Little known in the English-speaking world, Burundi is Rwanda's twin, a small Central African country with a complex history of ethnic tension between its Hutu and Tutsi populations that has itself experienced traumatic events, including mass killings of over 200,000 people. The country remained in a state of simmering civil war until 2004, after which Julius Nyerere and Nelson Mandela took turns as mediators in a lengthy, and eventually successful, peace process which has endowed Burundi with new institutions, including a new constitution, that led to the election of a majority Hutu government in 2005. But there are many problems still to solve apart from ethnic tensions, above all the entrenched poverty of most Burundians, which has seen it designated by NGOs as one of the most deprived countries on earth.Nigel Watt's book discusses the troubled political fortunes of this beautiful yet disturbed country in the heart of Central Africa. He traces the origins of its political crises, sheds light on Burundi's recent history by means of interviews with leading participants and those whose lives have been affected by horrific events, and helps demystify the country's ethnic divisions.

Burundi has recently emerged from twelve years of devastating civil war. Its economy has been destroyed and hundreds and thousands of people have been killed. In this book, the voices of ordinary Burundians are heard for the first time. Farmers, artisans, traders, mothers, soldiers and students talk about the past and the future, war and peace, their hopes for a better life and their relationships with each other and the state. Young men, in particular, often seen as the cause of violence and war, talk about the difficulties of living up to standards of masculinity in an impoverished and war-torn society. Weaving a rich tapestry, Peter Uvin pitches the ideas and aspirations of people on the ground against the theory and assumptions often made by the international development and peace-building agencies and organisations. In doing this, he illuminates both shared goals and misunderstandings. This groundbreaking book on conflict and society in Africa will have profound repercussions for development across the world.

Burundi, a small landlocked country located in East Africa, has a population of approximately 12 million people. The country is bordered by Rwanda, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Burundi, which gained independence from Belgium in 1962, is known for its political instability, poverty, and ethnic conflict. The country has experienced several coups and attempted coups since gaining independence, with the most recent one occurring in 2015. Burundi is also known for its civil war, which lasted from 1993 to 2005 and claimed the lives of approximately 300,000 people. Despite these challenges, Burundi remains home to several ethnic groups, including the Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa people, and has a rich cultural heritage. Burundi is primarily an agricultural economy, with coffee and tea being the main exports. However, the country also has significant deposits of nickel, cobalt, and uranium. Burundi has a relatively young population, with over half of its inhabitants being under the age of 25. The country has made significant progress in improving its healthcare and education systems, with a particularly strong focus on increasing access for girls and women. The government has also implemented policies aimed at reducing poverty and promoting economic development. Despite these efforts, Burundi remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with the majority of the population living below the poverty line.

This book explores how categories of identity such as "Hutu" and "Tuts" produced through violence and exile. In 1972 the Burundi army, controlled by t Tutsis, responded to an attempted Hutu rebellion with mass killings of the Hutu The author conducted a year of anthropological field research in Western Tanzani among two groups of Hutu refugees who had fled the killings. One refugee group Kigoma township and the other in the isolated Mishamo refugee camp. The town refugees tended to seek ways of assimilating and inhabiting multiple shifting id contrast to the camp refugees who continually engaged in an impassioned reconstr of their history as a people. Ethnic traits ascribed by social scientists and were freely borrowed to assert cultural difference in this process of identity r In highlighting the different responses to exile in the two refugee groups, this against the assumption that displacement erodes collective identity and shows th possible for refugees in camps to locate their identities within their very disp Mishamo, the refugee camp itself functioned as a spatial and symbolic site for i political and moral community of Hutu.

The story of Burundi is not simply about Africans or Americans, but about all of us. Compelling and heartrending account of Ambassador Kruger and his wife.

This book offers a novel sociological examination of the historical trajectories of Burundi and Rwanda. It challenges both the Eurocentric assumptions which have underpinned many sociological theorisations of modernity, and the notion that the processes of modernisation move gradually, if precariously, towards more peaceable forms of cohabitation within and between societies. Addressing these themes at critical historical junctures – precolonial, colonial and postcolonial – the book argues that the recent experiences of extremely violent social conflict in Burundi and Rwanda cannot be seen as an ‘object apart’ from the concerns of sociologists, as it is commonly presented. Instead, these experiences are situated within a specific route to and through modernity, one ‘entangled’ with Western modernity. A contribution to an emerging global historical sociology, Entanglements of Modernity, Colonialism and Genocide will appeal to scholars of sociology and social theory with interests in postcolonialism, historical sociology, multiple modernities and genocide.

An examination of how peacekeeping is woven into national, regional and international politics in Africa, and its consequences.

Since the early 1990s, the African Great Lakes region has experienced a series of traumas that have profoundly disrupted its geopolitical, economic, social, and demographic stability. Despite numerous peace accords, political compromises, and international interventions, the region has yet to eliminate the tensions that regularly manifest in hate and violence. Featuring contributions from historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists, this collection accounts for the omnipresent "metastases of hatred and violence" in the Great Lakes region. Through a series of detailed case studies, contributors outline the genealogy and historicity of violence in the region while remaining sensitive to the singular, contingent experiences of each country.

Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa is a collection of ten studies by the most prominent historians of the region. Slavery was more important in the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa than often has been assumed, and Africans from the interior played a more complex role than was previously recognized. The essays in this collection reveal the connections between the peoples of the region as well as their encounters with the conquering Europeans. The contributors challenge the assertion that domestic slavery increased in Africa as a result of the international trade. Slavery in this region was not a uniform phenomenon and the line between enslaved and non-slave labor was fine. Kinship ties could mark the difference between free and unfree labor. Social categories were not always clear-cut and the status of a slave could change within a lifetime. Contents: - Introduction by Henri Médard - Language Evidence of Slavery to the Eighteenth Century by David Schoenbrun - The Rise of Slavery & Social Change in Unyamwezi 1860–1900 by Jan-Georg Deutsch - Slavery & Forced Labour in the Eastern Congo 1850–1910 by David Northrup - Legacies of Slavery in North West Uganda ‘The One-Elevens’ by Mark Leopold - Human Booty in Buganda: The Seizure of People in War, c.1700–c.1900 by Richard Reid - Stolen People & Autonomous Chiefs in Nineteenth-Century Buganda by Holly Hanson - Women’s Experiences of Slavery in Late Nineteenth- & Early Twentieth-Century Uganda by Michael W. Tuck - Slavery & Social Oppression in Ankole 1890–1940 by Edward I. Steinhart - The Slave Trade in Burundi & Rwanda at the Beginning of German Colonisation 1890–1906 by Jean-Pierre Chretien - Bunyoro & the Demography of Slavery Debate by Shane Doyle

Telling the neglected history of decolonisation and violence in Burundi, Aidan Russell examines the political language of truth that drove extraordinary change, from democracy to genocide. By focusing on the dangerous border between Burundi and Rwanda, this study uncovers the complexity from which ethnic ideologies, side-lined before independence in 1962, became gradually all-consuming by 1972. Framed by the rhetoric and uncertainty of 'truth', Russell draws on both African and European language source material to demonstrate how values of authority and citizenship were tested and transformed across the first decade of Burundi's independence, and a post-colony created in the interactions between African peasants and politicians across the margins of their states. Culminating with a rare examination of the first postcolonial genocide on the African continent, a so-called 'forgotten genocide' on the world stage, Russell reveals how the postcolonial order of central Africa came into being.