How do you communicate research effectively to busy policy makers? This practical masterclass helps researchers identify policy relevance, formulate compelling key messages and communicate findings clearly to non-academic audiences – without compromising scientific quality or nuance.

More details on how to participate TBC

How do you communicate research effectively to busy policy makers? This practical masterclass helps researchers identify policy relevance, formulate compelling key messages and communicate findings clearly to non-academic audiences – without compromising scientific quality or nuance.

More details on how to participate TBC

This event launches three new books that together provide a prism on African history in its global entanglements. Focusing on palm oil, railways, and decolonization, the volumes foreground ordinary actors’ agency and reshape debates on extraction, infrastructure, and empire.

Chair: Rabea Rittgerodt
Discussants: Dmitri Van den Bersselaar, Omar Gueye

How do recent monographs on African colonial and postcolonial history reframe long-standing debates about development, infrastructure, and decolonization when viewed through the experiences of “common” people? This roundtable, organized as a joint launch of three new volumes published by De Gruyter, provides a prism on Africa’s entanglements with global political and economic projects. 

Giovanni Tonolo’s "Rooted in Exploitation: Oil Palm Development in Twentieth-Century Dahomey/Benin" traces how long-term “development” produced different winners, losers, and in-between groups across changing economic and political regimes, revealing the social hierarchies embedded in extractive economies. 

Friedrich Ammermann’s "Contested Imperial Infrastructure. A User’s History of the Cape to Cairo Railway in Southern Africa, 1889–1967" shifts the lens from ‘tools of rule’ to the practices of owners, operators, workers, and customers, showing how infrastructure was used, adapted, and contested on the ground. 

Ngozi Edeagu’s "In Solidarity. The Elite Capture of Decolonisation in Nigeria, 1937–1963" moves beyond nationalist elites to recover the struggles of women traders, schoolchildren, ex-servicemen, and coal miners, whose demands were absorbed or marginalized as new political orders took shape.

Nordic Africa Institute/Bloomsbury Book Launch: Everyday Humanitarianism: Crisis, Care and Local Response in Tanzania

NAI launches the edited volume ‘Everyday humanitarianism: Crisis, Care and Local Response in Tanzania' that focuses on locally-led aid in response to crisis outside formal international structures. It challenges the traditional view of humanitarianism as solely international and North-South driven.

Convenors:
Lisa Ann Richey (Copenhagen Business School)
Peter Kragelund (Danish Institute for International Studies )
Consolata Sulley (University of Dar es Salaam )

Discussants:
Line Engbo Gissel (Roskilde University)
Herbert Hambati (University of Dar es Salaam)
Claire Mercer (London School of Economics LSE)

The book launched is based on a six-year collaborative research project (EHTZ) examining ‘everyday humanitarianism’, the informal, citizen-led actions of ordinary Tanzanians responding to acute and protracted crises outside formal aid structures. Set against a backdrop of severe Western funding cuts to the international humanitarian sector, seventeen Tanzania and European authors challenge conventional North–South, organization-centric frameworks that assume aid is an act of "rescue" directed at distant others. Instead, this book shifts the perspective to the Global South, focusing explicitly on local givers and their relationships with recipients. Using Tanzania as an illustrative case - a lower-middle-income nation with deep-rooted traditions of communal solidarity alongside nascent formal crisis response institutions. EHTZ has produced findings that contribute to our understandings of how we might need to rethink ‘humanitarianism’ as necessarily based solely on helping at a distance during generalizable situations of ‘crisis’; how ‘localization’ needs to rethink power relations also within the local; and finally, how citizen self-reliance and informal helping interacts and engages with – but does not challenge – the Tanzanian state. Thus, this project also highlights local understandings of care in crisis in ways that strengthen knowledge of Tanzanian state–society relations.

The Nordic Africa Institute and Bloomsbury will invite the editors, authors and discussants to launch the book at ECAS 2027.