Henryk Alff & Anna-Katharina Hornidge

China’s Maritime Silk Road Initiative and the Governance of Small Scale Fisheries in West Africa. Competition, Co-existence & Contestation 

Announced in 2013 by China’s president Xi Jinping as a vision for future connectivity, integration and mutually beneficial development between China and partners in Asia, Africa and Europe, the Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) has been controversially discussed as a vehicle for global infrastructural improvement and cooperation as well as an instrument for China’s increasing foray into the oceanic sphere. While much of the current debate around the MSRI is concerned with geopolitical considerations around the maritime transport of hydrocarbons to and manufactured goods from China, Chinese claims on marine biological resources have so far been less discussed.

The here presented paper will focus on Chinese activities in the fisheries’ sectors of Senegal, Mauretania, and Ghana, posing a stark competition to local small scale fisheries, while at the same time offering income opportunities in a context of resource depletion and job insecurity. Theoretically drawing on a critical Area Studies approach, the paper discusses how the locally found pressures on coastal livelihood systems and the contestation of Chinese activities in West Africa’s fishery sectors, suggest a sociospatial redefinition of the Maritime Silk Road Initiative encompassing West African waters.

By so doing, the paper aims to scrutinize debates on Chinese rapid expansion into the Oceanic realm and, at the same time, to question one-sided geopolitical accusations of the Chinese leadership enforcing neo-colonial relations of resource exploitation on the West African Tropical Atlantic. This piece of ethnographic work, drawing on preliminary field research in St. Louis, Senegal, Nouadhibou, Mauritania and Elmina/Cape Coast, Ghana, rather argues that the increasingly violent appropriation and dispossession of already overused marine resources, and the life-threatening consequences this has, are embedded in a more complex framework of local-to-global coastal governance, resource conflicts, and even cooperation.