The Dominique Jacquin-Berdal Travel Grant was established by the International Relations Department at the LSE in memory of Dr Dominique Jacquin-Berdal who was a lecturer in the Department from 1999 until her death in 2006.  She taught on nationalism and Africa as well as in the field of international relations theory.  Her most well-known publication is Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Horn of Africa published in 2002.  Her colleague James Mayall wrote an obituary in The Guardian, plus a longer piece in the IR Department journal Millennium.

The annual grant of £2,500 is intended to support travel and living costs for IR Department students’ research in the fields of Africa, ethnicity and nationalism.  The 2013 grant holder is Viviane Dittrich and she gives her reactions, plus details of her project, below.

Viviane Dittrich

“Receiving this travel grant in memory of Dr Dominique Jacquin-Berdal is a real privilege and honour. I am most grateful to the LSE for the generous support allowing me to travel to Tanzania, Rwanda and South Africa this autumn and to conduct original empirical research on international relations in Africa and beyond, following the inspirational work of Dr Dominique Jacquin-Berdal. The honour of this award gives me great joy in further pursuing meaningful research in Africa.”

Thesis Title: Institutional Closure and Legacies of International Criminal Tribunals

Viviane’s PhD is a timely examination of the institutional closure and legacies of international criminal tribunals. The theme of legacy and legacy building has become a topical issue for the tribunals and is at the heart of this thesis. In response to often speculative closure accounts and legacy previews, Viviane engages in a much needed critical analysis of the process behind their closure in relation to actors and processes. To date her study of ‘The End’ of the tribunals, developing an extended conceptual framework on institutional closure and legacy and based on extensive fieldwork addressing post-conflict justice and memory, appears to be the first systematised attempt of its kind. Viviane’s research focuses on two tribunals situated in Africa, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).