Power and Pathways, Violent Conflict and Mobility. Empirical Findings and Conceptual Innovations in Livelihoods Studies.

The contemporary mission of livelihoods studies is to further improve the understanding of exclusionary processes faced by the poor and to guide and inspire interventions to countervail that exclusion. Absolutely crucial to the understanding of exclusionary processes is an effective conceptualisation of power, power relations and power struggles. Then, there is an urgent need to arrive at meaningful generalisations that go beyond the micro-level of the individual, the household and the family. While respecting, valuing and learning from the particularities of the case, livelihoods studies need to come to grips with endless variations through longitudinal analyses of livelihood trajectories and pathways. And finally, two – often mutually interacting – contexts need scrutiny because of the overwhelming impact they have nowadays on the poor’s livelihoods: first, violent conflicts; and second, accelerating mobility with corresponding translocality. The chapter discusses the new prospects for further conceptual innovations in livelihoods studies on these four key dimensions.