Past Events / Dates

A Hybrid Lecture by Prof. Dr. Paul Basu on the relationship between colonialism and conflict, and colonialism and knowledge production about conflict.

This event brings together scholars, activists, and practitioners to critically assess EU border externalisation policies in the region of West Africa.

“Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict” (Hierarchies) will be launched in the context of this year’s conference of the Association for African Studies in Germany (VAD), starting off with a roundtable.

The series explores a central theme in migration research, namely the identity-mobility nexus, but does so through ongoing research from across the African continent. The theme encompasses issues relating to xenophobia and migrant integration, documentation and migrant rights, and the role of the diaspora. The emphasis is on intra-African migration.

Thailand has been through turbulent years. The pandemic was accompanied by heavy protests against the monarchy and the government in 2020. After a hard lockdown in 2021, Thailand abandoned its zero-Covid strategy and has been opening the country ever since. With the tourism, the hope for a better future returns. At the same time, the recovery is hindered by soaring prices for resources and food. Where does the country stand in the last year of the government led by PM Prayut? How does the country view the war in Ukraine and in Myanmar?

Based on two research projects on forced migration and peace in African countries, a workshop series will take place in 2022 with interdisciplinary researchers in forced migration research that have a focus on Africa.

Ingo Rohrer is an anthropologist who works on the role of imaginaries in the criminal justice system in Argentina. He will speak on Thursday at the ALMA Research Series, Freiburg's interdisciplinary colloquium on social transformations in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

Inés Durán Matute, currently a fellow at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, will present and discuss her work on indigenous resistance against energy and infrastructure projects in Mexico.

This lecture by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (Bayreuth) shows how African Studies became imbricated in global imperial designs and at the same time deploying the concept of decolonial intellectual turns to map out the key moments in academic resistance to the cognitive empire and how this shaped African Studies from an Africa vantage point.

Not least since the European “refugee crisis” in 2015, there has been a lot of focus in newspapers and discussions on African migration to Europe, the live of African migrants in Europe and to some extent their journeys coming here. The understanding of African migration is overtly simplified, stripped from all nuances and near-exclusively put into a negative light. In this roundtable discussion, three African scholars will discuss their work in migration research, their positionality, contemporary debates in academia and society as well as what a more nuanced understanding of African migration could mean for a better relationship between the two continents.

The VAD conference 2022 in Freiburg focused on the theme “Africa and Europe: Reciprocal Perspectives” and will address processes of co-production of knowledge as well as the mutual questioning of different ways of thinking.

In the webinar, Julia Gurol presents her paper in which she deconstructs Sino-Emirati relations in the field of digital surveillance. Inspired by Social Network Theory, she explores three transregional public-private elite networks as multipliers for the travelling of authoritarian practices. She shows that authoritarian diffusion under the umbrella of fighting the pandemic is not spatially bound to geopolitical proximity or other structural similarities, but rather a global phenomenon that is reproduced by state and non-state actors.