Neither war nor peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): profiting and coping amid violence and disorder

• Published in: Review of African political economy 2013-03, Vol.40 (135), p.1-12
• Main Authors: Larmer, Miles, Laudati, Ann, Clark, John F.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Civilians; Democratic Republic of Congo; Displacement; EDITORIAL; International political economy; Occupations; Political socialization; Soldiers
• ISSN: 0305-6244; 1740-1720
• DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2013.762165

A decade on, the DRC is experiencing an absence of both outright war and a lasting peace. Periodic outbreaks of fighting, as with the M23 occupation of Goma and other parts of North Kivu in November 2012, have led to the deaths of soldiers and civilians and to the further displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. The DRC has made a limited recovery from the worst aspects of its recent conflicts, but few if any of the underlying problems have been resolved in the last decade and the complexity of doing so has not significantly diminished. In this context, this Special Issue focuses less than its predecessor on national and international political issues although the Briefing by Theodore Trefon provides significant insight into this area. Instead, it seeks to show the ways in which some Congolese people, particularly in the east of the country, find strategies to survive, cope and in some cases even to profit from, the liminal socio-political environment in which they find themselves. This, we believe, provides a compelling sense of the political economy of post-war DRC from the perspective of those who experience it first-hand. Reprinted by permission of Carfax Publishing, Taylor & Francis Ltd.