Autumn 2017 marks the ending of the REAL-research project, which the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne was participating in. In total, the REAL project involved seven full participant research centers in Europe and nine international associate partners. REAL was funded by the European Commission through a Marie Curie Innovative Training Network.

The project’s aim was to provide a longer-term historical perspective on human-environment interactions to enable future long-term sustainable use of East Africa’s fragile environment and resources. By bringing together ecologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, historians and agronomists, the innovative training network provided cross-disciplinary training to a new generation of researchers, enabling them to interpret data relating to past and present socio-cultural and ecological dynamics from across the environmental and social sciences and the humanities.

Prof. Dr. Michael Bollig of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne supervised two PhD theses as first supervisor produced within the context of the REAL project:

Marie Ladekjær Gravesen worked on land invasions in Laikipia, Kenya.

Eric Kioko’s thesis looks at the transformation of conflicts at the Maasai/Kikuyu agro-pastoral borderlands in Kenya’s Rift Valley.

Executive summaries of the project and sub-projects as pdf-Download.