Scientific Symposium: "Burundi in East Africa: Opportunities and challenges"
The 40 years old partnership between Baden-Württemberg and Burundi has to be situated in specific temporal and spatial contexts that have a formative effect:
- Burundi was a (marginal) part of the larger German colony of German East Africa; what happens between Germany and Tanzania on a larger scale is still important today - and also instructive via the somewhat longer-established bilateral culture of remembrance.
- Burundi's violent conflicts in the recent past have had cross-border implications. Both the escalation patterns, conflict consequences such as refugee camps and permanently displaced persons, as well as political "engineering" in copying or differentiating from other models show the importance of regional embedding.
- As a landlocked country, Burundi is particularly dependent on its East African neighbors, through which almost all of its imports and exports pass. Regional integration within the East African Community, which is currently reorganizing itself and possibly focusing even more strongly on the Indian Ocean as a trading area, therefore has direct consequences for the country.
This conference should therefore help to better geographically and temporally contextualize Burundi and the partnership with Baden-Württemberg, in order to develop realistic, pragmatically meaningful perspectives for cooperation.
The event will be held in English and French without translation.
The online program of the symposium can be found here in English and French.
Registration for online participation is possible here.
Organized by: Hochschulnetzwerk für Globale Partnerschaften Baden-Württemberg (GloPart), Africa Centre for Transregional Research, Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institute
With support from the Foundation for Development Cooperation in Baden-Württemberg (SEZ)
