The Tubu Teda's customary law and its contribution to stability. A citizen-science approach

Funding: Gerda Henkel Stiftung

Duration: 2018 - 2020

Project lead and execution: Dr. Tilman Musch

Located at the Chair of Anthropology of Africa and at the Institute for African Studies (IAS)

Outline:

The present project focuses the customary law of the Tubu Teda, living in north-eastern Niger, north-western Chad and southern Libya.

The Teda’s customary law, which is original and particular in the Central Sahara, plays an essential role in their every-day life, the socio-political coherence of their ethnic group and even in their relations with foreign people.

The project studies the interactions between the Teda’s customary law and the respective national law and tries to find out how it could contribute to stability in parts of the Central Sahara, a geopolitical highly relevant region linking North Africa and the Mediterranean coast with Sub-Saharan Africa. It adopts an innovative approach rooted in the concept of Citizen Science, i.e. it integrates locals as researchers in order to study local realities in a bottom-up approach.