Project Overview

Reports Index

The scene of recurrent ethnic violence and long-running crisis in recent years, the region of Central Africa has been mired in armed conflicts that have defied the international community's capacity for crisis response and management. As Rwanda slid into genocide in 1994, the world seemed transfixed while 800,000 people lost their lives in a conflict which left a devastated country in its wake and had a profoundly destabilising effect on the region. Rwanda's neighbour Burundi, embroiled in ethnic warfare since 1993, is only now making painstaking headway towards national reconciliation. Meanwhile, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which erupted in the summer of 1998, continues in defiance of the Lusaka cease-fire agreement - having ensnared six other African governments and rebel movements from Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi.

ICG has operated a small-scale project in Central Africa since early 1998, which for much of this period has consisted of two full-time analysts in the field supported by a Brussels-based project co-ordinator and a number of part-time consultants. A series of policy reports have been published, mainly focusing on the peace process in Burundi and the war in the Congo.

The project has recently been significantly expanded, with the opening of an office in Nairobi and the appointment of additional full-time field analysts, bringing the size of the field team to four, plus support staff.

ICG's most recent reports and papers on Central Africa are: