The Baden-Württemberg University Network for Global Partnerships (GloPart), the Africa Centre for Transregional Research and the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, with the support of the Foundation for Development Cooperation in Baden-Württemberg (SEZ), invite to the academic symposium “Burundi in East Africa: Opportunities and challenges”.
The 40 years of partnership between Baden-Württemberg and Burundi have a specific temporal and spatial context that has a formative effect:
1. Burundi was a (marginal) part of the larger German colony of German East Africa. What happens between Germany and Burundi’s neighboring state Tanzania on a larger scale is still important today - and also instructive via the somewhat longer-established bilateral culture of remembrance.
2. 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.
3. As a landlocked country, Burundi is particularly dependent on its East African neighbours, through which almost all its imports and exports pass. Therefore, regional integration within the East African Community, which is currently reorganising itself and possibly focusing even more strongly on the Indian Ocean as a trading area, directly affects the country.
This conference seeks to geographically and temporally contextualise Burundi and the partnership with Baden-Württemberg better, in order to develop realistic, pragmatically meaningful perspectives for cooperation.
The event will be held in English and French without translation.
Here you can find the program of the online symposium in English and French.