Panel 3 The Congolese military in context

ASAUK Panel Proposal 3 (of 12)

This panel will be presented at the biannual conference of the ASAUK (African Studies Association in the UK) in September 2012 (Leeds, Sept 6-8). The organizers have invited the Congo Research Network to participate in this. 12 Congo related panels have been accepted.

If you wish to participate, you can join already accepted panels or you can submit a stand-alone paper. Participants should submit their paper abstracts via the ASAUK website. First, they should register as authors, then select the panel in which they want to participate, and then enter their abstract.

The following link gives you more information about registration: http://www.asauk.net/conferences/asauk12.shtml

The deadline for the submission of paper abstracts is 27 April 2012.

To attend the event without presenting a paper, contact the conference organizer David Kerr (conference@asauk.net, +44 (0)121 414 5124)

Panel Convener: Judith Verweijen, PhD Candidate, Utrecht University, judithverweijen@gmail.com

Panel title: The Congolese military in context

Description:
Over the last years, representations of the Congolese military, the FARDC (Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo), have become one of the most important pillars of historical Western imaginings of the Congo as the epitome of savagery. There is no better incarnation of the New Barbarian than the raping, looting and pillaging FARDC soldier that is omnipresent in contemporary media and NGO reporting, which focuses predominantly on sexual violence and so called “conflict minerals”.
This flurry of one-sided attention has caused rather simplistic explanations for the FARDC’s undeniable weak institutionalization and abusive behavior to dominate. These shortcomings in analysis are in part the result of the dearth of fundamental academic research on the FARDC, reflecting the scarcity of academic attention to militaries in Sub-Saharan Africa in general. This panel is intended to be a platform for academic discussion on the FARDC, drawing from a variety of disciplines in order to advance understandings of the FARDC and their role in Congolese society. By placing the Congolese military firmly in their political, economic, cultural, social and historical context, it hopes to move beyond the at times sterile policy-prescriptive discussions of the SSR-genre.

Chair:
Maria Stern, Professor, Institute of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
maria.stern@globalstudies.gu.se

Presenters:
Maria Eriksson Baaz, Professor, Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden
Olaf Bachmann, PhD Candidate, King’s College London, UK
Bryant P. Shaw, Professor, Troy University, USA
Judith Verweijen, PhD Candidate, Utrecht University, the Netherlands