Workshop: Governance and Connections in Africa's Contemporary Conflicts

19-20 March 2015

A film was made about this workshop, have a look!

Day one, 19 March, is on invitation only.
Africa has been seeing multiple violent conflicts and contestations of the legitimacy of national governments in recent years. These conflict zones range from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa and from Central Africa to the Great Lakes Region. State failure, bad governance, economic crises, social dissatisfaction, the legacy of colonial divisions or ethnic and religious tensions are all relevant aspects of these conflicts but cannot alone explain their complexity. Recent analysis has drawn attention to network(ed) wars in which local, regional and international dynamics meet. This workshop will explore the multi-dimensional connections from and between these conflict zones to gain better insight into the causes of the conflicts and the tenacity of the underlying dynamics of strife and violence.

Guiding concepts
Two concepts will be introduced in this workshop as related; ‘connections’ and ‘governance’. ‘Connections’ can be seen as the linkages between regions that are both obvious and hidden, in the sense of networks of people, goods, ideas and the new media; and ‘governance’ here refers to alternative forms of governance that steer these conflicts by adopting (ir)regular rules and power relations often outside the control of state rule. The aim of this workshop is to think through notions of ‘governance in connections’ as an alternative understanding of the way these apparently unordered conflict zones after all show common dynamics that even connect huge geographical zones and lead to discover new borders.

Day two, 20 March
Public Lecture 'Globalised Conflict Situations - Nigeria's Boko Haram in Perspective'.
By Egosha E. Osaghae, Professor of Comparative Politics and Vice Chancellor of Igbinedion University, Okada, Nigeria