Hobbes and the Congo: Frames, Local Violence, and International
Intervention
International Organization,
Vol. 63, pp. 249-280, 2009
Why do international peacebuilders fail to address the local causes of peace process failures? The existing explanations of peacebuilding failures, which focus on constraints and vested interests, do not explain the international neglect of local conflict. In this article, I show how discursive frames shape international intervention and preclude international action on local violence. Drawing on more than 330 interviews, multi-sited ethnography, and document analysis, I develop a case study of the Democratic Republic of Congo's transition from war to peace and democracy (2003–2006). I demonstrate that local agendas played a decisive role in sustaining local, national, and regional violence. However, a postconflict peacebuilding frame shaped the international understanding of violence and intervention in such a way that local conflict resolution appeared irrelevant and illegitimate. This frame included four key elements: international actors labeled the Congo a “postconflict” situation; they believed that violence there was innate and therefore acceptable even in peacetime; they conceptualized international intervention as exclusively concerned with the national and international realms; and they saw holding elections, as opposed to local conflict resolution, as a workable, appropriate, and effective tool for state- and peacebuilding. This frame authorized and justified specific practices and policies while precluding others, notably local conflict resolution, ultimately dooming the peacebuilding efforts. In conclusion, I contend that analyzing discursive frames is a fruitful approach to the puzzle of international peacebuilding failures beyond the Congo.
Article Link to article on the publisher's website
Penser
les Conflits Locaux: Violence Locale et Intervention Internationale
au cours de la Transition Congolaise (2003-2007)
L’Afrique des Grands Lacs : Annuaire 2007-2008, Paris:
L'Harmattan, pp. 179 – 196, 2008
This chapter takes stock of the international intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo in order to explain why it failed to end violence in the eastern provinces. Based on field observations in the Congo, document analysis, and over 330 interviews, it demonstrates that massive violence continued between 2003 and 2008 in part because of the presence of local conflict. The international actors left these local tensions fester because they perceived them as a consequence of broader problems and as a humanitarian issue. International actors thus focused on national and regional reconciliation, especially through the organization of “free and fair elections,” and they passed onto each other the responsibility of working on violence at the local level. They paid attention to local issues only in case of shocking events or when they realized that micro and macro tensions were linked. As a result, they neglected many critical local conflicts, which regularly erupted into major crises.
Link to book presentation on the publisher's website
D.R. Congo: Explaining Peace Building Failures, 2003 - 2006
Review of African Political Economy, 113 (34), pp. 423-442, 2007
As a corrective to the emphasis on national and international reconciliation during peace-building processes, I develop here a conceptual analysis of the dynamics of violence during the transition from war to peace and democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2003 and 2006. I locate the sources, at the local, national, and regional levels, of continued local violence during this transition. Through an analysis of the situation in the provinces of North Kivu and North Katanga, I illustrate how local dynamics interacted with the national and regional dimensions of the conflict. I demonstrate that, after a national and regional settlement was reached, some local conflicts over land and political power increasingly became self-sustaining, autonomous, and disconnected from the national and regional tracks. Thus, peace building action was required not only at the national and regional levels but also locally.
Local Violence, National Peace? Postwar "Settlement" in the Eastern D.R. Congo (2003 - 2006)
African Studies Review, 49 (3), pp. 1-29, 2006
This article develops a conceptual analysis of the dynamics of violence during the transition from war to peace and democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2003 and 2006. I locate the sources, at the local, national, and regional levels, of continued local violence during this transition. Through an analysis of the situation in the Kivus, I illustrate how local dynamics interacted with the national and regional dimensions of the conflict. I demonstrate that, after a national and regional settlement was reached, some local conflicts over land and political power increasingly became self-sustaining and autonomous from the national and regional tracks.
The United States'
'humanitarian diplomacy' in South Sudan
Journal of Humanitarian Affairs,
January 2002
This essay studies the manipulation of food aid to South Sudan, and its interplay with US politics: the US is the major donor of relief aid to Sudan, and at the same time it appears as one of Khartoum's major opponents on the international scene. This essay argues that humanitarian aid, and especially food aid, is not a substitute for political action, but that it has become the main channel of the US's Sudan policy for the past ten years.
Torn between its conflicting economic, political, geo-strategic, and moral imperatives, the US has had to adopt a difficult strategy: supporting the rebels, but not openly, and not enough to enable them to win the war. In this situation, humanitarian aid, with its reputation of neutrality and its moral appeal concealing a fundamental vulnerability to all sorts of manipulation, is a very efficient tool. Food aid is especially useful: it directly counteracts Khartoum's strategy (starving the South into submission) and directly helps the rebel movement and army in a number of ways (bringing them resources, as well as domestic and international legitimacy). Food aid also has the crucial advantage of fitting perfectly into western prejudices about Africa -- a starving continent dependent on the West -- so that no one thinks about questioning the underlying motives of US relief aid to Sudan.
Peacetime Violence - Post-Conflict Violence and Peace-Building
Strategies
Program on States and Security
This synthesis provides an overview of the academic findings on the sources of violence in post-war environments and on the strategies to address them. It distinguishes between unaddressed pre-war tensions, war-induced cleavages, and peace-generated conflict. It argues that current peace-building strategies have two major weaknesses, which explain their frequent failures. First, they neglect the micro-local causes of violence. Second, they do not devote enough attention and resources to state reconstruction (which is distinct from merely holding elections).
The
Trouble with Congo - How Local Disputes Fuel Regional Conflict
Foreign Affairs,
May/June 2008
Although the war in Congo officially ended in 2003, two million people have died since. One of the reasons is that the international community's peacekeeping efforts there have not focused on the local grievances in eastern Congo, especially those over land, that are fueling much of the broader tensions. Until they do, the nation's security and that of the wider Great Lakes region will remain uncertain.
Kongo'da siddet ve
ölüm kültürü (Violence and the Culture of
Death in the Congo)
Birikim, Volume
174, October 2003, 88 - 96, translated by Koray Caliskan
Only available as a paper copy... sorry! Don't be too disappointed, you would need to understand Turkish :-) For those who do and would like to order the paper copy, here is the link to Birikim.
The Responsibility to Protect
in the Congo: The Failure of Prevention
Paper
presented at the symposium on Imperfect Duties? Humanitarian
Intervention in Africa and the Responsibility to Protect in the
Post-Iraq Era (March 2009).
Available upon request at sa435 [at] columbia.edu