CRS Seminar: Understanding the ongoing conflict and human rights violations in Ethiopia
Military conflict began in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, more than one year ago, expanding to Afar, Amhara, and Oromia and beyond national borders. Ethiopia continues to face a humanitarian crisis caused by drought, the effects of Covid-19, conflict, socioeconomic and political instability both within and beyond the country’s borders. According to local authorities and the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), an estimated 2.1 million people have been internally displaced in the Tigray region. UNICEF has reported that 60,000 Ethiopian refugees from Tigray have fled into Sudan since November 2020 to seek safety. In August 2021, the United Nations estimated that at least 400,000 people were living in famine-like conditions. Refugee camps for Eritreans in northern Tigray have been destroyed, with thousands of Eritrean refugees displaced within Ethiopia, abducted or forcibly returned to Eritrea; tens of thousands more remain under siege in the region. This roundtable brings together experts with deep knowledge and experience of the region to highlight the deteriorating human rights and security conditions in the country and the Horn of Africa.
Moderator:
Dr. Jennifer Hyndman: Jennifer Hyndman is a professor and currently serves as Associate Vice-President of Research at York University, Canada. Her research focuses on the geopolitics of forced migration and humanitarian response, as well as refugee resettlement. Books Refugees in Extended Exile: Living on the Edge, with Wenona Giles (Routledge, 2017); of Dual Disasters: Humanitarian Aid after the 2004 Tsunami (2011), Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism (2000), and Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones (co-editor with W. Giles 2004).
Speakers:
Dr. Awol Allo: Awol Allo is a Senior Lecturer at Keele University in Keele, UK. Dr. Awol’s research interests are in the areas of human rights and social justice broadly conceived and draws on a wide-range of fields including the sociology of law, socio-legal studies, critical social and legal theory, and post-colonial perspectives. His forthcoming monograph, Law and Resistance: Toward a Performative Epistemology of the Political Trial is a genealogical enquiry into law’s conditions of possibility for progressive change and transformation.
Dr. Awet Weldemichael: Awet T. Weldemichael is professor and Queen’s National Scholar at Queen’s University in Canada. Dr. Awet is a member of the College of New Scholars at the Royal Society of Canada. An expert of Northeast Africa, he is the author of Third World Colonialism and Strategies of Liberation (2013) and Piracy in Somalia: Violence and Development in the Horn of Africa (2019), among other publications.
Dr. Goitom Gebreluel: Goitom Gebreluel is a political analyst at Just Security focusing on the international and comparative politics of the Horn of Africa. Dr. Goitom holds a PhD in political science from the University of Cambridge. He has in the past taught IR courses at the University of London and University of Mekele. His publications have appeared in Foreign Affairs, the Washington Quarterly and Al Jazeera.
Dr. Angela Raven Roberts: Angela Raven Roberts is currently a Research Affiliate at the Institute of Education in Oxford working on capacity development specializing on the role of national civil services in disaster preparedness and reviewing current educational policies for pastoral communities in the Horn of Africa. Dr. Raven-Robert’s career spans 30 years of work with INGOs, United Nations and academia in the Humanitarian sector.
Register in advance for this webinar:
https://yorku.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jXSsIA01T6yHG0ldsSrdeQ
