Responding to important research gaps at the intersection of conflict studies, migration studies and urban studies, this project sets out to investigate the formation of transnational ‘urban warscapes’ between cities in Eastern Congo and Flanders. From the specific perspective of everyday spatial experiences, this project aims to provide a better spatial understanding of the dialectical relationship between migration, war and urbanisation across the transnational Flanders-Eastern Congo geography.

Through a multidisciplinary, collaborative and multi-sited fieldwork in secondary cities in both Eastern DRCongo and Flanders, applying data collection methods from political anthropology, human geography and architectural ethnography, the project will investigate the transnational mobility and reconfiguration of conflict narratives and

social tensions that emerge from the protracted civil war in Eastern DRC, and its impact on urban settlement patterns and home-making practices in the Congolese diaspora in Flanders. Ultimately, the project’s ambition is to deliver a novel transnational epistemological and analytical framework and empirically grounded theory-formation on the reconfiguration of urban spaces through the de- and re-territorialisation of violent conflict dynamics within transnational fields