Known as highly mobile cattle nomads, the Woɗaaɓe in Niger are today increasingly engaged in a transformation process towards a more diversified livelihood based primarily on agro-pastoralism and urban work migration. This book examines recent transformations in spatial patterns, notably in the context of urban migration and in processes of sedentarization in rural proto-villages. The book analyses the consequences that the recent change entails for social group formation and collective identification, and how this impacts integration into wider society amid the structures of the modern nation state.

“A highly welcome contribution to research on mobility in West Africa and more particularly in the West-African Sahel region in as far as it focusses on the complexity of mobility phenomena in a pastoral nomadic group." Elisabeth Boesen, Université du Luxembourg “This is a wonderful and deeply detailed study of a group of Wodaabe in Niger. The author’s descriptions of a sub-group of Gojanko’en and their various strategies of mobility, dispersion, and cohesion is absorbing and clearly based on solid fieldwork." Wendy Wilson-Fall, Oeschle Center for Global Education

Florian Köhler is currently a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He is also trained as a practitioner in peace-building and conflict-resolution and worked for the German Development Service (DED) in Haiti and for the Civil Peace Service (ZFD) in Niger, Benin and Burkina Faso.