DEPA Burundi-DRC Project
Fluid Borders is a project undertaken by a team of academic researchers, artists, feminist activists, and people severely affected by the flooding around Lake Tanganyika and its riverbeds in Uvira (DRC) and Gatumba (Burundi). Uvira is the second major town of the South Kivu province. Gatumba is a small town of Bujumbura Rural province. The two are located each side of the only official land crossing border point between the two countries. Very literally, most of the 236 kilometres of the border line between the DRC and Burundi is drawn on water bodies. These water bodies are often projected as a ‘natural’ delimitation, yet that border was drawn on maps whilst European empires disputed allegedly ‘unoccupied lands’ and then re-formalised at independence from Belgian. For decades, this borderland region has been embroiled in cyclical crises linked to militarisation, identity, resources, and day-to-day survival. The UN peacebuilding missions, development and educational NGO programmes, and countless researchers have been working on these crises, yet their efforts have failed to secure the ‘peace’ they promote. Seeking to question the coloniality of peace, we engaged with literal and metaphoric meanings of the fluidity of borders.
Building upon border thinking (Anzaldua, 1987, Anzaldua and Keating 2015) and drawing as a research methodology (Theron et. al 2011, Nakashima Degarrod 2017, Bliesemann de Guevara et. Al, 2022), we considered implications for peace education from decolonial feminist perspectives. Over three years, we built a strong and stimulating space to debate the coloniality of peace among ourselves (about 20 researchers, 10 peace educators/activists, and 10 artists) with about 50 research participants, as well as our respective professional academic, artistic, and activist networks in Belgium, Burundi, South Kivu – DRC, the UK, and beyond. In addition, the project encouraged many other activists and policy makers to rethink how to approach peace activism and peace education, but also act upon power asymmetries and research extractivism within peacebuilding policy and practice.
Upon the unfolding of the project, we set an example of how to work at a slower pace to mitigate the too often dismissed effects of the coloniality of peace. We co-produced locally relevant arts and pedagogic material. We drew on proverbial arts to explore tensions emerging from the simultaneous reproduction and undoing of gendered patriarchal norms through everyday languages, grammar rules, and proverbial metaphors. (Un)learning from our interactions with borderlands women activists, we brought into discussions opportunities, challenges and limitations of these joint reflexive spaces; as well as their implications for imagining and articulating activist engagements that undo the coloniality of gender reproduced in both everyday life and gender mainstreaming peace initiatives.
Items in this collection includes:
1. Online Drawing in the Borderlands Albums
2. https://www.pluriversaldreams.org/blog/
3. Fluid Borders Booklet (a multi-disciplinary audio-visual book) (Booklet in Kirundi)
4. https://www.pluriversaldreams.org/carnetdebord/
5. Capturing Fluid Borders Ebook
Filing of the Data
The data from the DRC-Burundi project is organised differently to the other DEPA projects. Many of the arts outputs created through research activities have been published publicly online through different mediums and platforms. The coloniality of archiving research data was a topic of exploration within, and across, DEPA teams. In conversation with The Open University, the decision was taken to not replicate the archiving of individual files in ORDO but to leave the curation to the public spaces where the data is housed. Therefore, the files in this folder are one word document. Within it, it provides a description for each of the eight exhibition spaces listed in the collection items above (what data was collected, curated and exhibited on that particular platform and why). Links are then provided directing you to these different platforms where you can view the art data.
Please note, linked content is NOT stored by The Open University and we can't guarantee its availability, quality, security or accept any liability.
The Burundi-DRC Project was part of a wider DEPA (Decolonising Education for Peace in Africa) project. DEPA was a 4 year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Council (AHRC) addressing the question: What are the different knowledges and values underpinning peace and how can these practices be connected and compared across countries to create curriculum content and mode of delivery in informal and formal settings, Secondary and Higher Education (HE), in order to decolonise peace education?
