Review article of recent literature on the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Nzongola-Ntalaja: The Congo from Leopold to Kabila, Trefon (ed): Reinventing Order in the Congo, and Clark (ed): The African Stakes of the Congo War)

By survival in conditions that are murderous, by evading forms of control and de-linking from the system, people in Congo ultimately limit the reach of the power imposed on them. They have to a great extent isolated, and to a lesser degree diminished, the leadership of Congo and the power of the invaders. The forms of economic survival dispute authority by depriving the state (or predatory nonstate actors) of revenue, whilst maximising the opportunities for survival irrespective of – and in defiance of – the coercion to which people are exposed. The violent regimes in Congo have broken the country to the extent that they were able, but the fact that they cannot break it all attests to the resistance against them: for the powerful, as for the powerless, there may be a will, but there has been no way to achieve it completely

Challenging aid in Africa. Principles, Implementation, and Impact

Why do humanitarian principles, human rights and other ‘rules’ espoused by aid organisations apparently fail to influence the reality of assistance delivery, whilst reality does not dint these objectives? Not breaking the rules, not playing the game investigates the international assistance given in countries at war. Presenting evidence from Sierra Leone, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and southern Sudan, it finds that appeal to a morality based on rights and principles allows aid staff to justify their operational weaknesses by blaming or discrediting others. The terminology used casts political and military activity as illegitimate, forestalling dialogue, limiting aid organisations’ perception of the contexts in which they work, and ultimately questioning the sincerity of the assistance. The book concludes that people in countries at war are not ‘breaking the rules’ of assistance – as assistance is not meaningfully ‘ruled’ by rights or principles – they are more fundamentally ‘not playing the game’