Introduction
When it comes to real power, people from all parts of society from eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) tend to invoke the role of the incontournables – a category of actors defined by the following attributes: impossible to sideline, unavoidable, indispensable towards a respective context, and instrumental in shaping their surroundings and operating through them.
Using this prism, the article investigates the spatial logics of political patronage. A rich literature notwithstanding (see Eisenstadt and Roniger 1980), these logics are marginally addressed in seminal theory on patronage and neopatrimonialism (Scott 1972; Lemarchand 1972; Chabal and Daloz 1999; Bayart 2006) and overlooked by a growing peacebuilding and governance industry in eastern Congo’s presumed ‘post-conflict’ era.1 Analysing the transnational regulation of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), the essay studies patronage and looks at how political and economic order is made, unmade and remade within and across networks. Drawing from in-depth ethnography, it outlines how wartime powerbrokers and their networks persist and reinvent themselves, despite and due to transnational reform – mastering the art of becoming incontournable in the eastern Congo.
While ASM has been widespread for decades in eastern Congo and beyond, it only gained relevance in research and policy after 2000, making headlines for fuelling violent conflict. Looking at the ensuing flurry of transnational initiatives to curb the trade in ‘conflict minerals’ (known as the 3Ts – tin, tantalum and tungsten), this essay dissects how stakeholders of eastern Congo’s political economy became incontournables in the realm of mineral trade, and how they transition from ‘war to peace’, from ‘chaotic to clean’ trade. Moreover, it examines how formalisation and traceability of mineral supply chains reshape patronage networks, involving politicians, entrepreneurs and security providers. Based on a critical literature review, the essay uses inspiration from political anthropology and critical geography in order to offer an ethnographically informed socio-spatial reading of incontournables and their networks of patronage in situations of conflict.
An emic term, the notion of incontournables is recurrent in public and private conversations across the DRC. Yet, there is only cursory reference to it in scholarly literature. While Schouten (2019, 2) takes a geographical stance, translating it as the quality of being ‘un-skirtable’ (sic), Stearns, Verweijen and Eriksson (2013, 34) conceive of incontournables sociologically as those ‘impossible to ignore’. Others use the term as stand-alone emic concept (Bucyalimwe 2006, 270; Buescher, Cuvelier, and Mushobekwa 2014, 263). Drawing on discussions with Congolese academics, commentators and friends with an avid interest in politics and society, this essay conceptualises incontournables as a blend of political, social and spatial qualities. Incontournables are figures that are unavoidable and indispensable in a respective context based on their resources, connections and roles as necessary, but also on chance and circumstance as sufficient conditions.
This essay complements patronage theory with the notion of incontournables to reconceptualise the interplay of transnational regulation, violent conflict and contested authority within and across socio-spatial networks. It then illustrates, with three empirical vignettes, how incontournables connect and close off intersecting interests, spaces, actors and structures. The three cases demonstrate how peacebuilding and transnational mineral regulation efforts to address armed conflict can reproduce the very patronage networks that have long been operating at the heart of violent politics. In an effort to inductively sharpen existing theory, the essay draws on 14 months of fieldwork between 2014 and 2018. This resulted in over 300 interviews and informal conversations, mostly conducted jointly with three Congolese researchers. While they decided not to co-author the article, all of them were involved in designing and carrying out the research. The bulk of the interviews took place in eastern Congo’s artisanal 3T mining areas, complemented by participant observation, and urban hubs such as Goma and Bukavu. They involved political, military, customary and economic stakeholders across the supply chain. In an attempt to lessen some of the distortions induced by researcher positionality, I preferred open and semi-structured debates over a precast questionnaire.
Patronage: overused or ill-defined?
This section introduces the key texts informing our understanding of patronage – not limited to but focusing on African polities – and carves out their contributions and limitations. It makes a case for rethinking existing theory in order to account for socio-spatial, networked logics of patronage in situations of contested authority, before illustrating the argument with three empirical snapshots.
A century ago, Weber argued that no form of authority is free from (neo-)patrimonial, patron–client or other interpersonal logics. At the same time though, no form of authority, or domination, is based on those alone: they are context-dependent corollaries of how private connections intersect with what is defined as public affairs in all three ideal-types (legal-rational, traditional and charismatic rule) of legitimate authority (Weber 1980, 137). Weber and others emphasise that any empirical example of rule – while perhaps resembling one ideal-type more than others – incorporates elements of all three: for instance, like the blending of bureaucratic administration with patrimonial (and, often worse, charismatic) structures in European nation-states between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, those states’ very own colonial projects and their postcolonial outcomes across the world offer ample illustration of how patronage emerges inside, at the margins of, and in parallel to states.
Part and parcel of the hybrid and violent nature of colonialism was the pretence of public authority performed by private, albeit often metropolitan (European) government-linked entities or, in Mbembe’s (2001) words, ‘private indirect government’. Examples like the British East India Company and the Congo Free State speak intimately to that. However, this is not to presume linear causality from colonial to postcolonial governance. Rather, it flags broader logics of patronage: if colonialism was a masquerade for privatised extraction, postcolonial governance often operates under a similar disguise – combining interpersonal ties with the signposting of officialdom. Nowadays, this radiates into global development ideology, pushing a ‘re-ordering of the various modes of government’ (Bayart 2000, 244), often based on imagined binaries like formal and informal, or modern and traditional (Hart 2008; Rubbers 2007). Lemarchand claimed that
clientelism … has a heuristic value generally missing from the conceptual arsenal of either ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’ polities; it directs attention to processes of adjustment between traditional and modern patterns of behavior, expectations, and normative orientations to politics. (Lemarchand 1972, 68)
Useful as a starting point, such analyses reduce patronage and clientelism to a ‘shorthand for corrupt, dysfunctional regimes [ … ], perpetuating normative judgments based on ideal-type government structures that do not exist’ (Wolfe and Müller 2018, 102). Hence, these terms remain a moving target, embodying ideas of personalised relations between actors with ‘unequal wealth, status or influence, based on conditional loyalties and involving mutually beneficial transactions’ (Lemarchand 1972, 69). Patrons and clients bring resources to the table: patrons command skills, information and capital, while clients offer economic, political or military support. Often involving a ‘package-deal’ (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1980, 50), patronage is a redistribution of profit (to patrons) and protection (to clients). Members of patronage networks define this not ‘as a quid-pro-quo exchange [ … ], but instead interpret it in flowery terms as an enactment of community relations’ (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007, 19). In Sierra Leone, Hoffman (2007, 651) observed that the ‘social being of an individual is measured by the people with whom one has relations of dependence or for whom one acts as a patron.’ The ‘reciprocal legitimacy’ of patronage depends on a ‘stable or growing pool of rents’ (Wolfe and Müller 2018, 106). Looking at the army of the DRC, Verweijen (2018, 631) sees patronage as ‘social networks cemented by patron–client ties, which are asymmetric but reciprocal.’ This sets patronage apart from brokerage, where intermediaries derive their clout from centrality and mobility (Boissevain 1974; Adams 1970; Landa 1981).
Very few scholars look at the spatial logics of patronage. However, if space is ‘a constellation of different, co-existing ongoing social, economic, and political dynamics’ (Korf et al. 2018, 168), spatialising patronage can expand it from heuristic to concept and connect to larger debates on public authority (Lund 2006; Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2014) and non-state or negotiated government (Raeymaekers, Menkhaus and Vlassenroot 2008; Hagmann and Péclard 2011). Moreover, patronage is one key factor that shapes the ‘assortment of power struggles between the elements that permit statehood to occur’ (MacKay 2006, 76). Conceptualising the incontournables can help spatialise patronage and provide insight into how registers of authority are cumulated and funnelled through networks. Before illustrating how this plays out in militarised political economies like eastern Congo, the next part conceptualises incontournables and (their) networks and outlines why spatialising patronage can help inform policies on reconstruction, political settlements and stabilisation beyond imagined, colonially inspired binaries.
Bringing in space: patronage, networks and incontournables
Within broader literatures on patronage, the idea of a ‘political marketplace’ where ‘elites secure the support, including votes and guns, of their constituents in return for money, jobs and licences to trade or pillage’ (de Waal 2009, 103) is one of the few outspoken pointers to spatial dynamics. Its implicit reference to place and territory are a rare attempt to capture spatial logics. Yet, critical scholarship reminds us that place and territory are not the only spatial dynamics in political, social and economic phenomena (Jessop, Brenner, and Jones 2008; Allen 2009; Marijnen and Verweijen 2018). This essay focuses on how networks define the ‘flow’ of patronage. Networks are bundles of actors and the connections, or ties, that link them to each other. The clout of any given actors within a network then depends on the number of ties they command as well as the direction of power, or quality, expressed in these ties. The number of ties defines the centrality of an actor, while their quality defines relational influence. In other words, patrons entertain more connections: they are nodes bundling numerous ties but also command how power flows through them. This is where the notion of incontournables becomes relevant.
Being incontournable means being able to command a sufficient number of ties so that no meaningful political, social and economic action can happen without that given actor in that network. In other words, it is the capacity of centralising flows in a network efficiently enough that other actors cannot bypass. Often, the clout of incontournables is not limited to one network. Using skills and assets, they are gatekeepers across networks. In eastern Congo’s ASM sector – nowadays a pivot of international peacebuilding and transnational regulation, interveners at different scales (national, regional, or international) promote governance innovations that allow incontournables to ‘sit at the table’ and, ideally as the unique link, represent a ‘local arena’, like ‘a voice from the field’. Inversely, this makes them ‘the person accepted elsewhere’ – simultaneously increasing their clout back home. The more exclusive the ability to navigate multiple networks, accumulating power across political, economic or military domains, the more an actor then is incontournable.
Being incontournable is not a fixed attribute: it depends on an actor’s assets (means, connections, reputation, political clout and institutional roles) and the networks in which those assets will be invested. Sometimes, only the convergence of several persons creates a collective incontournable. Being incontournable is tenuous and creates jealousy and competition. Incontournables need to continuously reposition themselves in order to remain ‘obligatory passage points’ (Callon 1984, 204). Their clout is rooted simultaneously in networks and statutory hierarchy – which runs counter to imagined binaries – as they harness authority within, outside and across institutional frames. While statutory hierarchy provides clout, social networks are a source of power of their own (Jessop, Brenner and Jones 2008, 390). Similar observations exist in other fields of social science, such as actor–network theory (Latour 1996; Lee and Brown 1994). The following section illustrates patronage in eastern Congo’s ASM sector and demonstrates why the notion of incontournables is a fruitful avenue for spatialising patronage theory.
Conflict and patronage in eastern Congo
Mobutu preferred to circulate his principal elite rivals in and out of favour, making them compete against one another. Since the late 1990s this system has been replaced by a regionalized political marketplace in which organized violence has become a major instrument (de Waal 2009, 105).
To become incontournable, patrons need to strike an often delicate balance between reliability and ambiguity across the networks in which authority and rents are negotiated. These dynamics persist where international peacebuilding kicks in, such as in transnational reform in specific areas of governance or broader approaches to address conflict such as the restoration of state authority, community dialogues, or the fight against impunity. While such interventions are aimed at ‘returning’ to an imagined ideal of state authority, the DRC’s recent history has seen the ‘outsourcing of central state functions [ … ] to influential individuals in post-civil war settings’ (Themnér and Utas 2016, 256). A lack of settlement resources – extractive rents outweighing productive ones – has furthered the militarisation and ‘shadowisation’ of the economy, in which incontournables organise survival and rebranding of wartime networks. If political (power-sharing) and military (army integration) deals absorbed high-level patronage structures, and vice versa, numerous entrepreneurs, disgruntled politicians, customary chiefs and mid-range commanders had little to gain. At the same time, the ‘post-conflict’ assumption, framed by watchdog scrutiny and ‘peace dividends’ to co-opt spoilers, encouraged ‘illegal’ wartime patrons to morph into ‘legal’ ones (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1980, 76). One key component of foreign-supported peacebuilding is transnational governance reforms, in particular ASM. Yet, the creation of ‘conflict-free’ mineral markets has intensified the fragmentation of authority under a smokescreen of transparent, regulated trade. While this has not lessened violence, it has strengthened the position of wartime networks, in which incontournables thrive.
Conflict minerals and the future of patronage
The ‘conflict minerals’ narrative emerged in the Second Congo war between 1998 and 2003. While there had been a nationwide liberalisation of ASM two decades earlier, the sector did not raise much international interest prior to its association with the war. Driven by Western advocacy, public scrutiny of ‘conflict minerals’ boomed as much as high-end smartphones around 2000. This coincided with the entry of the greed theory into policy and donor discourse. This theory initially claimed that lootable resources ‘triggered’ civil war, before back-paddling to the idea that they made them ‘feasible’ (Korf 2011; Nathan 2005; Cramer 2002). Violence, however, had escalated previously in eastern Congo (Vlassenroot, Hoffmann, and Mudinga 2016; Stearns 2013), mostly rooted in contestation over land and identity, and had been significantly compounded by the 1994 arrival of Rwandan refugees and génocidaires (Mathys 2017; Ndaywel è Nziem 2012).
Yet, it took five years into the wars until conflict parties found interest in mining, alongside more civilians than ever due to price peaks and war-induced loss of agricultural livelihoods: although Mobutu was ‘credited with liberalizing artisanal mining in the 1980s, [ … ] the war introduced people to the real value of minerals’ (Smith 2015, 11). Years later, greed theory, Western campaigning and investigative reports inspired a series of policy innovations, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Due Diligence Guidance and Section 1502 of a US law called the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Consumer Protection Act (hereafter ‘Dodd-Frank’). In response, Kinshasa declared a half-year mining ban for eastern Congo in late 2010, provoking ‘the collapse of many artisanal mining and mineral trade structures and nearly halting registered exports’ (Rothenberg and Radley 2014, 25). The OECD guidance and Dodd-Frank also triggered the onset of traceability to perform due diligence (Cuvelier, Vlassenroot, and Olin 2014; Nest 2011). A soft law, the OECD guidance informs robust rules like Dodd-Frank, domestic ratification in the DRC, and the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region’s (ICGLR) regional certification (the OECD guidance and the ICGLR rules were ratified by the government under Decree no. 0057/CAB.MIN/MINES/01/2012 of 29 February 2012). Export certification depends on supply chain traceability conducted via the industry-led ‘iTSCi’ (international Tin Supply Chain initiative) scheme since 2012. This formalisation of a notoriously suspicious ASM sector forced extant business networks to reinvent themselves, as ICGLR certification outlawed non-iTSCi 3T exports to smelting companies and end users.
These laws and initiatives, however, presumed a ‘flat geography’ – a terra nullius-type empty space where new regulation intervenes – and an ideal-type ‘Weberian’ state (in which Weber himself did not believe) effectively aiming at a monopoly of violence. Yet, four things happened: first, co-opting protagonists of the ‘conflict minerals’ era into iTSCi resulted in ‘façade institutions where [ … ] power continues to be concentrated in and implemented through informal structures’ (Themnér and Utas 2016), as illustrated by continuing smuggling. Second, iTSCi roamed into the negotiation of authority, legitimising non-state actors and bolstering patronage networks through a monopolistic set-up. Third, there was a proliferation of mining cooperatives controlled by customary and political elites to formalise ASM entrenched patronage.2 Fourth, aimed at promoting due diligence, annual OECD meetings began to include incontournables as participants that reinvented themselves from rebels as politicians and traders. Like rebels-turned-generals in security sector reform workshops, they embrace co-optation while maintaining their patronage networks. Three case studies (see Figure 1) demonstrate how patronage networks lubricate the friction between violent politics and the new rules of the ASM game, and how these networks underpin ostensibly ‘conflict-free’ mining.
Map of the case study areas. (Source: © OpenStreetMap and stahldsgn design studio; annotations by C. Vogel. The work of stahldsgn is gratefully acknowledged.)
The first case, a raid on boats during a shipping process (‘boat busting’), is rooted in a broader ethno-political conflict pitting a mining company against local trade networks. It shows how, in a competition over minerals, a collusion of commanders with a rebel past became incontournable in a major smuggling operation. The second case (‘Fuliiro fault lines’) describes a customary succession conflict involving militia and provincial politics. Connecting different networks, one side of the conflict became incontournable for the access to minerals and taxation prerogatives. In the third case (‘conflict cooperatives’), customary elites pushed rivalry between mining cooperatives by imposing – as incontournables – their cooperative in the name of ‘conflict-free’ mining. In all cases, contemporary and historical tensions of identity, access to resources and customary authority play a role. Customary power is both a central tenet of local politics in eastern Congo as well as a key factor of contestation of public authority. As part of a codified hybridity, customary leaders embody a bifurcated position as both community-based and state-sanctioned authorities. However, many of today’s customary entities are the result of social engineering, (post)colonial manipulation and invented tradition, fixing formerly fluid ethno-territorial dynamics into state structure and heightening competition over local politics (Verweijen and Van Bockhaven 2020; Hoffmann 2019). Together, the three cases show how patronage takes priority over institutions and regulations, raising questions over national and international actors’ tenets of clean, transnational reform. They highlight how key figures became incontournable in a particular moment and space, being both at the centre of and connecting links between different networks.
Boat busting: coltan contraband and militarised patronage
Masisi is a territoire (sub-provincial district) in North Kivu’s highlands west of Goma. A densely populated area in eastern Congo, Masisi’s main communities are Hunde, Tembo, Hutu and Tutsi. Kinyarwanda-speaking, the latter two are often considered opposed to the ‘autochthonous’ Hunde and Tembo. Yet, the history of tensions in and between communities goes beyond these cleavages. Misguided colonial migration and citizenship policies and the manipulation of customary authority built a fertile basis for conflict over identity and land. For half a century, Kinyarwanda-speakers’ citizenship has been ‘switched on and off’ (Jackson 2007, 483), fostering other communities’ invective against perceived ‘invaders’ in the struggle over local political power. A hotbed of armed mobilisation, Masisi experienced security dilemmas giving birth to both Hutu and Tembo/Hunde militia prior to the arrival of refugees and genocide fugitives from Rwanda in 1994. Since 1996, Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s rebellion and, since 1998, the anti-Kabila Rassemblement congolais pour la démocratie (RCD) connected Masisi to wider conflicts, deepening old rifts and creating new ones, such as between the Conseil national pour la défense du peuple (CNDP) and the Patriotes résistants congolais (PARECO), a predecessor to today’s Nyatura militia (Stearns 2013).
Decades of violence allowed entrenched patronage networks involving politicians, business people and military commanders to evolve. Although armed mobilisation fragmented in recent years, many of the associated networks survived, thriving around ethno-political manipulation and lucrative trade, including in coltan. Rubaya, Masisi’s coltan hub, has 17 mines. Seven are part of a contested concession of the Societé Minière de Bisunzu (SMB). Roughly half of the miners there are ex-combatants and, with local traders, organise in the Coopérative des exploitants miniers artisanaux de Masisi (COOPERAMMA). When Rubaya joined iTSCi in 2014, COOPERAMMA quickly denounced price falls due to monopoly, and SMB’s refusal to tolerate other buyers (Vogel and Raeymaekers 2016). In mid 2015, this added up to US$6 million in unpaid deliveries. While COOPERAMMA is believed to have had ties with PARECO, SMB used to be close to the CNDP’s political wing. The following incident, however, illustrates how cross-cutting patronage ties supersede seemingly ethnic contestation.
On an early October morning in 2015, seven lorries carrying around 50 tonnes of coltan from Rubaya, accompanied by army escorts, arrived at the shores of Lake Kivu. There, they came across other soldiers trying to stop the shipment, but one high-ranking army officer called off the intervening troops so that the lorries could reach the boats. However, gunfire had alerted nearby navy personnel who found the boats being loaded and also opened fire. Two boats capsized. While one boat managed to leave, three lorries went back to a nearby hideout, still accompanied by army escorts. An eyewitness called provincial authorities but got no reply. One day later, the cargo was reloaded onto jeeps and brought to Goma, where it was parked at the provincial office of the central bank. From there, it disappeared, and the mining police lost track (compiled from field notes as well as Interviews nos. 198, 200 and 201, November 2015).
There are a number of striking aspects in this case: some of the lorries belonged to the transport company of an army general, formerly active in Hutu militia. The army units involved were under the orders of another general, who had previously taken part in rebellions opposed to Hutu mobilisation. Both have ties to politicians critical of SMB, who in turn command networks of coltan traders (Vogel and Musamba 2017) – a threat that SMB reciprocates with its private police force, leading to regular skirmishes. Coupling their military networks with anti-SMB circles, the generals became incontournable to the point of staging a major smuggling operation. Other incidents show similar patterns of FARDC’s (the DRC armed forces’) involvement in mining, or, in other words, the ‘need to know the right people to work with’.3
In the same area, one mining official recalled regular ‘minerals transports with military escorts we can’t even stop for controls’, while a police officer said, ‘we can’t just arrest people, it depends on their connections.’ In one case, a convoy opened fire on unarmed controllers (Interviews no. 105, August 2014, and nos. 184 and 187, September 2015). One mid-level army officer complained that ‘politicians sabotage my work. I am a soldier, they are not my superiors, but they are incontournable [sic!] and influence my bosses’ (Interview no. 197, November 2015). This demonstrates how patronage ties involving military and business circles can level ostensible ethnic antagonisms. A shared interest among senior officers secured the operation, backed up by other networks, and thus became incontournable. Moreover, given the magnitude of the operation (vehicles, escorts etc.), it would have been unlikely that anyone other than senior military facilitated it, relying on army logistics and ties to politics and business to ensure impunity. Hence, the collusion between one army faction, entangled with business circles and provincial elites in a shared past of rebellion, and another: in order to avoid rival interests, they formed an incontournable cluster, infiltrating a supply chain that was ‘clean’ only on paper.
Fuliiro fault lines: rebels, merchants and chiefs
Stretched along the DRC–Burundi borderland in South Kivu, Uvira territory is made up of three customary chieftaincies. One is that of the Bafuliiro, located in Lemera on the hills that drop down to the Ruzizi plain. The area is known for deep-seated conflict over land, cattle and ‘ethnic territory’ (Muchukiwa 2006) both between and within communities – involving local, provincial and national elites and fine-grained patronage networks.4 This case shows how one customary succession conflict became entwined with armed mobilisation in a context of mining. After the passing of mwami (paramount chief) Ndare Simba in 2012, the Kigunga and Mugerero tin mines near Lemera joined iTSCi’s ‘conflict-free’ supply chains. Meanwhile, a succession struggle evolved between Ndare’s son Adam and the late chief’s half-brother Albert. This conflict scaled up to the level of provincial and national politics, with Adam initially garnering government support (through a decree declaring him mwami and from the South Kivu governor at that time, highlighting the hybrid character of contemporary customary power).5 Albert counted on support from opposition stalwarts of his party (including one Uvira strongman later co-opted as national minister). Recounting the situation, one interlocutor quipped that ‘to become incontournable, you need to divide the people’ (Interview no. 63, July 2014). The confusion was compounded by the half-brother’s possession of customary insignia (including the Fuliiro lushembe crown), which many took as explanation for a ‘magical’ disappearance of minerals during the peak of contestation. Meanwhile, iTSCi traceability transformed Lemera’s economy. Magical or not, the reconfiguration of local mineral markets resulted – based on an erstwhile deal with the late chief – in a de facto monopoly held by a joint venture tieing the concession holder to a Bukavu-based trading house. In 2014 and 2015 the monopoly – according to Lemera’s traders – was ‘firmly in the hands of the chefferie’ (Interview no. 26, June 2014). In this period, a local militia named Biloko (Lingala for ‘things’), partly composed of family members of the mwami’s son, got embroiled in the conflict over power and business:
Molière, the previous commander-in-chief, was firmly in the mwami Adam camp, obeying his orders became a political act. Consequently, local defence commanders preferring to stay neutral or harbouring sympathies for Albert tried to distance themselves from Molière. (Verweijen 2016, 37)
In this context, Biloko, loyal to the chieftaincy, staged a coup in the local mining committee. They managed to occupy key positions and were paid monthly allowances by the joint venture on the basis of a memorandum signed with the chieftaincy (Interviews nos. 89, August 2014, and 168, September 2015). The head of the local mining office refused to be paid and recommended that the committee be suspended. Shortly afterwards Biloko looted his office, prompting him to flee, after which he was replaced by a Biloko member on the joint venture payroll.6 The customary–militia–business network, iTSCi’s operating costs and falling global prices aggravated the monopoly, leading to a crisis with local prices two-thirds down. Mid 2015, Lemera’s market had spatially shrunk by the same factor. In the light of a dwindling economy, the networks connecting the mwami, local militia and business elites became a powerful tool: pits were allocated – through the committee – to Biloko supporters. Forming a node that tied local militia, political and entrepreneurial elites into one network, Adam’s branch of the chiefly family became incontournable. Their position was reinforced by navigating other networks, including the then presidential majority and provincial business elites, but also rallying many miners that were working part-time for the militia. This was backed up by official chiefly prerogatives to levy local taxes. This increased the amount of available rents to hand out beyond the joint venture revenues, providing Adam with a key instrument of politico-economic power rooted in the bifurcated logics (state and custom) of chiefly legitimacy that the DRC’s dual system makes provision for.
Conflict cooperatives: formalising patronage networks
Ngweshe chieftaincy in Walungu territory, South Kivu, is an important kingdom of the Shi community whose ‘ethnic territory’ surrounds the provincial capital Bukavu (Muchukiwa 2006). One distinct trait of the Shi is their centralised chiefly and political organisation, as opposed to more segmentary communities that harbour grievances over a perceived Shi dominance in provincial politics. In Shi custom, kalinzi regulates land use: usufruct rights are leased in return for tribute payments (Bahati 2016).7 Based on a contract, these rights are inheritable and alienable, pending mwami consent. However, the mwami can take back land leased under kalinzi and offer another plot in exchange, unless state titles exist and legal pluralism triggers ambiguity. Land legislation in the DRC has a non-linear history: the 1966 Bakajika Law and the 1973 Land Law, for instance, created superposition, with state and customary laws overlapping, yet saying different things. This is even more tricky in mining: unlike land laws, the 2002 mining code differentiates between soil and subsoil. This institutional ambiguity nurtures patronage, as the tin mine in Chaminyago shows. Located near the town Nzibira, this tin mine was validated as ‘conflict-free’ and integrated into the iTSCi scheme in 2014. Two cooperatives compete over access there: COMIDEA, founded 2010 by local traders and registered in 2012, and COMIANGWE, founded and registered in 2014 by the provincial mining minister at the time (formerly a secretary to the mwami Ngweshe, before being appointed by the governor, also a Shi). The imbricated politics of dual state and customary authority formed a basis for the creation of COMIANGWE, where ‘appointments [are] a family affair, and illegal traders are protected by incontournables through what we call political umbrellas’ (Interview no. 167, September 2015). Although both cooperatives are recognised in ministerial decrees, by late 2015 only COMIDEA was in full conformity with state-issued mining cadastre rules. Legal on paper, COMIANGWE is hence an example of the ‘double game practiced [sic] by the political elite, in mastering both the law (official norms) and their obligation-based relationships (clientelism)’ (Olivier de Sardan 2008, 7).
Initially run by COMIDEA, Chaminyago also is a transit site to tag tin from a nearby industrial gold concession of the Canadian mining corporation Banro who operates several large-scale mining operations in concessions with a history in state-owned mining operations in the era of Zaire, but also overlapping with artisanal mining areas. Since 2014, the site has been claimed by the mwami’s wife and head of COMIANGWE. However, there is also a lease agreement between the mwami and a local chief in Chaminyago.8 Many miners eventually acquired land from the latter, through kalinzi and state contracts, and pit holders have agreements with local tenants. Hence, besides a theoretically absolutist right over land, the mwami has no proof of ownership. While COMIANGWE’s claims have turned out unsuccessful thus far, the mwami continues to tax miners in Chaminyago, and COMIANGWE has repeatedly tried to infiltrate the iTSCi scheme with minerals from non-validated sites in the adjacent Banro concession (Interviews nos. 163, 165, 167, and 171, September 2015).
The Ngweshe case illustrates how customary patronage networks use cooperatives to tighten their grip over redistributive resources and trade access against political loyalty, thereby employing the duality of customary legitimacy in the DRC’s administrative organisation. Influential figures in politics and custom contribute to a burgeoning landscape of cooperatives, often serving as vehicles to ‘formalise’ patronage. One interviewee joked as to whether ‘there was any real mining cooperative at all’ in South Kivu, while a civil society leader stated that he was ‘unaware of any cooperative not being led by elites’ (Interviews nos. 45, July 2014, and 82, August 2014). Benefiting from proximity to provincial politicians and customary privilege, the royal couple transformed its networked power into a cooperative.9 Hence, this entanglement of Shi elites and provincial politics facilitated an attempt, even if ultimately unsuccessful, for the Ngweshe royalty to be incontournable in Chaminyago.10
Undermining reform? The entrenchment of post-war patronage networks
It is widely agreed that an economy is always embedded in its social and political context (Polanyi 2001). Hence, and bearing in mind Ekeh’s (1975) ‘tale of two publics’, it is unsurprising that patronage networks continue to thrive in postcolonial settings and beyond. In eastern Congo, the decline of large-scale war coincided with decreasing regional interference, the advent of robust peacekeeping and policies of elite co-optation. Together with neoliberal peacebuilding and stabilisation efforts, such as transnational regulation in the form of traceability when it comes to ASM, these policies assume a ‘post-conflict’ situation in which the restoration of state authority is believed to be a generic panacea to peace and prosperity. The resulting interventions, however, struggle to account for a number of empirical and analytical problems, including the mistaken presumption that the DRC state actively seeks to impose a Weberian-style monopoly of violence, and the flat reading of a complex and contested landscape of local political power.
Yet, as over 120 active armed groups and regular human rights violations by state security forces illustrate, this obfuscates the underlying dynamics of conflict which continue to shape public authority (Vogel and Stearns 2018). Within broader political deadlock, the fragmentation of conflict reinforces a constant repositioning of key stakeholders, many of which have mining interests and broker profit against protection. For the absence of predictable law enforcement, patronage provides a ‘space of complex interpersonal relations creating confidence through a process of learning by doing’ (Cartier-Bresson 1997, 475). Labonte describes these patronage networks and their incontournable nodes as ‘permanent fixtures’ (2011, 109), in contrast to foreign interveners. The advent of ‘conflict-free’ mining has thus allowed these networks to reinvent themselves, while paying lip service to the fight against ‘conflict minerals’, and embed themselves in the illusion of ‘post-conflict reconstruction’. In this conundrum, wartime powerbrokers have adapted to changing regulatory frameworks in general and ‘conflict-free’ ASM in particular: none of the savvy incontournables openly reject reform while participating in transnational fora. At the same time, they cultivate their unavoidable, unskirtable role, undermining reform by using their clout within and beyond statutory institutions.
Taken together, the three cases demonstrate how patronage co-exists with ‘conflict-free’ mining. They illustrate how incontournables – chiefs, rebels-turned-politicians, military commanders or traders – can navigate the political economy of ASM. In all cases, ‘conflict-free’ sourcing offers both a smokescreen and new opportunities for legitimation. Case one highlights how a combination of provincial politics and trade circles boosted the convergence of a military network that became incontournable based on shared interests, overcoming ethnic and customary cleavages otherwise preponderant in Masisi area. Case two outlined how customary leadership in the Uvira area became incontournable as a result of being the only actor tapping into all relevant networks. More precisely, it became the necessary vector through which a provincial business joint venture and a loyal local militia could connect. Case three exemplified how customary elites – in the end unsuccessfully – employed the multiple connections offered by their dual position to become incontournable. In eastern Congo’s questionable ‘post-conflict’ situation, this accentuates the continuing importance of militarised power: while the first two cases featured networks of patronage that intersect military and civilian spheres, the third and unsuccessful one did not feature notable armed involvement.
While all cases highlight how socio-spatial dynamics help certain actors to become incontournable, they show – like ‘obligatory passage points’ (Callon 1984, 204) – that this always remains tenuous and contingent. Looking at the wider literature on patronage, this essay has stressed the need of taking into account socio-spatial dynamics such as scales and networks to explain the imbricated character of patronage in contexts of contested authority. This is particularly salient in situations of protracted conflict and concomitant foreign intervention. Political order, customary authority and economic power are neatly intertwined in eastern Congo. Hence, transnational reforms co-exist with long-standing patronage and resulting ‘governance experiments’. At best, this can lead to harmonisation between ‘external’ regulatory change and ‘local’ practice. At worst, it can turn into a smokescreen of transparency under which some of the very same actors that participated in past waves of violent accumulation continue to operate in the shape of refurbished, whitewashed, ‘complexes of power, profit and protection’ (Vlassenroot and Raeymaekers 2004, 23). Based on ethnographic research, this essay has conceptualised how and why incontournables can operate these complex patronage networks. Through this emic notion, the essay hence offers a refinement of existing patronage theory. Being incontournable, here, offers the leeway to ‘generating and enforcing own norms, in semiautonomous relation to other social fields’ (Greenhouse, Mertz, and Warren 2002).
This not only stresses the limitations of polities and policies to evenly impose regulation: in the words of a trader, ‘there is a formal system and then there is le système, and some people are unavoidable in both. I won’t give names, but they are known’ (Interview no. 85, August 2014). It also reopens a debate on the unstable character of state-sponsored – domestic and foreign – disciplinary and, more contextually, sovereign power in situations of political patronage and violent conflict (Foucault 2004; Hansen and Stepputat 2006). Moreover, it expands our conceptual understanding of patronage as something impossible to avoid in some cases, given its socio-spatial ramifications and fluidity, not least because ‘social relations, rather than institutional arrangements or generalised morality, are mainly responsible for the production of trust in economic life’ (Granovetter 1985, 491). This is particularly true in contexts of perpetuated insecurity where other mechanisms of trust and predictability have eroded. Hence, the incontournables’ clout, within and in between networks, may make them people – to paraphrase Mario Puzo’s Godfather – whose offers others cannot refuse.