The IOB Great Lakes of Africa Centre (GLAC) aims to give more visibility to our research on the Central African Great Lakes Region. The Central African Great Lakes Region stands out as a region of interest for many staff members and other scholars affiliated with IOB, across all research lines. Their work deals with a variety of topics (livelihoods, peace, gender, public services, etc.) and adopts a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. IOB’s partnerships with local academic partners in DRC, Uganda, Burundi and Tanzania and the annual publication of our yearbook ‘Conjonctures de l’Afrique centrale’ also stand witness to IOB’s institutional interest in the region.
GLAC Seminars
GLAC organises a series of online seminars, helping IOB staff members working on the region to present their work to interested audiences worldwide and thus to reach out to fellow academics and policy circles. Surf to the website to find a list of both past and upcoming seminars.
Modern Rwanda
One of the GLAC seminars featured a book presentation by Filip Reyntjens. In his book, Modern Rwanda, he traces 150 years of Rwanda’s political history—from precolonial times to the 1994 genocide & the rise of the RPF. You can watch the recordings of this presentation here.
Conjonctures de l’Afrique Centrale 2025
A yearly tradition for GLAC is the publication of the “Conjonctures de l’Afrique centrale”. It is a joint publication by the Belgian Centre for Expertise on Central Africa (CRE-AC), the Great Lakes of Africa Centre (GLAC) at IOB, the Royal Museum for Central Africa (MRAC) and the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL). It offers peer reviewed scientific analyses of contemporary dynamics of political, economic and social life in Central Africa. Each edition is coordinated by a team of editors of IOB, UCL and CRE-AC.
This year’s edition is edited by Anuarite Bashizi and Vedaste Cituli Alinirhu and examines the escalation of the conflict between Rwanda and the DRC and its impact on political and security dynamics in the Great Lakes region. Drawing on fieldwork in Rwanda, Burundi and the DRC, it analyses authoritarian consolidation, militarisation, extractivism and structural crises, while highlighting local forms of adaptation and resistance. The volume offers key insights into the region’s ongoing transformations. Stay tuned for the release.
In the meantime, you can still check out previous editions, of which the 2023 one is open access.
Political Chronicles 2024
Continuing the tradition of L’Afrique des grands lacs: Annuaire, this companion volume to Conjonctures de l’Afrique centrale (Paris, L’Harmattan), offers a yearly survey of political developments in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda; which was largely dominated by the war in Eastern DRC in which all four countries were involved. Political Chronicles are available as a free, open-access download from the IOB website.
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