The Institute for African Alternatives and our partner Surplus Radical Books are pleased to host visiting Prof. Luca Jourdan of the University of Bologna, who will host a public lecture entitled, Congo: A Multi-dimensional War.
Since the beginning of the 1990s, the Eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo have
been at the core of an extremely violent war. Millions of Congolese have lost their life in a conflict
forgotten by the international media. This talk aims at bringing attention back to the Congo war
focusing on the various factors that fuel it: the competition for mineral resources, the weakness of
the Congolese state (especially its army), the military intervention of neighboring countries (in
particular Rwanda), and the ineffectiveness of the international community.
This public lecture will take place on Wednesday 29th March 2023 at 17:30, at the Activist Café, Bertha House, 67-69 Main Rd, Mowbray.
All are welcome, to attend this interesting and timely installment in our series of critical discussion forums.
Luca Jourdan (Ph.D.) is a Professor in the Department of History and Cultures at the University of Bologna who specializes in Social Anthropology and Political Anthropology. He has a long experience with NGOs (Chad, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Vietnam). Since 2001 he has carried out field research on youth and war, childhood crisis, informal economies and the frontier in North Kivu (Democratic Republic of Congo). From 2004 to 2005 he was the country coordinator in east-DRC for a research project (“Re-imaging peace after massacres”) carried out by CERI (Paris) and financed by the Ford Foundation (USA). He is a member of the Italian Ethnological Mission in Equatorial Africa and he is currently carrying out research in Uganda, financed by the Corus (France) on the impact of the environmental crisis among islanders in the Lake Victoria region.