Despite being central to the development of Saharan regional connectivity, northern Chad has been closed to researchers since the late 1960s and thus remains virtually unknown to scholarship. Based on long-term fieldwork, The Value of Disorder is an original and in-depth account of the area and its Tubu majority inhabitants. Julien Brachet and Judith Scheele examine trans-border connectivity and trade; civil war and rebellion; wealth creation and dispersal; labour and gender relations; and aspirations to moral autonomy in northern Chad from an internal point of view - a point of view that in turn participates in a dynamic process of regional interdependence. Vividly ethnographic, the book gives precedence to local categories of value, while asking broader questions about the nature of non-state regional political organisation. Questions that inform current political developments in the Sahara more widely, and have the potential to challenge key concepts in Saharan studies and the social sciences.

Based on long-term research in northern Chad, this book provides a unique account of mobility, wealth, and aspirations to political autonomy at the heart of the contemporary Sahara.

About the Author
Julien Brachet is a Research Fellow at the Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement, University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne. He is the author of Migrations transsahariennes: Vers un desert cosmopolite et morcele (2009). Judith Scheele is Directrice d'etudes at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. She is the author of Village Matters: Politics, Knowledge and Community in Kabylia (2009), and Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara: Regional Connectivity in the Twentieth Century (2012).


Book Information
ISBN 9781108449342
Author Julien Brachet
Format Paperback
Page Count 371
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 550g
Dimensions(mm) 150mm * 230mm * 20mm