The AUCHAN protest in Dakar: from ethics of resistance to advocacy for local consumption[La protestation Auchan dégage à Dakar : de l’éthique d’une résistance au plaidoyer pour le consommer local]

In this article, we propose to explore food mobilizations, such as Auchan dégage, a protest campaign against the offensive of the French supermarket chain in Senegal, through the prism of the conflict approach, a perspective from the sociology of markets. The study grid of the social movements research program is used to analyze conflicts around food consumption patterns. This work is based on a qualitative survey carried out among the actors of the protest campaign. It is based on the content analysis method. The perspective adopted postulates a consumption that goes beyond the narrow perimeter that orthodox economic theory usually confers on it, its study under the sole angle of the act of purchase. It thus offers the possibility of examining the power relationships, resistance and responses that are organized through the markets. The mobilizations against hunger of the 1970s and 1980s in Africa have been replaced by other forms of mobilization around the issues of food sovereignty and economic patriotism, notably those organized since 2018 against the takeover of urban consumer markets by French supermarkets in Senegal. In doing so, the mobilization is both a refounding issue for the question of consuming locally and an attempt to reappropriate the sector by a peripheral capitalism.