Elieth Eyebiyi

This research project questions the urban production of informality in West Africa. Existing scientific and policy discourses tend to reduce informality to the informal sector, to the sphere of capitalist labour and often adopts a legal-legal vision. The project aims to challenge this frame of analysis. Thus, he shows how informality, on the one hand, transcends the economic perspective of the informal sector, reinstates social relations in local economic functioning and influences national scales. On the other hand, it includes the marginalized and actors without social protection in the economic fabric at urban spaces. Following marginalized people involved in fuel smuggling, he investigates the social relations, risks management in uncertainty context, the daily life of informality’s production from margins and how it influences the formal economy in new urban spaces.

Based on long term empirical fieldworks, this interdisciplinary work deconstructs the normative aspects of informality by voicing poor and stakeholders embedded in the resourcefulness business, legally prohibited but socially tolerated. He reintegrates the urbanity aspects in this analysis in order to understand deeply the new socio spatial dynamics occurring around inequality, and risk management around fuel smuggling in the economies of borderlands urban cities in West Africa.