The Expert holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology and is a specialist on Chad and aspects of the Central African Republic (CAR). She has spent most of her professional career working for and affiliated with the African Studies Centre in Leiden, the Netherlands. She has 10 years of experience setting up research projects, carrying out fieldwork, analyzing results, monitoring and evaluating the process, as well as putting together reports for a variety of audiences. For the PhD, a total of 12 months of fieldwork were carried out over a period of three years, in both urban and rural locations in Chad and CAR. In that time, she became part of a strong network of local Chadian professionals. Inge’s areas of interest include (post)conflict dynamics and how these play out in an everyday setting, understanding local and trans-national socio-economic networks, and the interplay of insecurity and belonging. Her past research in Chad and CAR focussed on Arab nomads. While currently based in the USA, she is working on proposals for projects in Anglophone Cameroon, and publishing her PhD thesis as a book with De Gruyter.
Nomads, Gender, kinship, gender-based violence, child soldiers, forced marriage, FGM/FGC, ex-combatant reintegration, land tenure disputes, ethnic, religious, tribal discrimination/persecution, torture/risk of political persecution/risk from state actors, risk from non-state actors, risk of retaliation, healthcare access/health systems capacity, mental illness
After the 2013 coup in CAR, those Chadians living there became both refugees, returnees and immigrants within their country of origin. The Expert experienced, researched and documented their experiences.
Butter, IC (2020) Navigations of a globalizing Chad: Nomadic Walad Djifir grounded in connectivity, PhD thesis, Universiteit Leiden/African Studies Centre.
[https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/123198]
De Bruijn, ME, IC Butter & AS Fall (2017) 'An ethnographic study on mobile money attitudes, perceptions and usages in Cameroon, Congo DRC, Senegal and Zambia', Final Report, ASC/IFC.
[http://www.ascleiden.nl/sites/default/files/final_report_ethnographic_s…]
Van Dijk, R, M De Bruijn, C Cardoso, I Butter (eds.) (2011) Special Issue on ‘The Ideologies of Youth’, Africa Development 36 (3-4). [https://codesria.org/IMG/pdf/0-Prelim-7.pdf]