Prof. Thomas Bierschenk

Personal Profile

Thomas Bierschenk is Professor of Anthropology and Modern African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. He has specialised in the political anthropology of French-speaking Africa and in the anthropological analysis of development. His current research interests are African public services and civil servants as well as decentralisation and the local state in West Africa. He is currently coordinating an international comparative research project on States at Work. PublicServices and Civil Servants in West Africa: Education and Justice in Benin, Ghana, Mali and Niger, and is a participant in the project Significations of Oil and Social Change in Niger and Chad: An anthropological cooperative research project on technologies and processes of creative adaptation in relation to African oil production (coordination: Prof. Schareika, Göttingen; Dr. Behrends, Halle). He has done extensive fieldwork in the Sultanate Oman and in West and Central Africa.

Among his more recent publications are "50 Years of Independence in Africa", Africa Spectrum 45 (3) (2010). Hamburg: GIGA (hg. mit Eva Spies), “Democratisation without development: Benin 1989 – 2009”, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 22 (3) (2009): 337-357; “The every-day functioning of an African public service: Informalization, privatization and corruption in Benin’s legal system”, Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 57 (2008): 101 – 139; “L’éducation de base en Afrique de l’Ouest francophone. Bien privé, bien public, bien global ". In: Une anhropologie entre rigueur et'engagement. Essais autour de l’œuvre de Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, éd. T. Bierschenk, G. Blundo, Y. Jaffré & M. Tidjani Alou. Paris: APAD-Karthala 2007: 235-257 ; Islam und Entwicklung in Afrika (Islam and development in Africa, Köln: Köppe, edited with Marion Fischer, 2007); “The local appropriation of democracy in an African middle town: An analysis of the municipal elections in Parakou, Republic of Benin, 2002/03”, Journal of Modern African Studies 44 (2006), 543-571; “Powers in the Village. Rural Benin between democratisation and decentralisation", Africa 73 (2003): 145 - 173 (with Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan); Courtiers en développement. Les villages africaines en quête des projets (Paris: Karthala,  2000, edited with J.-P. Olivier de Sardan & J.-P. Chauveau).

Before coming to Mainz in 1997, he held assignments at Georgetown University (Washington, DC) and the University of Bielefeld (Germany), and taught anthropology and development sociology at the Free University of Berlin, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) at Marseilles/France and the University of Hohenheim at Stuttgart. He also held visiting assignments at the University of Bonn (Germany/2001-2), the University of Uppsala (Sweden/spring 2006) and the New School of Social Research (New York/2007-2008).

He served first as general secretary, than as president of the Association Euro-Africaine pour l’Anthropologie du Développement et du Changement Social (APAD). From 2008 to 2010, he was the president of the German Association for African Studies (VAD). He is member of the scientific advisory board of the Germany Ministry for Economic Cooperation (BMZ) and on the editorial board of Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (Berlin) as well as the scientific advisory board of the journal Afrika Spectrum (Hamburg). He also is an advisor to the African Power and Politics Programme of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI, London) and chairman of the scientific advisory committee of the Laboratoire d’études et des recherches sur les dynamiques socials et le développement local(Niamey, Niger). In 2010, he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Bénin by the government of the Republic of Benin.

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