“In Congo the population protects people”, Kambere, a Congolese human rights defender, explains. Growing up in a region wracked by complex and enduring violent conflicts, this seminar explores the everyday lives of the young people who come to be the ‘human’ in human rights. For many in the DRC ‘human rights’ – les droits de l’homme – are understood to be the men and women who strive to protect and defend them in a landscape of violence and fear.
Drawing upon two years of ethnographic research with Congolese human rights defenders forced to flee into Uganda as refugees, this seminar examines how these social agents navigate multiple forms of everyday violence through the social action of rights work. Out of such states of emergency, these Congolese youth emerge from violent crisis through a frame of potentiality, identity and action within a dynamic but oppressed civil society.
Forced to flee into Uganda, they become enmeshed in the humanitarian realm of ‘refuge’, stretching across the isolated refugee camps and dense urban neighbourhoods of Uganda. They are subjected to new legislation repressing their political rights. The final part of this seminar explores how whilst many continue to engage in rights work, the scope of this social action transforms and can come to act as a form of resistance in the ‘politics of living’ under a humanitarian condition in which refugees continue to face multiple forms of everyday violence.
About the Speaker:
Katie McQuaid is currently completing her thesis after two years of ethnographic fieldwork (2011-2012) amongst Congolese refugees in Uganda. She focuses upon the ways refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo imagine, articulate and frame their everyday experiences of violence, conflict, forced displacement, human rights and humanitarianism in the Great Lakes region of Africa.
Her research explores everyday local understandings of violence, voice and rights as refugees come to be enmeshed within Uganda’s humanitarian refugee realm. Part of her work explores the lived realities of sexual minority refugees from DRC, Rwanda and Burundi fleeing into Uganda; and the activities of Congolese human rights defenders at home and in ‘refuge’.
Katie holds an MA in Social Anthropology (University of Edinburgh, 2007), and in the Anthropology of Conflict, Violence and Conciliation (University of Sussex, 2008), and an MSc in Comparative and Cross-Cultural Research Methods (University of Sussex, 2010). She worked with the Refugee Law Project in Uganda from 2011 to 2012.
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