Stephanie Wolters
Stephanie Wolters has been working in the Great Lakes region since 1998. She was based in Kinshasa for six years as a correspondent for the BBC, Reuters, and The Economist, and later as chief news editor of Radio Okapi. Since then, Stephanie has worked in over 30 African countries for the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the UN, and numerous international NGOs as a researcher specializing in conflict dynamics and political economy, while maintaining a focus on the Great Lakes and the DRC in particular.
Stephanie ran the Institute for Security Studies’ Peace and Security Research program from 2014–2019. Since 2020, she has been a Senior Research Fellow at the South African Institute of International Affairs, working on geopolitics in the Great Lakes region. Stephanie is also a founding director of Okapi Consulting, an organization specializing in peace building media in conflict zones.
She is the author of the forthcoming book, commissioned by Chatham House: A Disinterested State: War, Violence and Indifference in the Great Lakes, to be published by Bloomsbury in 2026.
Stephanie holds a master’s degree in African Studies and International Economics from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Listen to hear Dominic Bowen in conversation with Stephanie Wolters on why the crisis in the DRC is regionally driven and more about power than resources, the limits of international intervention including MONUSCO, and what daily life actually looks like for communities living under armed group control.
