We must work hard to resist a fear of other people’s bodies

Relatively little attention has been paid to the loss of social spaces and its political and societal ramifications. Marie E. Berry and Milli Lake (LSE) remind us why it is important to remember the importance of physical touch, intimacy and connection to build community, practise resistance, heal from trauma and escape oppression

Imagining a distanced future: centring a politics of love in resistance and mobilisation

Globally we are witnessing and experiencing the many social implications of COVID-19, but less attention has been given to the loss of social spaces and the political and societal ramifications of this as we begin to navigate our reimagining of the ‘public space’. Marie E. Berry and Milli Lake remind us why it is important for us to remember the importance of physical touch, intimacy and connection to build community, practice resistance, heal from trauma and escape oppression

Building the rule of war: postconflict institutions and the micro-dynamics of conflict in eastern DR Congo

Why have peace-building and reconstruction efforts so frequently failed to create durable institutions that can deter or withstand resurgent violence in volatile sites of cyclical conflict? Extant theory predicts that new institutions can help overcome violence and mitigate commitment problems in postconflict contexts by reducing uncertainty in inherently uncertain environments. By contrast, this article argues that postconflict institutions often prove limited in their abilities to contribute to durable peace because they offer wartime elites new venues in which to pursue conflict-era agendas. Through a micro-analysis of efforts to build the rule of law in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, I demonstrate that wartime elites capture and instrumentalize new legal institutions to maximize their intra- and inter-organizational survival; to pursue economic, military, and political agendas behind the scenes; and, in some cases, to prepare for an imminent return to war

Women's rights in "weak" states: the promises and pitfalls of gender advocacy in transition

Milli Lake explores how and to what extent the spotlight on sexual violence has restructured judicial priorities in eastern DR Congo and South Africa

Equality on His Terms: Doing and Undoing Gender through Men’s Discussion Groups

Efforts to promote gender equality often encourage changes to interpersonal interactions as a way of undermining gender hierarchy. Such programs are premised on the idea that the gender system can be “undone” when individuals behave in ways that challenge prevailing gender norms. However, scholars know little about whether and under what conditions real changes to the gender system can result from changed behaviors. We use the context of a gender sensitization program in the Democratic Republic of Congo to examine prospects for transformative change at the interactional level of the gender system. Over nine months, we observed significant changes in men’s quotidian practices. Further, we identified a new commitment among many men to a more equal division of household labor. However, participants consistently undermined the transformative potential of these behavioral changes through their dedication to maintaining control over the objective, process, and meaning of change, resisting conceptions of equality that challenged the gender system. Because quotidian changes left gender hierarchy intact, they appear unlikely to destabilize the logics that legitimate women’s subordination

Social protection and state-society relations in environments of low and uneven state capacity

Grounded in social-contractual ideas about relationships between the governed and those who govern, the provision of social benefits to citizens has historically been predicated on expectations of acquiescence to state authority. However, the rapid expansion of noncontributory social assistance in sub-Saharan Africa, often supported by global donors through technical assistance programs, raises myriad questions about the relationship between social protection and the social contract in fragile and low-capacity contexts. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, but drawing on the theoretical and empirical literature on social protection from around the world, this review parses out the redistributive, contractual, and reconstitutive effects of social protection programming on citizen-state relations. We argue that program features—including targeting, conditionality, accountability mechanisms, bureaucratic reach, and the nature and visibility of state-nonstate partnerships—interact dialectically with existing state-society relationships to engender different social contract outcomes for differently situated populations

Social protection and state-society relations in environments of low and uneven state capacity

Grounded in social-contractual ideas about relationships between the governed and those who govern, the provision of social benefits to citizens has historically been predicated on expectations of acquiescence to state authority. However, the rapid expansion of noncontributory social assistance in sub-Saharan Africa, often supported by global donors through technical assistance programs, raises myriad questions about the relationship between social protection and the social contract in fragile and low-capacity contexts. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, but drawing on the theoretical and empirical literature on social protection from around the world, this review parses out the redistributive, contractual, and reconstitutive effects of social protection programming on citizen-state relations. We argue that program features—including targeting, conditionality, accountability mechanisms, bureaucratic reach, and the nature and visibility of state-nonstate partnerships—interact dialectically with existing state-society relationships to engender different social contract outcomes for differently situated populations

Strong NGOs and weak states: pursuing gender justice in the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa

Over the past decade, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) and South Africa have attracted global attention for high rates of sexual and gender-based violence. Why is it that courts in eastern DR Congo prioritize gender crimes despite considerable logistical challenges, while courts in South Africa, home to a far stronger legal infrastructure and human rights record, have struggled to provide justice to victims of similar crimes? Lake shows that state fragility in DR Congo has created openings for human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to influence legal processes in ways that have proved impossible in countries like South Africa, where the state is stronger. Yet exploiting opportunities presented by state fragility to pursue narrow human rights goals invites a host of new challenges. Strong NGOs and Weak States documents the promises and pitfalls of human rights and rule of law advocacy undertaken by NGOs in strong and weak states alike

Policing insecurity

In environments of seemingly intractable conflict, how should we understand the role of state capacity building and security-sector reform in transitions to peace? Prevailing wisdom suggests that a strong state security apparatus mitigates cyclical violence and aids in transitions to predictable, rule-governed behavior. Yet growing attention to police brutality in institutionalized democracies calls this assumption into question. Drawing on a multiyear study of war making and state making in eastern DR Congo, this article interrogates logics of police capacity building, analyzing how and why reform efforts intended to bolster the state’s monopoly on violence frequently fail to curb the unrest they seek to disrupt. I argue that enhancing the coercive capacity of the police can entrench a wartime political order that makes peace more elusive; when police deploy the image of the state toward destabilizing ends they reinforce the institutions of everyday war, undermining the stability a monopoly on violence is intended to build