Africa Lunch Meeting with Dr. Kieran Mitton, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.
Drawing on recent extended fieldwork with gangs in Sierra Leone, South Africa and Brazil, Kieran Mitton will highlight the ways in which violent youth rebellion is better understood as a consequence of the persistence of existing orders, not their collapse. There has been much contemporary alarm over the effects of urbanisation and climate change, particularly in Africa and Asia. This talk will take a critical approach to a neo-Malthusian framing of so-called ‘fragile cities’, in which urbanisation is typically assumed to increase risks of criminal violence and anarchy.

(Photo credit: Kieran Mitton)