The Politics of Return

Professor Tim Allen is the inaugural Director of the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa and the Head of the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Tim has expertise in the fields of complex emergencies, ethnic conflict, forced migration, local conceptions of health and healing, controlling tropical diseases, humanitarianism and development aid. Much of his field research has focussed on East Africa.

 Email: t.allen@lse.ac.uk

Dorothy Atim is a researcher in northern Uganda. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in education from Makerere University and a post-graduate diploma in Project Planning and Management from Gulu University.

She has over five years experience doing clinical inter-personal psychotherapy with formerly abducted ex-LRA children 14-18 years old. Since then she has been involved in various research projects. Her interests are on mental health, gender-based violence, and reintegration of ex-combatants.

 

Jacky Atingo is a researcher in northern Uganda. She holds an MSc in Development Studies with a major in Human Rights and social justice from Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, a post-graduate diploma in Peace and Conflict Management from Gulu University, as well as a Bachelor’s Degree from Makerere University in Development Studies

Her expertise is in the areas of sexual and gender-based. violence, children born into rebel movements, conflict, land issues, transitional justice and reintegration of ex-combatants. She is also interested in the accountability of the missing persons [re-burial of the missing person].

 

Dr Tatiana Carayannis (@TCarayannis) is director of the Social Science Research Council’s new Understanding Violent Conflict Initiative and deputy director of the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum.

She also leads a project on China’s engagement in Africa, The China-Africa Knowledge Project, convenes the DRC Affinity Group, a small brain trust of leading Congo scholars and analysts, and serves as a research director of the Conflict Research Programme and senior fellow at LSE. 

 Email: carayannis@ssrc.org

Dr. José Bazonzi is the Politics of Return local coordinator for the western DRC research team, and specialises in local dynamics in the Kongo Central province.

He is based at the Université de Kinshasa in the faculty of social sciences, administration and politics and is also a researcher and teacher in the sociology department at the Centre d'Etudes Politiques.

 

Kara Blackmore is an anthropologist, curator and writer who works at the intersections of arts, culture and social repair after conflict.

She has more than a decade of experience working directly with NGOs, governments, corporate entities, cultural institutions and local communities across East and Southern Africa. In her practice, she uses exhibitions as an arena to promote dialogue around challenging issues such as war, peace and reconciliation.

To critically reflect on this work, she is pursuing a PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science, focusing on the relationship between memorialization and transitional justice.

 Email: k.a.blackmore@lse.ac.uk

Emery Mushagalusa Mudinga (@EmeryMudinga)  is a lecturer, researcher and consultant based at the Institut Supérieur de Développement Rural de Bukavu (ISDR Bukavu) in the DRC. He holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the University of Louvain-la-Neuve and a Masters degree in Development Studies.

Emery's research focuses on land grabs dynamics and local resistance in Africa, armed groups dynamics, resource conflicts, peacebuilding and research ethics.

Alongside his work for CPAID, Emery is the scientific coordinator of the Land Rush project based at ISDR Bukavu and Université catholique de Louvain. Prior to ISDR-Bukavu, Emery worked as a Technique Advisor in Conflicts Transformation, Peacebuilding, Civil Society Organizations Capacity building and Advocacy at the Life and Peace Institute in DR. Congo.

Email: mudingae@yahoo.fr

Chrispin Mvano works as a journalist, photographer and researcher in North-Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo. Chrispin holds a Masters in Social, Political and Administrative science from the University of Goma (UNIGOM).

Chrispin is specialised in the armed militias active in the region. In the past he has worked for numerous organisations including Reuters and Flemish news platform MO. 

Dr Anna Macdonald is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the LSE Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa. She holds a BA in modern history from the University of Oxford; an MSc in the Theory and History of International Relations from the LSE and a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London.

Anna's research interests are in conceptions of law, justice, statehood and social order in central Africa. She is currently in receipt of a Leverhulme British Academy research grant and also works as a research fellow on the DFID-funded Conflict Research Programme (CRP), which examines violence and political markets in Africa and the Middle East and the new ESRC-funded Centre for Public Authority and International Development (CPAID).  Her recent research has been published in Development and Change, Africa, and the International Journal on Minority and Group Rights. 

Email: a.macdonald1@lse.ac.uk

José Ndala is a Politics of Return researcher in the western DRC sites of Gbadolite and Gemena in Nord and Sud Ubangi provinces.

He is also a lecturer at the Université de Gbadolite in the faculty of law, and will be essential to the project as an interviewer of demobilised combatants in the region, and in his engagements with the Central African Republic refugee community in and around Inke.

Tony Odda  holds a Masters in Development Studies from Bugema University, where his research focused on  morality and resilience in Arua district.

Alongside his research role with the Politics of Return project, Tony is a Sub County Chief of Moyo district, and has previously held similar administrative management roles in Arua district. Tony has also worked with UNHCR as a verification officer, recording data on refugees in the region. 

Aaron Pangburn is the Program Manager of the Social Science Research Council’s new Understanding Violent Conflict Initiative (UVC).

Previously, he served as a program coordinator for SSRC’s Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum’s special projects in Africa, including the Justice and Security Research Programme, DRC Affinity Group, and Accommodation of Justice for Displaced in DRC research consortium. He joined CPPF in January 2013 and also supports CPPF’s Africa programming with the United Nations. 

Email: pangburn@ssrc.org

Professor Melissa Parker is a medical anthropologist at the Department of Global Health and Development, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

She has worked on a range of global health issues in Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda including: mental health and well-being among war-affected populations; the control of neglected tropical diseases; emerging infectious diseases; the anthropology of evidence and public policy.

In 2014, she helped to establish the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform.

Email: melissa.parker@lshtm.ac.uk

Dr Holly Porter is a Research Fellow in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and holds a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship with the Institute of Development Policy and Management (University of Antwerp) and the Conflict Research Group (Ghent University).

Holly's research has focused on gender, sexualities, violence, and local notions of healing and justice in northern Uganda where she has lived for more than ten years.

She is the author of After Rape: violence justice and social harmony in Uganda published by Cambridge University Press. Her work has also been published in journals including Africa, the Women's Studies International Forum, and the Journal of Eastern African Studies.

Email: h.e.porter@lse.ac.uk

Liz Storer (@lizziestorer) is a PhD student in the Department of International Development, London School of Economics. She is currently based in Arua, West Nile.

Working with Lugbara speaking communities, her research seeks to ascertain how individuals and groups in the region define wrongdoing, injustice and danger, and the various forms of public authority which become entangled in associated dispute resolution.

Liz is also involved in research with South Sudanese refugees in West Nile. She has previously received an M.Phil in Development Studies and a BA in Geography, both from the University of Cambridge. 

Email: e.storer@lse.ac.uk

Dr Joe Trapido is a Research Officer on the the Politics of Return project based at the LSE Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa.  He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from University College London. He has worked at several universities, including the University of Pretoria in South Africa and at SOAS in London, where I am currently, teaching in the Anthropology department.

He recently published a monograph entitled Breaking Rocks: Music, Ideology and Economic Collapse, from Paris to Kinshasa.

His most recent research is about city politics in Kinshasa, looking in detail at very small, ethnographic scale but also connecting this to national and international dimensions.

Email: j.trapido@lse.ac.uk

Professor Koen Vlassenroot (@kvlassen) is  the Director of the Conflict Research Group (CRG) at Ghent University and the Africa Programme at Egmont Institute in Brussels.

He is an international expert on conflict dynamics in Central Africa and conducts research on armed groups, conflict and governance, with a particular focus on eastern Congo. 

Email: koen.vlassenroot@ugent.be

Willy Karekezi is an artist-in-residence at the 32º East, Ugandan Arts Trust as part of the Politics of Return project.

He is a self-taught Rwandan visual artist. Karekezi is interested in everyday lives of people around him and wants to portray the dynamics of human realities. He uses painting, live making and sculpture to express himself. Karekezi works in Kigali. 

Thembo Muhindo Kashauri, or better known in the artistic community as KASH, is one of the premier cartoonists, caricaturists and advertising designers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He created the logo for Politics of Return, and will provide additional political cartoons and artistic commentaries to help display the findings of the  project.

Born in Butembo in the northeast of DRC, KASH went to primary and secondary school in Beni and, after receiving his state diploma, moved to the capital Kinshasa to enroll in the Academy of Fine Arts in 1987. After receiving his degree in Graphic Arts, KASH began his freelance career in advertising design, and in parallel became the first and most prominent political cartoonist in one of Kinshasa's largest newspapers, Le Phare and later in Le Potentiel.  

His cartoons have also been published internationally in Congo-Brazzaville in Talatala, in Belgium in Le Soir, in France in Jeune Afrique, in Switzerland in Hebdo, and exhibited in DR Congo, Congo - Brazzaville, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Morocco, Niger, Vietnam, Mauritius, Isle of Réunion, Algeria, Cameroon and Guinea-Conakry. KASH has also published a number of comic books, which have raised awareness on a number critical issues (environmental protection, education, prevention of STDs and HIV/AIDS), and organised five editions of the African Fair of Comic Strips and Reading for Youth.  

Gael Kusa Kusa Maski is an artist-in-residence at the 32º East, Ugandan Arts Trust as part of the Politics of Return project.

He was born in Kalemie, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The experience of conflict and fleeing to Kinshasa as a child has inspired his work in the study of his society. Through collage, Maski asserts that the world is a confrontation of several simultaneous realities that allows us to identify questions and observations around memory, conflict and social oppression. 

Bathsheba Okwenje is an artist-in-residence at the 32º East, Ugandan Arts Trust as part of the Politics of Return project.

She is an interdisciplinary, researcher-artist working at the intersection of information practices and aesthetics. Her work explores the hidden histories of people, their interior lives and the interactions between them. Okwenje is also part of a collective called Radha May that has recently undertaken to investigate issues of aesthetic censorship. She is based in Uganda.

32º East | Ugandan Arts Trust is an independent, non-profit organisation focused on the creation and exploration of contemporary art in Uganda.

Action Pour la Promotion Rurale (APRU) is an association NGO. APRU participates in the reconstitution of basic social services. It participates in the rehabilitation of social infrastructures including bridges, schools, and health and maternity clinics.

It also contributes to struggles against AIDS through sensitisation and in the promotion and protection of women’s and children’s rights. Lastly, it is conducts research on access to justice and security. 

The African Youth Initiative Network (AYINET) is an independent national NGO in Uganda. AYINET has implement several important projects on post conflict recovery, paying much attention to transitional justice and healing among the growing youth populations in Uganda.

AYINET's director, Victor Ochen, was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and currently serves as an ambassador to the UN on Sustainable Development Goal 16, Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions. 

The Centre for Political Studies (CEP) is a research centre operating in the School of Social, Administrative and Political Sciences of the University of Kinshasa. CEP brings together some fifty researchers; maintains activities in five main areas: research, training, studies, surveys and appraisals, publication and documentation; and institutionally it privileges collective and interdisciplinary research.

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine is a world-leading centre for research and postgraduate education in public and global health, with more than 4,000 students and 1,000 staff working in over 100 countries. The School is one of the highest-rated research institutions in the UK, is among the world's leading schools in public and global health, and was named University of the Year in the Times Higher Education Awards 2016. Our mission is to improve health and health equity in the UK and worldwide; working in partnership to achieve excellence in public and global health research, education and translation of knowledge into policy and practice.

The Conflict Research Group (CRG) is a multidisciplinary research unit at Ghent University (Faculty of Political and Social Sciences). We are primarily interested in the micro-level dynamics of civil conflicts and concentrate both on the impact of civil conflicts on local communities, and on the links between local and global dimensions of conflict.

CRG's crosscutting analysis has led to the comparison of different geographical case studies, from Asia and sub-Sahara Africa to Latin America. Our research centres around three clusters: resources, governance and humanitarian aid.

Institut Supérieur Pédagogique de Bukavu is one of the leading teaching institutes of South Kivu and is based on Bukavu.

It was created in 1961, and houses the Centre de Recherches Universitaires du Kivu, which promotes local research activities and invests in local research capacity.

The Social Science Research Council is an independent, international, nonprofit organization founded in 1923.

Governed by a board of directors, it fosters innovative research, nurtures new generations of social scientists, deepens how inquiry is practiced within and across disciplines, and mobilizes necessary knowledge on important public issues.