Conflict And Social Transformation In Eastern Dr Congo

At head of title: Conflict Research Group.

This book analyses the radical political transformation of eastern Congo through the lens of cross-border risk management.

The concept of 'hybridity' is often still poorly theorized and problematically applied by peace and development scholars and researchers of resource governance. This book turns to a particular ethnographic reading of Michel Foucault's Governmentality and investigates its usefulness to study precisely those mechanisms, processes and practices that hybridity once promised to clarify. Claim-making to land and authority in a post-conflict environment is the empirical grist supporting this exploration of governmentality. Specifically in the periphery of Bukavu. This focus is relevant as urban land is increasingly becoming scarce in rapidly expanding cities of eastern Congo, primarily due to internal rural-to-urban migration as a result of regional insecurity. The governance of urban land is also important analytically as land governance and state authority in Africa are believed to be closely linked and co-evolve. An ethnographic reading of governmentality enables researchers to study hybridization without biasing analysis towards hierarchical dualities. Additionally, a better understanding of hybridization in the claim-making practices may contribute to improved government intervention and development assistance in Bukavu and elsewhere.

Ten years after Libya descended into conflict, the contours of a new society are emerging. How has violence remade the country—what has happened to inter-community and inter-personal relations, to social hierarchies and elite composition? Which new groups, networks and identities have formed through conflict, and how has this transformed power structures, modes of capital accumulation and governance at the local and national levels? How has the violence contributed to create new communities, both inside the country and in exile? This volume brings together leading researchers, both foreign and Libyan, to examine the deep changes undergone by Libya’s society amid civil war. These transformations are bound to shape the country for decades to come, and will influence its relations with the outside world. By addressing neglected yet crucial aspects of social change amid violence, the contributors substantially broaden the picture of Libyan society beyond the current confines of scholarship, as well as enriching wider debates in Conflict Studies.

Urban centres are at the heart of the dynamics of war and peace, of stability and violence: as ‘safe havens’ for those seeking protection, as concentrations of public administrative and military apparatus, and as symbolic bases of state sovereignty and public authority. Heavy fighting in South Sudan’s capital city of Juba, post electoral protests and brutal killings in Bujumbura, Burundi, and violent urban uprisings in Congo’s cities of Goma and Kinshasa, all demonstrate that cities represent critical arenas in African conflict and post-conflict dynamics. This comprehensive volume offers a profound analysis of the complex relationship between the dynamics of violent conflict and urbanisation in Central and Eastern Africa. The authors underline the need to look simultaneously at cities to understand ongoing conflict and violence, and at conflict-dynamics to understand current urbanisation processes in this part of the world. Building on empirical and analytical insights from cities in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, DR Congo, South Sudan and Kenya, this collection demonstrates how emerging urbanism in the larger Great-Lakes region and its Eastern neighbours presents a fascinating window to investigate the transformative power of protracted violent conflict. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.

This book helps to better understand how the interaction between local and international peacebuilding actors influences the outcomes of their programs. Based on the case study of Ituri in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it analyses the relationships between local and international peacebuilding actors over the long term and assesses ways to overcome the obstacles to more cooperative partnerships. Focusing on perceptions, the book nuances existing definitions of war, peacebuilding and peace and allows for a more comprehensive understanding of conflict contexts. Thereby, it contributes to the literature on peacebuilding effectiveness and makes concrete suggestions for translating these findings into practice.

Today's vision of world order is founded upon the concept of strong, well-functioning states, in contrast to the destabilizing potential of failed or fragile states. This worldview has dominated international interventions over the past 30 years as enormous resources have been devoted to developing and extending the governance capacity of weak or failing states, hoping to transform them into reliable nodes in the global order. But with very few exceptions, this project has not delivered on its promise: countries like Somalia, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) remain mired in conflict despite decades of international interventions. States of Disorder addresses the question, 'Why has UN state-building so consistently failed to meet its objectives?'. It proposes an explanation based on the application of complexity theory to UN interventions in South Sudan and DRC, where the UN has been tasked to implement massive stabilization and state-building missions. Far from being ''ungoverned spaces," these settings present complex, dynamical systems of governance with emergent properties that allow them to adapt and resist attempts to change them. UN interventions, based upon assumptions that gradual increases in institutional capacity will lead to improved governance, fail to reflect how change occurs in these systems and may in fact contribute to underlying patterns of exclusion and violence. Based on more than a decade of the author's work in peacekeeping, this book offers a systemic mapping of how governance systems work, and indeed work against, UN interventions. Pursuing a complexity-driven approach instead helps to avoid unintentional consequences, identifies meaningful points of leverage, and opens the possibility of transforming societies from within.