Event: State Of Rebellion - Violence And Intervention In The Central African Republic

Summary: Event recording from 10/04/2017 STATE OF REBELLION: VIOLENCE AND INTERVENTION IN THE CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC Speaker: Louisa Lombard, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Yale. Chair: Dr Kieran Mitton, War Studies, KCL. A joint event of the Africa Research Group and the 'Approaches to Understanding Violence Seminar Series' of the Conflict, Security & Development Research Group. Join Professor Louisa Lombard as she discusses her new book 'State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic', drawing on extensive fieldwork to challenge conventional wisdom about the causes of CAR's violent conflict. About the book: In 2012, a wave of violence swept through the Central African Republic as Seleka rebels clashed with anti-Balaka militias. In the face of seemingly senseless bloodshed, journalists, politicians, and scholars struggled to account for the conflict’s origins. In this first comprehensive account of the violence, Louisa Lombard argues that the conflict was more than a straightforward religious clash between Christians and Muslims. Instead, she traces the roots of the conflict to fears of spiritual insecurity and a social breakdown that drove inter-communal violence. Placing the uprising within its broader social, cultural, and historical context, Lombard reveals the complicated roles played by marginalized rural youths, local political leaders, and the global community in sustaining the conflict, and she offers an urgent corrective to our perceptions of this little-understood country, making a compelling case for international leaders to rethink their approach to resolving the conflict. Reviews: “This valuable, indeed important, study helps us make sense of a little-known but strategically important African country. Those who wish to know Africa today need to know this book.” - Paul Richards, author of No Peace, No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts “If you want to understand why the CAR seems a perpetual work in regress, then Lombard’s book is a must-read. Her new perspectives illuminate a neglected recess of globalization.” - Stephen W. Smith, Duke University “With a stunning combination of conceptual clarity and vivid ethnography, Louisa Lombard’s book challenges conventional wisdom on the roots of violence in the CAR. A must-read for anyone wanting to engage with current debates on peace-building and state-building initiatives.” - Marielle Debos, author of Living by the Gun in Chad “In this stimulating and provocative book, Lombard proposes a new approach to peacekeeping, peace enforcement, and humanitarian action that rests upon a politics of redistribution and acknowledgement of the social dignity of fighters lacking a state.” - Jean-François Bayart, Graduate Institute Geneva “Provides a magisterial reading of the role of violence in the making of the CAR. Authoritative, nuanced, and empirically rich, Lombard offers a new and compelling lens through which so-called state failure and post-conflict transitions can be understood.” - Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley For more information, visit http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/warstudies/events/eventsrecords/lombard.aspx.