Former U.S. Congressman to Discuss Challenges to Peacemaking in Africa

<Posted 10/09/2001 11:00>

Howard Wolpe, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. and former presidential special envoy to Africa's Great Lakes Region, will present a public lecture titled, "Challenges to Peacemaking in the Great Lakes Region of Africa," on Wednesday, October 17, 2001 at 4:30 p.m., Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall, on the Princeton campus.

The Great Lakes region of Africa includes the countries of Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.  The region has been a locus of ethnic conflict and power struggles, most recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo.   A cease-fire agreement to end the fighting was signed at Lusaka in 1999, but has only recently taken hold. 

Wolpe, who reported to the House Subcommittee on Africa regarding the Lusaka agreement in 1999, is a specialist in African politics with particular interest in the dynamics and management of ethnic and racial conflict. A former member of Congress from Michigan (1979-1993), Wolpe spent ten of his fourteen years in that capacity chairing the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Africa. His other roles in the Congress included chairing the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittees of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee and co-chairing the bipartisan Northeast-Midwest Congressional Coalition and the Congressional Energy and Environmental Study Conference.

Wolpe also served in the Michigan House of Representatives and as a member of the Kalamazoo (MI) City Commission. He is a former visiting fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program of the Brookings Institution, and was also a member of the faculty at Western Michigan University and the University of Michigan.

A current member of the Council of Foreign Relations, Wolpe co-directed the Ninetieth American Assembly on "Africa and U.S. National Interests" in March 1997. Wolpe has written extensively on Africa, including Urban Politics in Nigeria and "The Great Lakes Crisis: An American View," which appeared in the South African Journal of International Affairs in summer, 2000. He also co-authored The United States and Africa: A Post-Cold War Perspective.

Wolpe's lecture is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs' Office of External Affairs.