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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 –…
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…
Background Reports
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…
Background Reports
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…
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…
Journal Article
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…
Journal Article
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…
Journal Article
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…
Journal Article
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…
Journal Article
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…
Journal Article
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…
Journal Article
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…
