Fofana, Habibou
Habibou FOFANA, born on 09.08.1972, studied sociology and political science. As a holder of a doctorate in sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS / Paris), he is currently a senior lecturer at the Department of Law and Political Sciences, Université Ouaga II, Burkina Faso. He is also a researcher at GRIL laboratory (Ouagadougou), of which he had been a Coordinator for ten years, and an associate researcher at CEMS(EHESS,Paris). His main fields of scientific interest are sociology of mobilisations and sociology / anthropology of law and justice.
Research project
Social Litigations, Judicial Pluralism and Instances of Recourse, Mediations and Accompaniment of Promotion of Human Rights in Burkina Faso
By offering legal and judicial advice and support to people with no legal knowledge, while developing alternative ways for resolving litigations, organisations for the promotion and defence of human rights in Burkina Faso establish a specific space for access to justice. These organisations are subject to the intervention of various social authorities. They do offer a mode of (jurisdictional and non-jurisdictional) resolution of conflicts which are brought to them. These dynamics spotlight a process where various social legitimacies are opposed or reinforced in a burkinabé society subjected to multiple and accelerated transformations. So, these organisations constitute an observatory of the ways in which ordinary people acquire legal resources, but more broadly, of the process of determining collective legitimacies. We therefore propose an ethnography of the functioning and uses of this instrument in the resolution of social litigations, through sociology of law and justice, and sociology of mobilisations. In so doing, we reassess the issue of legal pluralism in African contexts by examining how legal awareness fostered by these organisations reshapes the problem of access to law and justice; whereas this issue has so far been considered from the perspective of bringing the judicial institution closer to the litigants or rehabilitating customary normative systems and standards.
Université OUAGA II/ Unité de Formation et de Recherche-Sciences
Juridiques et Politiques (UFR-SJP)
12 BP 417 Ouagadougou 12
Burkina Faso