November 18, 2025
12:30 pm
-
2:00 pm
Dulles Hall 264
Dr. Gillian Mathys, Ghent University, presents Fractured Pasts Revisited. Histories of Conflicts and Connections in the Lake Kivu Region (DR Congo and Rwanda).
Media reporting on Eastern Congo consistently refers to histories of violence and conflict as presumably self-evident explanations for the protracted conflicts in the Great Lakes region. In this talk based on her recent book Fractured Pasts in Lake Kivu’s Borderlands (2025), Mathys deconstruct such teleological narratives. Instead, she foregrounds the “loose ends of history”—those overlooked processes and relationships that do not neatly fit into genealogies of crisis but are essential for understanding how communities have historically interacted. By tracing long-standing patterns of mobility and cross-lacustrine connections, she shows that such inter-communal ties historically offered protection.
In addition, Mathys adopts a genealogical approach to explaining the region’s fraught past and present, centering historical, social, political, and affective dimensions. In doing so, she puts into perspective the dominant political economy approaches that explain the current crisis by privileging the role of resource competition. Focusing on colonial interventions transforming relations between identities and territory and on the more recent reappropriation of historical narratives within the conflicts helps clarify that neither the current enmity between Rwanda and Congo, nor the antagonisms between communities within Congo are “natural” or inevitable.
Feel free to bring your lunch! For more information, contact Sarah Van Beurden.
This program is sponsored by the Department of History, the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, and the Center for African Studies.