The trouble with the Congo: local violence and the failure of international peacebuilding, by Séverine Autesserre, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, xxi + 311 pp., £18.99 (paperback), ISBN 9780521156011
What is the real nature of a war? Can we burrow down deep enough to get to some causal essence, to find revealed in the dénouement the real culprit of this mass-murder whodunnit? In the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter DRC), enduring one of the deadliest conflicts of our times, is it all about minerals, as some advocacy groups argue? Or perhaps due to the decrepit Congolese state, as some neighbouring countries allege? Theorising about these causes has led academics and pundits to spill much ink. However, as Séverine Autesserre argues in a recent African Affairs article, such simplistic, monocausal narratives tend to misdiagnose the problem, privileging optics – what donor bureaucracies and Western audiences can understand and care about – over content. (Autesserre 2012a)
In light of this article, I suggest that Autesserre may have fallen victim to her own critique.1 In her lucid and well-argued book, The Trouble with the Congo, she puts forward a compelling, yet ultimately skewed portrayal of how the peace process in the Congo went astray. She suggests that international efforts were doomed by a culture of peacekeeping that made its protagonists neglect the importance of local conflicts. ‘The main reason that the peace-building strategy in Congo has failed is that the international community has paid too little attention to the root causes of the violence there: local disputes over land and power’ (Autesserre 2008, p. 95).
Autesserre is not alone in her emphasis on the local. In a recent article in the London Review of Books, Mahmood Mamdani argues that it is the ‘persistence of the native authority’ – the colonial system of rule that welded ethnicity together with power and land, splitting the political world into those who are indigenous and those who are not – that continues to fuel violence (Mamdani 2011, p. 33). While his argument is different from Autesserre's, both highlight the importance of customary rule, land conflicts and a discourse of indigeneity in explaining current violence. It is worthwhile exploring these concepts.
In her book, as well as a series of articles and opinion pieces, Autesserre argues that diplomats, donors and aid agencies have privileged elite-based explanations for violence, and limited themselves to solutions tailored to this view of the world. The peace process that culminated in a transitional government in 2003, and national elections three years later, forged deals among national and regional elites. However, this process, as well as the United Nations peacekeeping mission that was its principal outside guarantor, did not address local conflicts – especially in the eastern DRC – over citizenship, land tenure, and customary power. ‘Ultimately, this peacebuilding culture enabled foreign actors to pursue an intervention strategy that permitted, and at times even exacerbated, fighting, massacres, and massive human rights violations’ (Autesserre 2010, pp. 11–12).
Understanding the interaction between centre and periphery, the local and the national – and in the DRC's case, also the regional – is a crucial challenge to theorising civil wars. It places an emphasis on causal processes, rather than the aggregate data presented in most large-scale quantitative studies, and sheds light on the links between the local grievances and national politics that produce much of the violence, especially in weak states such as the Congo, where actors often operate with substantial autonomy. As Kalyvas suggests:
Civil wars are not binary conflicts, but complex and ambiguous processes that foster the ‘joint’ action of local and supralocal actors, civilians, and armies, whose alliance results in violence that aggregates yet still reflects their diverse goals. It is the convergence of local motives and supralocal imperatives that endows civil wars with their particular and often puzzling character, straddling the divide between the political and the private, the collective and the individual (Kalyvas 2003, p. 475).
Understanding this cat's cradle of causal interactions is also crucial for policy. Outsiders will always see actors with both local and national ambitions and links, but in some cases the national will take precedence, or vice versa. Is the best entry point to dealing with violence through a mediation of land feuds, via elite-based negotiations, or by strengthening the decrepit state apparatus? Which strand in the cradle can be pulled to reduce the messy tangle to a more stable, symmetrical picture?
Autesserre argues that it is all of the above, but that diplomats, blinkered by their peacekeeping culture, have focused disproportionately on the level of elites. However, while Autesserre provides good descriptions of local grievances over land and customary authority, she does not adequately theorise how these dynamics interact with the national and regional to create the armed groups responsible for much of the violence. After all, there are land conflicts throughout the country, and state weakness and disputes over customary power are pervasive, but it is only really in certain parts of the eastern DRC that mass violence has persisted.
What is lacking from her account is a rigorous analysis of the causal sequences that created and motivated the armed actors that perpetrate the violence. Grievances must, after all, be filtered through agency, which takes places in the structural and organisational context of armed rebellion. There is no doubt that there are deep-seated resentments over thorny issues such as citizenship, land tenure, and local power structures in the eastern DRC. But how do these resentments coalesce into armed mobilisation?
Why has violence persisted in the eastern Congo since 2003?
This debate is anchored in the alarming escalation of violence in the Kivus region that has taken place since 2003, and it is here that Autesserre's argument is most problematic. Whilst she agrees that violence has been produced in both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ ways, she argues that ‘most violence in the Congo is not coordinated on a large scale. It is the product of conflicts among fragmented local militia, each trying to advance its own agenda at the village or district level’ (Autesserre 2012b). As a result, she has advocated that ‘the best approach is to make a priority of treating core problems at the local level, especially long-standing land disputes, rather than focusing exclusively on managing their broader consequences’ (Autesserre 2008, p. 110).
So what does this mean for the eastern DRC? How should we understand the violence that has continued there since the peace deal of 2003? In her book, Autesserre points to struggles over land and local power between Mai-Mai militia, which generally represent communities that considered themselves ‘indigenous’, and armed groups that emerged out of Banyarwanda communities, including descendants of immigrants from Rwanda (see also Huening, this volume). The animosity fuelling violence between these two groups draws on historical struggles over land and customary rule that date back to the colonial era. She argues that in 2004, the Banyarwanda community split after a new citizenship law was passed, with Hutu abandoning their alliance with the Tutsi community. Feeling marginalised, the Tutsi ‘lost all hope of political representation, increasingly feared for their lives and property, and became more radicalized’ (Autesserre 2010, p. 163).
This view posits a seamless line between feelings of marginalisation and armed activity. But who organised these groups and which constituencies played a role? Perhaps the two most important groups involved in this phase of the conflict were the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP) and the Coalition des Patriotes Résistants Congolais (PARECO). These two groups were at the heart of an escalation of violence that, between 2006 and 2009, increased internal displacement – which had fallen following the peace deal by 2.3 million – by a million people.
Studies of the two groups, drawing on interviews with over 50 of their former leaders, suggest that it was not so much amorphous communities that mobilised from the grassroots in response to discrimination, but military and political elites (Stearns 2012a, 2012b). The impulse behind the creation of the CNDP came from a small clique of Congolese Tutsi officers, with important backing from the Rwandan security establishment. Similarly, the main PARECO wing was created as a counterweight to the CNDP by Hutu politicians and disaffected military officers. Both groups enjoyed high levels of support among their respective communities, but the distinctive trait of both groups was the degree to which disaffected elites were able to quickly mobilise military support to protect their interests.
This points to a larger trend in the region – how armed groups have become increasingly integrated into political and business networks (see articles by Laudati and Verweijen, this volume). The reverse also holds: faced with a venal and unreliable state, armed violence has become an essential part of elite strategies to bolster their stature and protect their interests.
Contrary to Autesserre's account, the CNDP rebellion began in the political stratosphere, not as a grassroots-based movement, and as early as 2003. The ‘Sun City’ peace deal in the DRC posed a threat to one of the main belligerents – the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD). RCD controlled over a quarter of the country but stood to do very poorly in elections then scheduled for 2005 as the culmination of the peace process. (RCD eventually won around 4% representation in national institutions in the 2006 elections.) This threat prompted RCD officers, led by General Laurent Nkunda and backed by the Rwandan government, to launch a new rebellion in 2004. In other words, the CNDP did not arise out of the failure of diplomats to address local conflicts over land and customary authority, but because the elite compromise they had brokered did not hold. When the CNDP eventually did disappear, it was as a result of a rickety – and ultimately unsuccessful – deal between Congolese and Rwandan governments in 2009.
The emergence of PARECO, probably the second strongest Congolese rebel force during the 2007–2009 period, is also instructive. Almost all of its commanders cut their teeth in self-defence militia that fought in the Masisi war of 1993. At this time, the Hutu militia were relatively decentralised, rooted in local issues, and reliant on village chiefs and leaders for recruitment and financing. Over time, however, these groups consolidated, created a central structure, and their leaders became integrated into elite politics. In 1998, the Rwandan-backed RCD was able to co-opt a majority of these leaders and integrate them into its security forces. In 2005, as the CNDP was forming, Hutu politicians led a majority of Hutu officers out of that group and into an alliance with the Congolese government. This sequence of events suggests that armed groups have evolved over time, growing more integrated into elite political and economic networks. When PARECO was eventually demobilised in 2009, this arrangement was brokered by influential Hutu politicians and army officers.
This is not to say that the histories of marginalisation and oppression do not affect these elites, nor that they could have succeeded without a large pool of recruits and sympathisers at the grassroots level. This is surely the case, and some of the officers and politicians involved in these rebellions were probably driven by genuine ethnic solidarity, not greed. And while there is no doubt that land mediation or local reconciliation work could help consolidate a political settlement, it is difficult to imagine them bringing about the peace deal in the first place. To provide a crude analogy: there is no doubt that many whites in apartheid South Africa sympathised with the racist policies of the National Party governments, and that social marginalisation led many blacks to join the guerrilla resistance. But the main effort to end apartheid did not initially focus on land reform or local reconciliation projects.
Ironically, Autesserre recently penned an opinion piece in the International Herald Tribune urging policymakers to spend more money on local reconciliation and land projects, in the same week a United Nations investigation accused Rwanda of playing a decisive role in creating a successor to the CNDP, the M23 (Autesserre 2012b). Here was an armed group that, although led by many of the same Tutsi officers that had been in the CNDP, was far more disconnected from the local Tutsi community and was driven largely by Rwandan involvement and disaffected army officers.
Conceptualising violence
What is the nature of violence in the eastern DRC? If we want to know why it has persisted, we should try to understand its causes. For the most part, violence is collective, in that it is perpetrated by members of armed groups. The motivations are multiple – violence can be used to control territory, discipline fellow soldiers, collect revenues, or for individual gain. But, most importantly, in areas with no armed groups, there is a much smaller incidence of violence.
A theory of violence should therefore have to pass through a theory of armed mobilisation, a deep understanding of why armed groups emerge and persist. Theorising this kind of collective action, and the incentives, ideology and organisation necessary to forge it, is crucial to understanding the current Congolese conundrum. Much like forms of peaceful mobilisation, armed mobilisation follows immediately from local grievances. It depends on the strength of pre-existing social networks and organisations – student groups, peasant cooperatives, ethnic organisations; and political opportunities – powerful allies, splits among elites, and the weakness of the central state (McAdam 1982, Kriesi 2007).
Some of the groups in the eastern DRC are indeed like the ones Autesserre describes in her book: deeply rooted in rural communities and invested in struggles over land and local power. She is right to point out that such groups are more prevalent in South Kivu than in North Kivu, perhaps because they are less integrated into national and regional political networks, and that non-governmental groups have done valuable work in brokering peace in some of these areas. But not all armed groups are the same, and in recent years the main fault lines of the conflict have been more determined by the interests of national and regional elites, than by quarrels over land or customary authority.