Event Details - Lecture: Security Conundrum in the Sahara

Lecture: Security Conundrum in the Sahara — The Tragic Trajectory of the World’s Largest Desert, presented  by Berny Sèbe, associate professor in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Birmingham, online via Webex, noon to 1 p.m.

The Sahara Desert has become one of the most unstable regions of the world in the 21st century. The recent political trajectory of the Sahara has been marked by Islamic terrorism, Western counter-terrorism, dictatorship, the Arab Spring, successive coups d’état, Russian diplomatic and military involvement, in addition to the more traditional centrifugal forces of irredentist movements such as the Tuareg National Liberation Movement of the Azawad. This presentation offers key geopolitical and historical insights to understand the “present of the past” in the Sahara. Berny Sèbe researches the role and place of desert spaces in colonial designs, and the cultural history of British and French imperialism since the nineteenth century. He is the author of Heroic Imperialists in Africa: The Making of British and French Colonial Heroes, 1870-1939, and has co-edited Echoes of Empire: Identity, Memory and Colonial Legacies; Decolonising Imperial Heroes: Cultural Legacies of the British and French Empires and Decolonising Europe? Popular Responses to the End of Empire. His upcoming book is Empire of Emptiness: Fortresses of the Colonial Conquest in the Sahara. The lecture is free and open to the public. 

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This event is organized by the Clark Center for Global Engagement with support from the International Studies Program and the Provost’s Office