South Kivu: identity, territory, and power in the eastern Congo

This Usalama report by Koen Vlassenroot outlines the historical dynamics behind the armed movements in South Kivu, focusing on the period before and leading up to the First Congo War. The province of South Kivu has been at the heart of the conflict in the eastern DRC. Since the end of the Second Congo War (1998–2003), the province’s potential to cause broader regional destabilization has decreased, but violent local conflicts have multiplied, fuelled by political opportunism and local struggles over land and power. The report concentrates on sources of local conflict but argues that these can only be understood when also concentrating on wider political, social, economic, and demographic processes at both national and regional levels

Dealing with land issues and conflict in Eastern Congo: towards an integrated and participatory approach

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The border city of Goma: zone of contestation or laboratory of change?

In order to assess the remarkable paradox of Goma’s dynamic development and transformation from a peripheral town into an important regional economic hub in a generalized context of state collapse and armed conflict, this article tackles the city as a zone of contestation and a centre of opportunity. The semi-autonomous development observed is strongly linked to the city’s connection to the extensive and flourishing transborder trade in natural resources. These dynamics have had a considerable impact on urban socioeconomic activities, have strengthened the position of the city as a ‘borderland’ and have redefined the relations between city, state and region

EU Policies in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Try and Fail?

This paper argues that even though EU policies in the DRC integrated different components of human security – namely human rights protection, the restoration of law and order, and effective multilateralism – in practice these policies have had mixed success in realizing the objective of human security. This can be explained by three main reasons: (i) EU policies are based on a number of premises about how peace and human security can best be achieved, but these premises are overly simplistic, and in most cases tend to overlook or are disconnected from complexities on the ground; (ii) since the end of the transition in 2006, the EU saw its influence as dominant diplomatic and conflict management actor gradually weakening, and has focused on its role as a development actor, with a specific focus on the implementation of technical projects rather than on the development of a strategic policy on the DRC; and (iii) there is a general lack of political will from Congolese state authorities to engage with donor strategies and to support initiatives that promote a genuine national reform

'It's not all about the land': land disputes and conflict in the eastern Congo

Key points • Current interventions in land conflicts are focused on conflict management rather than conflict resolution. • Land conflicts are part of a wider governance problem and need political rather than technical approaches. • Conflicts over land are related to wider conflict dynamics, which are the result of an interplay between struggles for power and resources, identity narratives and territorial claims. • There is a need for better donor coordination and more coherent land governance interventions, which should be integrated into larger state-building efforts

Can collaborative research projects reverse external narratives of violence and conflict?

Despite genuine efforts for contemporary research on the global South to include more participatory approaches with local researchers, guiding frameworks and research agendas are still usually developed by core researchers in the global North. This externally imposed approach to knowledge production stunts new ways of thinking. When local views rarely find their way into larger debates, how can we trust the resulting narratives