Memory, Silence and Reconciliation in Africa’s Great Lakes region: A Comparative Study of Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda, 1994-2014.

In the past two decades, the Great Lakes region in central Africa has experienced violent conflict,

genocide and other forms of violence. The sub-region has also been a space to experiment

different kinds of peacebuilding initiatives by both international and local actors. Although many

scholars like Gerald Prunier, Filip Reyntjens,Kenneth Omeje and others have written on the politics

of reconciliation in the region, few researchers have examined the place or the role that memory

or silence plays in these processes, the actors involved in this process and its impact on long term

peace. Therefore, this comparative proposed research will examine the state and role of memory

and silence in the Great Lakes region by comparing three distinct case studies. Namely, Rwanda

that has a State mandated commemoration as key component of government's reconciliation

agenda, North Uganda where remembrance is community driven and part of local reconciliation

initiatives and Democratic Republic of Congo where silence and forgetting is part of peacebuilding.

The proposed study will rely on field interviews and existing secondary sources to explore what

the evolution of these phenomena in the Great Lakes region tells us about the place of collective

remembering or forgetting in peacebuilding.The proposed research topic evolved out of questions

and a gap that the researcher identified when studying the Evolution of Commemoration in one of

the case studies, Rwanda.