Join us for this talk with Dr. Ann A. Laudati on natural resources and armed violence in the eastern Democratic Republic. Welcome remarks will be provided by MPPGA student John Ede and Carla Suarez, Killam and SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs.
Lunch will be provided with RSVP. This event will take place in the xʷθəθiqətəm (Place of many trees), formerly the Multipurpose Room, Liu Institute for Global Issues.
In Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, nearly all armed groups and state forces have been or are directly or indirectly involved in illegal natural resource extraction. While minerals, namely, coltan, diamonds, and gold, have been shown to play a key role in generating, sustaining and strongly affecting the course and impact of armed conflict within Congo’s eastern provinces, increasing evidence from researchers working in the area demonstrate that a much wider portfolio of natural resources is at play. Fundamental to unraveling the necessarily complex role of natural resources in shaping and being shaped by Congo’s violence, requires research which clarifies the differentiated nature(s) of these resources. Drawing on over 16 months of qualitative and survey data collection in Eastern DR Congo since 2009, this talk focuses on a case study of cannabis as illustrative of the larger research project that explores how particular resources differentially influence and shape the country’s landscape of violence and how these resources are entangled in the everyday lives of conflict actors.
Photo credit goes to Ann Laudati for all pictures.
Bio: Dr. Ann A. Laudati is a broadly trained human-environmental geographer with specializations in natural resource conflict, war economies, livelihoods and (in)security, conservation and development, political ecology, qualitative field methods, and Sub-Saharan Africa. After gaining her doctorate at the University of Oregon, she taught at Utah State University followed by the University of Bristol before moving back to the states. She is currently finishing a Social Science Research Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley where she also teaches as a Visiting Professor of Geography.
*Photo Credit: Ann Laudati
Sponsored by: The Decision Making for Humanitarian Crises (DMHC)
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