Ricardo Soares de Oliveira will discuss Angola's reconstruction trajectory following the end of the country's civil war in 2002. On the strength of an oil boom, the hegemonic control of its ruling party, and a partnership with China, Angola's reconstruction was self-defined and turned liberal peace-building on its head. Based on this study of post-civil war reconstruction in Africa's third largest economy, Soares de Oliveira delineates the traits of an illiberal approach to post-war state-building that is becoming increasingly common.

Ricardo Soares de Oliveira is Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Peter’s College, Oxford. He is also a fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin and Senior Associated Researcher at the Christian Michelsen Institute in Bergen. His research interests include African politics (particularly West and Central Africa), the geopolitics of energy, state decay and post-conflict reconstruction. His latest book isMagnificent and Beggar Land: Angola Since the Civil War (2015) and his op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Foreign Affairs, Politico and the Financial Times. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Africa and South Asia and worked in the field of governance and extractive industries for the World Bank, the European Commission, Catholic Relief Services, the National Democratic Institute and Oxfam.

Eric Morier-Genoud is a lecturer in African and Imperial History at Queen’s University Belfast. He has written extensively on religion and on politics in southern Africa, and he researches currently on missionaries and transnational sciences and politics as well as war, memory and memorial in contemporary Mozambique. He is a co-author with Caroline Jeannerat and Didier Péclard of Embroiled: Swiss Churches, South Africa and Apartheid, (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2011); and editor or co-editor of Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique (Leiden: Brill, 2012), Imperial Migrations. Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and The War Within. New Perspectives on the Civil War in Mozambique, 1976-1992 (Oxford: James Currey, 2018).

The IDRG holds a series of interdisciplinary events during the academic year for research students and staff across the university. It aims to bring together researchers from across disciplines to meet, discuss and share common interests around issues of peace, conflict, security and justice.