What: RPCV Virtual Reunion - Jason Stearns - Guest Speaker
When: April 15, 2023 at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET
Where: Online via Zoom - (registration will be available the week of March 13)
Jason Stearns will be our guest speaker. You may wish to read his newest book prior to our call: The War That Doesn't Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo (hardcover or Amazon Kindle). The book is also available in Apple Books (link opens in Books for iOS or macOS).
"Since 2001, Jason has been focused on better understanding the factors contributing to armed conflict in the Congo. He has worked for Héritiers de la Justice, a Congolese human rights organization, the International Crisis Group, the Rift Valley Institute, the United Nations peacekeeping mission, and Yale University. In 2008, he was coordinator on the United Nations Group of Experts on the DR Congo. In 2010, he published Dancing in the Glory of Monster: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (Public Affairs), a narrative history of the Congolese wars between 1996 and 2006. He is currently finalizing another book on conflict dynamics since 2006, to be published by Princeton University Press in 2020."
His articles and opinion pieces have appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Africa Confidential, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.
Stearns contributes to numerous policy reports for the Congo Research Group in English and in French.
Board member, Paul Garriepy, reviewed Stearns previous book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters.
Jason K Stearns worked and lived in the Congo for a decade. His book portrays vivid accounts of victims, perpetrators and eyewitnesses of events preceding of events which preceded the Rwandan genocide of 1994, an indirect cause of both Congolese wars. Stearns describes in detail not only the political causes of these conflicts but the economic factors to make sense of the “madness” which still lingers in the RDC to this day. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters is well documented by interviews with heroes, villains and victims of these atrocities. The book recounts stories within stories, how war made more sense than peace.