Rick Hoefsloot

I have an MA in Holocaust & Genocide Studies (University of Amsterdam), with a specialisation in transitional justice processes in Africa, specifically in the Great Lakes Region. I am fascinated by the question of how societies deal with their violent past, and have gained research and (NGO) work experience in history and peace education after violent conflict, in perpetrator studies, and in peace building and conflict prevention.

For my Master's thesis I tried to fill a gap in the existing literature on the First Congo War by adding a micro-perspective to the debate on the 1994-1996 refugee crisis in Eastern-Zaïre and the subsequent AFDL campaign against the Rwandan Hutu refugees. I tried to come to a deeper layer of this history of refugees and conflict by both distilling concrete structures and patterns within the acts of the different local actors involved and by analysing the mentalities that lay behind these acts.