Violent power, civilian exclusion and the M23

Violence in eastern DRC is portrayed by western countries in terms of abject failure: people or events in the Congo (or Rwanda) have caused peacebuilding and development processes to fail. But the M23 is a direct result of processes that legitimate violent power

Not Breaking the Rules. Not Playing the Game. International Assistance to Countries at War

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’

Congo Basics

Congolese musicians do the best they can with what they’ve got in a country on its knees from war and a collapsed economy. Zoe Marriage reports from Kinshasa on the struggles of Show Music

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’

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

Dialogues No.3: Fragile States

The term ‘fragile’, as opposed to ‘rogue’, implies weakness and the need for assistance. It suggests that a humanitarian intervention might be appropriate for an abused or neglected population. But what are humanitarian NGOs’ responsibilities? Should they temporarily fill gaps in infrastructure, or should they also work to rebuild and improve that infrastructure? How closely should NGOs’ work be linked to ‘western’ governmental agendas? In this discussion Zoe Marriage argues that NGOs have become part of the political scene, and should therefore proceed with extreme caution. Christian Captier maintains that taking too monolithic an approach carries risks and that NGOs working outside the political sphere have an essential role to play. There are many ‘fragile’ states and the question of how ‘western’ NGOs should respond is not about to go away

From national security to human security — less of the same in Congo?

With the end of the Cold War came shifts in the way that security was perceived and pursued. The failing favour of the nation state provided space for the concept of human security and with it a plethora of associated security actors. Human security has particular resonance in Congo as millions of people have died in the wars, and the majority of the deaths have not resulted directly from military violence. At the level of policy and practice, though, the contribution of human security is questionable: it has not inspired effective protection of the population. In addition, the relationship between human security and national security, originally theorised in terms of exclusive sovereignty, has proved to be more complex

Accounting for selection bias using simulations: A general method and an application to millimeter-wavelength surveys

We have developed a new Bayesian method to correct the flux densities of astronomical sources. The hybrid method combines a simulated likelihood to model survey selection together with an analytic source-count-based prior. The simulated likelihood captures the effect of complicated selection methods, such as multi-frequency filtering or imposed restrictions on recovered sample properties (e.g., color cuts). Simulations are also able to capture unanticipated sources of uncertainty. In this way, the method enables a broader application of Bayesian techniques. Use of an analytic prior allows variation of assumed source count models without re-simulating the likelihood. We present the method along with a detailed description of an application to real survey data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope.Comment: 10 pages. Accepted versio