formerly colonized by France, Morocco and Mauritania, which were explored in alternating colonial, national and international cooperation contexts: Volubilis, a major site in Roman Africa, and Koumbi Saleh, a capital city in medieval Africa. The comparative analysis of the remains of their archaeologies weaves a historicized and documented reflection on the learned and unschooled ways of managing and digesting an archaeological heritage, a complex aggregation of the legacy of the Ancients (inscribed in an identity genealogy) and of archaeologists (situated in a scientific filiation). Involving researchers from various backgrounds – history, archaeology, law, anthropology – the reflection carried out within the framework of ArchArch is conducted at three distinct and interdependent levels. Firstly, ArchArch uses the notion of 'archaeological remains' as a basis for a hermeneutic of what archaeological activity does to its environment, to society and to people, as well as to archaeology and archaeologists themselves. Secondly, ArchArch puts the question of archaeological remains to the test at two sites, Volubilis and Koumbi Saleh, which, in all their contrasts, between being classified on the Unesco World Heritage List and being virtually abandoned, constitute formidable documentary 'deposits': archival sources, archaeological material, legal texts, ethnographic data and oral sources. Aiming at a holistic treatment of the two cases of study, it is through the prism of history, anthropology and legal sciences that the material and immaterial traces left by the archaeological activity on these two sites are tracked, collected, inventoried, archived and analyzed. Thirdly, ArchArch implements an original experiment of deployment and sequencing of the archaeological archives of Volubilis and Koumbi Saleh, from the archival management of the funds to their dissemination via digital humanities, through the analysis not only of their content but also of their constitution as a full-fledged object, thus documenting the absence that is consubstantial with archaeological research, which destroys its deposit at the same time as it exhumes and produces its own object. In this way, ArchArch contributes to building the archives that are crucial for the future of archaeology as a science, for the institutions and states that fund research and, more broadly, for the societies that are necessarily stakeholders in the construction of their past.

Despite the Israeli law proclaiming Jerusalem to be the sole and eternal capital of Israel, the city is, in terms of the laws in force and the courts in operation, a mosaic of texts, institutions, jurisdictions and statutes that are at once complementary, superimposed and contradictory., mirror of the current conflict and bearer of new disputes. Thinking about the place Jerusalem will occupy in future negotiations (inevitable but unforeseeable) requires mapping, on the smallest possible scale, the laws in force and the jurisdictions in place, as well as carrying out a close-up, detailed ethnography of how they work. The ambition of JORDIN is to map, document and ethnographically describe, in the fields of family and land tenure, the different laws and legal practices coexisting in Jerusalem, in order to describe both their ordinary modes of operation and the inscription of this ordinary in a regime of exception. To carry out its descriptive and analytical work, JORDIN will conduct, first, the historical and spatial mapping of Jerusalemite inter-legality. Second, it will explore the diachronic process through which religious laws and land law transformed into state-backed positive law. Third, combining pragmatic history and legal ethnography, it will observe legal practices in both religious courts and land-tenure transactions. Two additional questions will be raised in a transversal way. There is, on the one hand, the question as to whether the diversity and fragmentation of the Jerusalemite legal and judicial landscape, which generates a discourse about “multiculturalism,” does not as a cover for discrimination, neglect, and the formation of Jewish hegemony. On the other, there is the question to know whether the strongly gendered nature of these orders is not exacerbated by the asymmetries generated by territorial and institutional fragmentation. The project, based at the French Center in Jerusalem and bringing together an articulated team of jurists, anthropologists, political scientists and historians, offers a combination of jurisprudence, pragmatic legal history and legal ethnography, three perspectives which converge in an approach centered on legal practices and their processual transformation.