© Photo by Mara Lavitt
June 7, 2022
Yale University, New Haven, CT.
Faculty of Arts and Sciences headshots.
The Association for Africanist Anthropology (AfAA) is honored to announce that Louisa Lombard will deliver the AfAA Distinguished Lecture during the AfAA Business Meeting (on Friday evening, November 21) at the 2025 AAA Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans, Louisiana, from November 19–23, 2025.
Lecture Title:
Studying Soldiers: From Military Rule to Cosmopolitan Careers
“Many anthropologists have studied African rebels. Fewer have studied African soldiers. There are understandable reasons, both practical and ideological, for that discrepancy. It is nonetheless time to turn to soldiers. Across a broad swathe of West Africa and the Sahel, soldiers rule. Elsewhere on the continent, soldiers are deployed domestically, often far from their homes and increasingly alongside soldiers from neighboring countries, as is the case in Mozambique’s northernmost Cabo Delgado prefecture, where Mozambican soldiers from the south are stationed alongside thousands of Rwandan soldiers engaged in counterinsurgency operations. One common anthropological approach to militaries has been to critique soldiers’ effects, both on society and on people working in military institutions. In this talk, I draw on my research with Rwandan soldiers to make the case for alternative approaches. Militaries, I argue, are as cultural as any other social institution. While in recent Euro/American history a sharp divide has emerged between the military and everyone else, that is not the case in most African settings, and there is more to learn about the varied cultures of the laws of war. Soldiering has become an unexpected vector for middle-class life and cosmopolitanism, given that many African soldiers repeatedly serve abroad, often as peacekeepers, and become involved with people in the places where they deploy. Soldiers can also be hugely destructive. Their social effects are varied, and even contradictory, and, I argue, expanding – and not just in Africa”
Louisa Lombard is a leading anthropologist whose work explores the dynamics of armed life in Central Africa. Her research brings ethnographic depth to the study of conflict, conservation, and governance, with a focus on the lives and logics of soldiers, rebels, and anti-poaching guards. She is the author of State of Rebellion and Hunting Game, and currently serves as Associate Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. Learn more about her work.
This year’s AAA Annual Meeting theme, “Ghosts,” invites reflection on how the past haunts the present. Lombard’s lecture will offer a powerful engagement with this theme through the lens of militarized life and the spectral traces of violence, memory, and statecraft.
We warmly invite all AfAA members and conference attendees to join us for this event.