Conflict and peacebuilding Archives - Page 6 of 7 - Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform

Research paper

The Politics of Return: Understanding Trajectories of Displacement and the Complex Dynamics of ‘Return’ in Central and East Africa

This introductory essay reflects on what studies of return can tell us about the ‘life cycle’ of conflict and displacement dynamics in war-affected Central and East Africa, with particular focus on Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Uganda.

Central and East Africa Hub

2021

Research paper

Home Is Where the Heart Is: Identity, Return and the Toleka Bicycle Taxi Union in Congo’s Equateur

While many ex-combatants in the DRC continue to be re-recruited into militia groups, one group that has reintegrated successfully is the Toleka—a several-thousand-strong group of ex-combatants who returned (or remained) in the provincial capital of Mbandaka (Equateur province). The Toleka…

Central and East Africa Hub

2020

Research paper

Competition, patronage and fragmentation : the limits of bottom-up approaches to security governance in Ituri

People are affected by different kinds of insecurity in the Ituri Province in the northeastern DRC. This article investigates donor-driven attempts to improve security governance there. More specifically, it investigates bottom-up approaches to security governance in Ituri’s capital of Bunia…

Central and East Africa Hub

2018

Book chapter

Urbanisation and the Political Geographies of Violent Struggle for Power and Control: Mining Boomtowns in Eastern Congo

This chapter addresses rural–urban transformations in the Kivu provinces, DRC, and more particularly focuses on the complex relationship between dynamics of violent conflict and the emergence of urban mining ‘boomtowns’. Mining towns offer fascinating sites from which to investigate the…

Central and East Africa Hub

2015

Research paper

Between Tags & Guns: Fragmentations of public authority around eastern Congo’s artisanal 3T mines

This essay addresses the current dynamics governing access to artisanal mineral markets in eastern Congo’s two Kivu provinces, an area caught in over two decades of protracted and multi-scalar armed conflict. It examines how public authority is fragmented and (re-)shaped…

Central and East Africa Hub

2018

Briefing

Understanding Armed Group Proliferation in the Eastern Congo

Due to the proliferation of smaller armed groups and the disappearance and scattering of larger rebel movements, the armed group landscape of the eastern Congo has become increasingly fragmented. This fragmentation results from the interplay between the growing engagement of…

Central and East Africa Hub

2015

Background report

Stable Instability: Political settlements and armed groups in the Congo

This report analyses the stability, inclusivity and levels of violence of both the political settlement of the Congo as a whole and of political settlements in the conflict-ridden east. It shows that in each of these political arenas, armed groups…

Central and East Africa Hub

Research paper

‘Living between Two Lions’: Civilian Protection Strategies during Armed Violence in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo

This article examines how civilians assess, negotiate with, and in some cases deceive armed actors in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It demonstrates that civilians not only navigate the precarious and unpredictable conditions within armed conflict, but…

Central and East Africa Hub

2017

Research paper

Courses au pouvoir: the struggle over customary capital in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

This article analyses the production and reproduction of traditional chieftaincy in war-torn eastern DRC through the case of a succession dispute in Kalima (South Kivu). Kalima has seen two decades of political instability and violent conflict involving numerous local, national…

Central and East Africa Hub

2020

Background report

Indirect Rule in Armed Conflict: Theoretical Insights from Eastern DRC

Building on the analogy between armed factions in contemporary conflict settings and states in the making, this paper explores the conditions under which indirect rule emerges in contexts of armed conflict, and the consequences that this governance arrangement has on…

Central and East Africa Hub

IDS

2018

Blog

Returning from the LRA: obedience, stoicism and silence

Research with Ugandan women and their children, fourteen years after their return from life with the Lord’s Resistance Army, highlights the inter-generational dimensions of war and conflict. Obedience, stoicism and silence enabled their survival, and now shapes their day-to-day lives.…

Central and East Africa Hub

London School of Economics

2019

Blog

Lord’s Resistance Army hierarchies survive in peace time

Recent research suggests that the lives of women who have returned from extended periods with the Lord’s Resistance Army greatly vary. This blog post describes how these differences often depend on what kind of authority they commanded with the LRA…

Central and East Africa Hub

London School of Economics

2019

Research paper

Geographical versus social displacement: the politics of return and post-war recovery in Northern Uganda

The civil war in Northern Uganda in the period 1986–2006 fundamentally altered former ways of life and created diverse and complex needs. Protracted conflict and displacement create, reveal, and enforce vulnerability, which can undermine resilience. Based on in-depth interviews with…

Central and East Africa Hub

Taylor & Francis Online

2018

Research paper

Moving Toward ‘Home’: Love and Relationships through War and Displacement

This article calls for greater attention to spatial considerations and proposes the concept of movement as an integral dimension of understanding affinal relationships. This observation is derived from reflections on how the experiences of displacement and return in northern Uganda…

Central and East Africa Hub

Oxford University Press

2020

Research paper

Land is now the biggest gun: climate change and conflict in Karamoja, Uganda

Places that are both recovering from violent conflict and dependent on natural recourses face the overlapping challenges of reducing the risk of recurring conflict, promoting economic recovery, and ensuring sustainable environmental management: all challenges exacerbated by climate change. This article…

Central and East Africa Hub

Taylor & Francis Online

2021

Research paper

Legacies of humanitarian neglect: long term experiences of children who returned from the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda

Much has been written about the short-term challenges facing children returning ‘home’ from rebel fighting groups, but little is known about the longer term day to day realities of return. Support for disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) of former combatants…

Central and East Africa Hub

Conflict and Health

2021

Research paper

The ‘Nuer of Dinka money’ and the demands of the dead: contesting the moral limits of monetised politics in South Sudan

This article explores the meaning of monetary exchanges in politics and political identities during South Sudan’s armed conflicts since 2013, in order to understand whether shifts in the moral meaning of money in politics confer legitimacy to current governmental configurations…

Central and East Africa Hub

2020

Research paper

Competing authorities and norms of restraint: governing community-embedded armed groups in South Sudan

How can international humanitarian actors help to restrain the conduct of armed groups when they violate moral, legal and humanitarian norms? Using qualitative and ethnographic research in South Sudan, this article explores patterns of restraint among the gojam and titweng…

Central and East Africa Hub

2021

Research paper

The longue durée of short-lived infrastructure – Roads and state authority in South Sudan

Road-building, followed by road runi and rebuilding, have been a cyclical feature of development in South Sudan. This article focuses on two internationally funded roads built around independence to explore their meaning for central government, and for people living along…

Central and East Africa Hub

2022

Blog

How can ethnomusicology support humanitarian protection research?

This article argues that ethnomusicology offers an important approach to understanding issues of participatory humanitarian safety and protection. Using music and dance as a means to better understand people’s ways of life can give insight into the larger cultural contexts…

Central and East Africa Hub

2021

Blog

A widow’s story of survival and humanitarianism in the Sudans

The story of Nyapuottek, a widow from the Sudanese war, illustrates how fraught it can be to navigate changing relations during times of conflict and migration, and how such struggles can intersect with humanitarian initiatives.

Central and East Africa Hub

2023

Blog

Why a South Sudanese NGO had to choose between protecting staff and strangers

This article highlights the risks of working for national rather than international organisations in humanitarian contexts. After the authors’ NGO base was attacked in April 2022, he had to navigate the complex balance between staying safe and saving strangers –…

Central and East Africa Hub

2021

Book chapter

Taxation, Stateness and Armed Groups: Public Authority and Resource Extraction in Eastern Congo

This contribution analyses the role of taxation in the constitution of authority in the conflict-ridden eastern DRC, where numerous authorities alternately compete and collude over the right to extract resources. Taxation ranges from simple plunder, to protection rackets, to material…

Central and East Africa Hub

2017

Background report

Contesting Authority: Armed rebellion and military fragmentation in Walikale and Kalehe, North and South Kivu

Eastern DRC continues to be plagued by violence and dozens of armed groups. Yet, these groups—and how they interact with their social and political environment—remain poorly understood. This report analyses their involvement in public life in the territories of Kalehe…

Central and East Africa Hub

2016

Background report

South Kivu: identity, territory, and power in the eastern Congo. Usalama Project Report: Understanding Congolese Armed Groups

This report outlines the historical dynamics behind the armed movements in South Kivu, focusing on the period before and leading up to the First Congo War. It concentrates on sources of local conflict but argues that these can only be…

Central and East Africa Hub

2014

Thesis

Ethnogovernmentality: The Making of Ethnic Territories and Subjects in Eastern Congo

In this article I investigate colonial constructions of ethnicity and territory and their effects in the post-independence period in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The core argument of the article is that the constructions of ethnicity and territory that…

Central and East Africa Hub

2021

Research paper

Navigating Social Spaces: Armed Mobilization and Circular Return in Eastern DR Congo

This article discusses the social mobility of combatants and introduces the notion of circular return to explain their pendular state of movement between civilian and combatant life. This phenomenon is widely observed in eastern DRC, where Congolese youth have revolved…

Central and East Africa Hub

2020

Research paper

The Politics of Rebellion and Intervention in Ituri: The Emergence of a New Political Complex?

This paper aims to place the Ituri conflict into its social setting, arguing the outbreak of violence resulted from the exploitation, by local and regional actors, of a deeply rooted local political conflict for access to land, economic opportunity and…

Central and East Africa Hub

2004

Research paper

Doing business out of war. An analysis of the UPDF’s presence in the Democratic Republic of Congo

This paper analyses how Ugandan army commanders have mobilised transborder economic networks to exploit economic opportunities in eastern DRC during the military intervention of the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF) in Congo’s wars (1996–97; 1998–2003). These networks are the starting…

Central and East Africa Hub

2011

Research paper

Rebels without borders in the Rwenzori borderland? A biography of the Allied Democratic Forces

This article provides a detailed analysis of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a Ugandan rebel movement that is operating from Congolese soil but so far has attracted very limited scholarly attention. Having its roots in Ugandan Islamic community, it has…

Central and East Africa Hub

2012

Research paper

Negotiated peace for extortion: the case of Walikale territory in eastern DR Congo

War in the DRC has increasingly been explained as a means to get access to natural resources and as a strategy to get control over informal trading networks linked to global markets. In most of these accounts, the complexity of…

Central and East Africa Hub

2009

Research paper

Producing democracy in armed violence settings: Elections and citizenship in Eastern DRC

The article analyses how the 2018 elections in the DRC contributed to a further opening of the democratic space and shared expressions and sentiments of citizenship. Through an ethnography of the electoral process in the South Kivu province, we investigate…

Central and East Africa Hub

2022

Research paper

Violent conflict and ethnicity in the Congo: beyond materialism, primordialism and symbolism

This paper investigates the nexus between ethnicity and violent conflict in the Congo. We make three interlocking arguments. First, that ethnicity is a defining political resource in the Congo’s politics and violent conflicts, which we call ‘ethnic capital’. Second, that…

Central and East Africa Hub

2021

Research paper

Armed mobilisation and the nexus of territory, identity, and authority: the contested territorial aspirations of the Banyamulenge in eastern DR Congo

The closely intertwined notions of territory, identity, and authority are at the heart of conflict dynamics in the eastern DR Congo. Focusing on the territorial aspirations of the Banyamulenge community in South Kivu, this article looks at the ways in…

Central and East Africa Hub

2015

Research paper

Armed groups and the exercise of public authority: the cases of the Mayi-Mayi and Raya Mutomboki in Kalehe, South Kivu

Some argue the Congolese state remains mostly irrelevant outside its capital or even that there is no such thing as Congo. Others contend there is no lack of state order, but that it is characterised by predatory rule and (privatised)…

Central and East Africa Hub

2013

Research paper

The ‘marketplace of post-conflict assistance’ in Northern Uganda and beyond

A diverse body of different actors and stakeholders offers a multitude of services and assistance for conflict-affected communities in Northern Uganda. There are relational and interactional dynamics between providers of services and intended beneficiaries, where there are often a variety…

Central and East Africa Hub

2021