Building Local Capacities to Monitor Methane Extraction in Lake Kivu

2015 ◽  
pp. 235-244
Author(s):  
Natacha Pasche ◽  
Janvière Tuyisenge ◽  
Ange Mugisha ◽  
Edouard Rugema ◽  
Alice Muzana ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Methane Extraction ◽  
Lake Kivu

scholarly journals Carceral Repair

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-37
Author(s):  
Kristin Doughty
Keyword(s):  
Natural Disaster ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Dissolved Methane ◽  
Energy Futures ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Methane Extraction ◽  
Lake Kivu ◽  
Energy Projects ◽  
Post War

This article, based on ethnographic fieldwork in 2016–2019, examines methane extraction operations in Lake Kivu on the Rwanda/DRC border as a lens into understanding how energy futures in Africa are imagined and enacted within national projects of post-war reconstruction. In 2005, scientists suggested that the lake’s dissolved methane risked oversaturation within the century. This spurred state-backed projects to simultaneously prevent a natural disaster and harness the methane to meet Rwanda’s rising electrification needs. Two companies are currently building and operating methane-fuelled power plants. The article suggests that these energy projects, an integral part of the overall architecture of social repair in Rwanda, reproduce and generate forms of captivity and entrapment that are central to understanding the lived politics of ‘carceral repair’, a generation after genocide.

Methane Extraction on Lake Kivu: Green Extractive Humanitarianism

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Kristin Doughty ◽  
Dieudonné Uwizeye ◽  
Elyseé Uwimana
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Environmental Risks ◽  
Gas Release ◽  
Energy Policies ◽  
Innovative Project ◽  
Renewable Power ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Methane Extraction ◽  
Lake Kivu ◽  
Green Capitalism

Abstract In 2016, Rwanda began extracting methane gas from Lake Kivu, an innovative project designed to reduce the risk of a deadly spontaneous gas release while providing clean and renewable power to an energy-strapped region. Based on qualitative research in Rwanda from 2016 to 2019, Doughty, Uwizeye, and Uwimana use the Kivu methane extraction project to ask, How do we balance urgent electrification needs with responsible energy policies that respond to environmental risks, particularly in post-conflict contexts? Analyzing the Kivu methane projects as “green extractive humanitarianism” provides cautions within the promises of sustainability and “green capitalism.”

Questioning territories and identities in the precolonial (nineteenth-century) Lake Kivu region

Africa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-515
Author(s):  
Gillian Mathys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Lake Kivu ◽  
Territorial Claims ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

AbstractThroughout Africa, contemporary boundaries are deemed ‘artificial’ because they were external impositions breaking apart supposedly homogeneous ethnic units. This article argues that the problem with the colonial borders was not only that they arbitrarily dissected African societies with European interests in mind, but also that they profoundly changed the way in which territoriality and authority functioned in this region, and therefore they affected identity. The presumption that territories could be constructed in which ‘culture’ and ‘political power’ neatly coincided was influenced by European ideas about space and identity, and privileged the perceptions and territorial claims of those ruling the most powerful centres in the nineteenth century. Thus, this article questions assumptions that continue to influence contemporary views of the Lake Kivu region. It shows that local understandings of the relationship between space and identity differed fundamentally from state-centred perspectives, whether in precolonial centralized states or colonial states.

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