Empirical understandings of informal citizenship and membership: internally displaced persons in the Democratic Republic Of Congo

ABSTRACT

In the last two decades, empirical scholars have asserted that citizenship may include memberships in political communities other than the nation-state. This paper is based on fieldwork (2015–2017) on the rights of Internally Displaced Persons in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It provides an empirically grounded analysis of the multiple political communities in which forced migrants take part and how membership in these communities helps them to claim fundamental rights, which the state is unable to provide. We outline various pre-displacement and post-displacement memberships, and show that they have different participation requirements, leading to varying levels of integration of people who are displaced from their communities of origin. The paper provides a methodological contribution to critical approaches to studying citizenship and informal political communities. It also contributes to well-informed policy-making in the humanitarian aid context of Eastern Congo.

KEYWORDS:

• Informal citizenship
• membership
• internally displaced persons
• Democratic republic of the Congo

Introduction

Scholars usually view forced migrants as outsiders, as noncitizens par excellence. Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) constitute a particular category of forced migrants because they possess formal citizenship of their nation-state, in contrast to refugees. Owing to the state’s inability to guarantee their fundamental right to security, IDPs are forced to flee their homes from ongoing violence, conflict, war, or natural disasters. While human rights are inherent to all human beings, regardless of nationality and formal membership in a nation (e.g. Arendt 1979), in reality governments of states have the primary responsibility for ensuring human rights (IASC 2010). In settings where the nation-state is weak or malfunctioning, it is common for people to seek the fulfilment of their human rights through membership of political communities other than the nation-state. These communities are political because they produce distinctive and authoritative goods that are categorised as common to all individuals (Márquez 2012, 6), the ‘political goods’ or fundamental rights to which every member has a right (Miller 1980a; Márquez 2012). Until recently, in citizenship studies the nation-state was reified as the most important political community. In the last two decades, empirical scholars have come to acknowledge that citizenship is not necessarily about formal membership in the nation-state but may include informal memberships in other – partly intersecting – political communities too, such as the religious community, the kin group, the labour union, the neighbourhood, and membership in global entities beyond the nation-state (e.g. Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2012; Williams 2015).

In this paper we make an empirical contribution to citizenship studies by exploring which informal political communities IDPs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) belong to, and how they facilitate securing human rights that the state is unable to provide.¹ On the basis of our emic approach, which includes paying attention to local categorisations, we argue that individuals always have memberships in multiple political communities and, as such, citizenship and noncitizenship are embodied in every human being. At the same time, our findings show that there is a difference between pre-displacement and post-displacement memberships. Where the forwarding of rights is more automatic and less conditional in the former, in post-displacement memberships active participation is more frequently required. This, in turn, leads to different levels of integration in displacement.

Our paper is in line with critical approaches to citizenship studies, which question that citizenship constitutes membership of the nation-state only (Sassen 2002b; Isin and Turner 2007; Isin 2017). Scholars in this tradition often employ the concept of ‘informal citizenship’ to denote political memberships and fights for public goods that are not exclusively bound to the nation-state (e.g. Sassen 2002b; Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2012). Informal citizenship does not rest upon official membership, but rather involves various forms of belonging by active participation (e.g. Das 2011; Tully 2014). Also called earned citizenship (van Houdt, Suvarierol, and Schinkel 2011), our empirical findings show that, while post-displacement memberships do, indeed, frequently require active participation, this often does not apply to informal pre-displacement memberships.

Methodology and field site

The data for this article were gathered in and around Bukavu, during different periods of fieldwork between 2015 and 2017, together with a team of four Congolese researchers. This city of over one million inhabitants attracts many IDPs and other migrants from the adjacent territories. Most respondents are Christians and either belong to the Lega or Shi ethnic group, the latter being the dominant ethnic group in Bukavu. While ethnicity plays a role in some of the ongoing conflicts, this does not apply evenly throughout the country. In South-Kivu province, for instance, ethnicity is more contested in the southern territories than in the rest of the province. However, even here violence is not always a result of interethnic strife as the story of Solange, which we present later, shows.

For the first project, we carried out semi-structured interviews with 73 IDPs (41 female, 32 male), 36 long-term residents² (12 female, 24 male), 34 local administrative authorities and 45 other state and non-state officials working in the justice sector. In addition, we conducted a survey (n = 279) with IDP’s (55%) and long-term residents’ (45%) on access to justice. The second research project explored ways in which integration unfolded. For this project, semi-structured interviews with 63 women and 60 men were carried out, including both IDPs and long-term residents.

In both projects the primary focus was on IDPs’ access to justice and the various ways of local integration. While analysing the data, it struck the authors that it was often through membership in communities not connected to the nation-state that people managed to realise fundamental rights, such as access to housing, education, and employment. Besides, access to rights was often conditional on fulfilling certain duties. This motivated us to systematically look at the findings through a citizenship lens and explore how informal memberships of these political communities help people to claim fundamental rights (Márquez 2012, 4) and to what extent active participation requirements play a role in this. Given the burgeoning literature on informal citizenship across academic disciplines, this question deserves attention.

This article proceeds as follows. In section one, we introduce the DRC context of displacement. Section two discusses empirical understandings of citizenship as they relate to forced displacement, local integration, and membership in different political communities. We connect this to the notion of multiple citizenship. We borrow the term from Yuval-Davis who, in (1997), argued that individuals can belong to different political communities. Yuval-Davis does not use empirical findings to flesh out how exactly we should understand processes of multiple citizenship. In sections three and four, we present empirical data from the DRC to explore which informal communities are important for IDPs in rebuilding their lives in Bukavu. In section three, we focus on post-displacement memberships and in section four on pre-displacement memberships. In the former, membership and delivery of rights are more automatic than in the latter where a certain level of political participation is required in return for fundamental rights. We show that higher levels of political participation increase IDPs integration in the city.

The DRC context of displacement

Starting from the early 1990s, millions of people have been displaced by ongoing military conflict and violence in the DRC, particularly in the North and South Kivu provinces. The First Congo War (1996–1997) started at a time when the east of the country was already unstable due to the Rwandan genocide that led to the arrival of large numbers of refugees and of genocidaires infiltrating these groups of refugees. Mobutu’s regime (r. 1965–1997) was overthrown by forces moving up from the east to the capital under the leadership of Kabila (r. 1997–2001). Kabila was unable to provide stability and the country was soon plunged into the Second Congo War (1998–2003). This turned into a complicated conflict, involving nine different African countries and dozens of armed groups. Over the years, the complexity of ‘the conflict’ in the DRC has only multiplied further. In 2019, more than 130 armed groups were reported to be in control of different areas in the eastern region (Congo Research Group 2019). Some of these groups consider themselves to be self-defence groups while others fight for control over minerals and other natural resources and access to infrastructure. Other conflicts revolved around contested customary leadership, competition between pastoralists and agriculturalists, or ethnic groups (see for instance Nzongola-Ntalaja 2007; Vogel and Stearns 2018; Hoffmann 2019).

Until now, ongoing violence has led to large-scale and prolonged internal displacement of more than 5.5 million people (IDMC 2020). Most of these IDPs do not seek shelter in displacement camps but find refuge in host communities, in Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu province, amongst others. The high number of armed groups and the vast displacement of people reveal the complexity of the conflict, the ongoing insecurity in the country, and the limited control the Congolese state has in this region. This instability leads to severe deprivation of human rights as the following table, which is based on a survey we administered in 2016 in Bukavu, shows.

Table 1: Experiences of human insecurity and violence

In the empirical part of this paper we explore some political communities in which displaced people seek informal membership as a way to claim their ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt 1979) in addition to or as an alternative for their membership of the nation-state.

Internal displacement, inclusion and exclusion, citizenship

According to the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, IDPs are: ‘persons, or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalised violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognised state border’ (UNOCHA 2004). Taken literally, this definition suggests that displacement and precarious citizenship are perpetual as reasons for displacement do not change; once an IDP, always an IDP. Our research findings, however, show that once they are more integrated, IDPs or are no longer regarded by others as displaced outsiders, but instead are seen as regular ‘residents’.

The international community has outlined local integration as one of the three routes to durable solutions for forced internal displacement (the other two being return and resettlement) (IASC 2010). Once IDPs have achieved one of these solutions, they are no longer officially counted as IDPs. Combining the static UN-definition of perpetual displacement with local integration as a durable solution, we show how displaced persons’ status exists along a continuum with ‘displaced-included’ and ‘displaced-excluded’ standing at its opposite ends.

According to Kabeer, scholars lack an understanding of how, what she calls, ‘the excluded’ think of citizenship because ‘ … a great deal of the theoretical debate on citizenship today is taking place in an “empirical void”’(Kabeer 2005, 1). While we agree on the importance of studying manifestations of citizenship on an empirical level, we warn against pre-conceived notions of who the excluded are (see also Mehta and Napier-Moore 2010, 7, 20). We should be careful in reproducing categories that are imposed from above but that are not necessarily experienced by the people concerned. Instead, we should develop an emic or insider perspective (Cole 2016), as careful attention to local categorisations helps to understand how people move within and between categories, and how ‘the excluded’ become included and vice versa. Instead of solely focusing on ‘the excluded’ or the noncitizen, we interviewed a wide range of IDPs: poor versus rich; house owners versus tenants; people who were clearly considered as ‘strangers’ by their social surroundings versus others who were seen as included and locally integrated; and people who longed to return to their community of origin versus people who intended to remain in Bukavu. What they had in common was that they had come to the city in search of more security.

Marshall’s 1950 definition of citizenship is still influential in citizenship studies: citizenship as full membership in a community with all its rights and responsibilities (Marshall 2009, 149). Although scholars usually relate citizenship to membership in the nation-state, Marshall’s definition of citizenship is less narrow. In his seminal work, he briefly refers to citizenship in medieval European towns, but explicitly mentions that the citizenship whose history he wishes to trace is national (Marshall 2009, 149). Marshall used the word ‘community’ rather than ‘nation-state’, paving the way for an understanding of citizenship, which does not give monopoly to citizenship or political membership in the nation-state (Yuval-Davis 2013, 59). We use the terms citizenship and noncitizenship to denote people with or without membership in a political community. We argue that people realise rights because they have access to various political communities, be them the nation-state or not. Our use of the term citizenship is thus broader than its ‘conventional’ legal usage, which relates citizenship to the nation-state (Isin 2017). When people possess multiple citizenships, there is no need to reject the category of citizenship (Sorensen, cited in Mehta and Napier-Moore [2010, 34]) or noncitizenship (Tambakaki 2015; Tonkiss and Bloom 2015) and replace citizenship with the concept membership to explore problems of belonging, identity and personality in the modern world (Mehta and Napier-Moore 2010, 33). Understanding that human beings embody citizenship and noncitizenship raises the questions: which community memberships do people possess, are they local, national, or supranational, what are the terms of inclusion and exclusion, and, to what extent do these communities’ function in the political capacity that enables people to claim goods and fundamental human rights?

Scholars often distinguish between earned and automatic citizenships. The former resonates with classical Greek participatory notions of citizenship in the polis, in which the right to the delivery of political goods was conditional upon membership and active participation (Miller 1980b). This earned citizenship contrasts with memberships that are more automatic, perpetual and exclusive, (cf. Marshall 2009; Parolin 2009), and in which citizenship is a status rather than a claim (Das 2011). We transcend the scholarly division between earned and automatic citizenships by showing that for the respondents in our sample, both earned and automatic citizenships are important in accessing fundamental rights and in the way processes of inclusion and integration unfold.

The narratives of Solange, Albert and Christelle, presented below, flesh out the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion of IDPs in different political communities in eastern Congo, and the rights that are connected to active participation. We disentangle the memberships on which they draw to claim fundamental rights, and analyse differences and similarities between them and other interviewed IDPs in Bukavu. Systematic analysis of the data – with the use of ATLAS.ti software – shows that, in many ways, the narratives of Solange, Albert and Christelle are illustrative of process of integration and of mobilising membership-based rights as experienced by the other respondents.

An empirical approach to citizenship: post-displacement memberships in the city

25 July 2017, Bukavu. Solange is a mother in her early forties from the Fulero ethnic group. She fled her village in eastern Congo in 2010 after her husband, also a Fulero, was killed by armed men because of the contested inheritance of customary leadership in the community. Initially, she fled to a relative of her husband’s in nearby Burundi. Meanwhile, her six children continued their education in another Congolese city. In the summer of 2011, when the school year was over, Solange moved with her children to Bukavu to live with her older brother. He had been living in the city for 15 years and enrolled the children in school. In 2012, during a family meeting, Solange’s family and in-laws advised her to sell the house in her village and use the money to buy a house in Bukavu’s periphery. This is what she did. Solange explains:

I do not want to go back to [Solange’s village]. I now consider myself a resident of Bukavu because, irrespective of the place, as long as you do not possess your own house, you are considered a stranger; someone who, at any time, can change environment and settle elsewhere. Here … I have consolidated my presence in this town, and even [that of] my children.

Solange’s sister-in-law mobilised her connections to get Solange a stand in Bukavu’s central market, enabling her to continue the business that she had in the village before her husband’s murder. Meanwhile, Solange’s children succeeded in mastering the Swahili language spoken at school, which significantly contributed to the family’s feeling of belonging. Solange even did her national voter registration in Bukavu and during the interview, she claimed that she would elect somebody from Bukavu, except, and here she remained silent for a moment, if the Bukavu candidate is originally from her territory of origin. She would never give her vote to somebody from the Fulero ethnic group who left her children fatherless. She would hesitate profoundly, perhaps even discourage her children to marry someone from her and her late husband’s ethnicity. The only thing she wants is for her children to marry a practising Christian.

Despite her firm commitment to stay in Bukavu, Solange still owns land in her village. Relatives cultivate the land, and she receives part of the harvest (e.g. rice, cassava, flour), which facilitates her life in the city. Yet, in Bukavu, in contrast to many other displaced people in the city, Solange avoids connections with people of her ethnic group as she blames them for her husband’s murder. Instead, she prefers to seek connections with neighbours from other ethnic groups who, like her, recently arrived in the city as IDPs. These neighbours support each other when needed and taught her to cultivate vegetables around the house, an activity, which is not common in her place of origin.

House ownership

When does a displaced migrant become a resident of Bukavu? In other words, when is a displaced-excluded person seen as included and locally integrated? As Solange’s story indicates, an important marker is house ownership. Solange felt that as long as she did not possess her own house others would continue seeing her as a stranger. Whereas most IDPs rent property, owning an urban plot is seen to be the marker of integration in the city. It signifies that an IDP has given up what in international humanitarian policy language is called ‘voluntary return’, and has opted for ‘local integration’ as a durable solution. Other IDPs expressed similar opinions. For them, the purchase of a plot in the city was an important marker of integration, of having become a ‘resident’ and of inclusion in the city. An elderly male IDP respondent who arrived in the city more than 10 years ago explained that since he had started building his house in the periphery of the city, he had started to feel more secure (interview, 08.06.2017). Non-IDPs interviewed confirmed that house ownership was a strong sign of integration. Strikingly, some of these non-IDPs lived as tenants without urban property. Drawing on their urban origins however, they did not need house ownership as a marker of urban membership (see also Jacobs et al. 2019).

On the surface, the requirements for membership in the city seemingly differ. Ultimately, however, what matters is that an individual delivers proof of an intention to stay. Long-term residents can rely on family lineage and history in the city, newcomers, irrespective of ethnic identity, rely on house ownership. City membership in Bukavu is not so much based on shared values and identity, but on a shared understanding of who has a right to rights, with rights forthcoming to those who have made it clear that they intend to stay. Once the membership requirements have been fulfilled, the active part of the community bears responsibility for delivering ‘political care’; for ensuring that ‘political goods’ are delivered to the passive part of the community (Márquez 2012). These goods can constitute traditional (civil, political, and/or social) (Marshall 2009) and expanded rights, such as environmental and cultural rights (Isin 2017). Our findings from Bukavu consistently show that becoming a property owner enables IDPs to take more actively part in public city life, including assuming authority positions. This clearly transpires in the following interview fragment with a local administrative chief:

A displaced person cannot become a chief. If you are a tenant and don’t have your own house, you cannot become a chief, because if you are renting a house, you can be removed easily. If a displaced person owns a house, he is no longer a displaced person. He is a resident (interview, 15.06.2017).

His words signal two things. First, when buying a house, IDPs obtain the right to participate in the exercise of power (a political right), and turn from passive into active community members. Second, IDPs who are renting are in an insecure tenure position because their rights can easily be violated. Without clear membership status in the city, the Marshallian social right to a modicum of security cannot be guaranteed, leading to vulnerable individual autonomy. Autonomy, according to Márquez, is a political good that typically derives from membership in models of political community based on a shared understanding of who has the right to have rights (Márquez 2012). City-membership clearly is a relationship of an individual to a territory. By selling her house in the village and using the money to buy a house in Bukavu, Solange had shown strong commitment to stay in Bukavu and in the process, she had become more detached from her community of origin. However, for most IDPs in Bukavu becoming property owners is utopian and they seek other ways to make sure that ‘political care’ and ‘political goods’ are coming their way.

Participation in neighbourhood activities

When IDPs arrive in Bukavu, their first concerns are to find shelter and employment. The rights to shelter and labour are part of the indispensable rights that come along with national citizenship in a human rights framework. In the Congolese context, however, the state plays a limited role in providing these. Like Solange, who initially stayed with her brother, IDPs draw on familial ties and membership in the extended family for housing in the first weeks or months upon arrival. After this period, most of them move out to rent a house in the relatively affordable peripheral neighbourhoods of the city Jacobs, et al., (2019). Most IDPs cannot afford to buy a house later on, because they are unwilling to sell their houses in the place of displacement, among other reasons. However, they exploit other means to obtain city membership and have political goods come their way. After all, an intention to stay signals a commitment to develop a relation with a geographical territory and contribute to its social, economic, and cultural development. Rather than buying a house, an easier way for most IDPs to show their willingness to integrate locally is to become active members in local communities, such as the neighbourhood.

Where Solange bonded with people in her neighbourhood who, like her, were forcibly displaced and often widowed too, many other IDPs established relationships of trust with non-IDP neighbours, a process that can be facilitated through participation in the weekly organised community work called salongo. Such participation leads to a form of earned (van Houdt, Suvarierol, and Schinkel 2011) or claimed (Das 2011) citizenship. The salongo dates back to the Mobutu reign (r. 1965–1997) when citizens were forced to take part in public works, as a service rendered to their own community. To combat waste in Bukavu, the municipality re-introduced the salongo a few years ago, ordering people to engage in cleaning their streets on Saturdays between 8.00 and 10.00 AM. Shops, markets and public services are supposed to close until the end of the salongo. Albert, a bachelor in his early thirties, is an example of an IDP without property in Bukavu, whose active participation in the salongo impacted on his status in the neighbourhood, and beyond.

When first arriving in Bukavu, Albert, from the ethnic Shi group, worked as a help in the household of a family. Participating in the weekly salongo on their behalf, people in the neighbourhood, including the local authorities, got word of him. This, he claimed, helped his integration, as they appreciated his contribution to the cleanliness of the neighbourhood. Besides, the interactions during the salongo helped him to master Swahili, the lingua franca of the city. Albert’s growing mastery of Swahili greatly facilitated communication with long-term residents and made him feel more at home (interview, 29.06.2017). Other IDPs also indicated that mastering the Swahili language contributed to their integration in the city. Local integration can thus be obtained by active participation in officially ordained neighbourhood activities and by making a genuine effort to master the local language. In the long run, performance of citizenship duties can also strengthen one’s status within the community. In such cases, passive members obtain active membership status; once the recipient of ‘political care’ and ‘political goods’, now the IDP him/herself is responsible for delivering political care and political goods, such as employment.

At the time of the interview, Albert worked as a garbage collector in his neighbourhood. He had a few clients whose garbage he disposed at a landfill on the outskirts of Bukavu, where he separated the waste; making compost of the organic waste and burning the plastic at night. His meticulous work enhanced his reputation in the neighbourhood, and beyond, as the landfill was also used by the nearby beer brewery to dispose of its industrial waste. The rapid growth of the landfill threatened the passage of the road, which alerted the brewery. They therefore signed a contract with a neighbourhood association for maintenance of the landfill. Albert was quickly identified as somebody capable of taking responsibility for this job. Understanding the importance of this neighbourhood association in finding employment for himself and others, Albert used his reputation as a trustworthy and responsible person to introduce several members from his village to the association and also work as employees at the landfill.

Participation in labour associations and mutual solidarity groups

Finding a source of income in the city is a major challenge for both residents and displaced people. However, as employment opportunities are strongly related to having the right connections, IDPs generally struggle more to access the labour market. An example is Christelle, a woman in her mid-thirties with eight children. She and her husband fled to Bukavu nine years ago, after she had lost many of her relatives due to illnesses, allegedly related to sorcery. In the first years of her stay in Bukavu, Christelle tried to sell bananas but her business did not prosper and at some point, she and her husband did not have enough to provide for their children. Eighteen months ago, her husband left her and their children to seek employment in one of the mining areas in South-Kivu province. Since his departure he has not been in touch with her, despite repeated promises to return and to provide for the family. Heading her household alone, Christelle narrates:

I am ready to work, but I lack someone to guide me towards jobs. Getting a job is not a matter of chance. You need either a brother, a sister, a friend, or another reliable acquaintance who knows the wheeling and dealing of the market. I don’t know how to get work, even the work of transporting cargo has become very demanding and usually work is only given to members of an association […]. I am not a member of an association or of a solidarity group and my church does not provide any labour to its members (interview, 26.06.2017).

Christelle’s words point out the importance of connections in finding work, in particular the role associations play in delivering this important political good. Like other interviewed IDPs, Christelle felt vulnerable, a feeling that was grounded in concrete experiences of unpaid salaries, poor labour conditions, insults and maltreatment. As head of a large household, she regretted not being part of an association or any other community that could help her realise her right to work. The only connections she had established in her neighbourhood were with other poor people. The stigma related to accusations of sorcery in her family probably explain why she shied away from reaching out to people and associations that could help her. Being excluded in this regard impacted the possibilities of carving out a living for herself and her children.

For stability, many IDPs -as well as other Congolese citizens- have taken initiatives to unite themselves in associations and solidarity groups. An example is the ‘Association for the Promotion of Vulnerable Displaced Women in South Kivu’. Initially, this group had started as a group of women that jointly negotiated commissioned work to carry and transport cargo. While being together enabled them to negotiate more complex and diverse tasks, it also helped them to jointly complain to a police officer about a customer who had paid only half the amount of money agreed upon. Under pressure from the police officer and the customer’s superior, the money was eventually paid. The women were convinced that this would not have been the case had they worked as individuals.

As is the case with house ownership, without clear membership status, this time to an association, the Marshallian social right to a small quantity of security cannot be guaranteed, leading to vulnerable individual autonomy. Autonomy, as we saw before is a political good that typically derives from membership in a political community where shared understandings of who has the right to have rights prevail (Márquez 2012). In the women’s association, membership requirements do not include shared ethnicity or a shared place of origin. The association unites women coming from different territories of the province, is place-bound and not based on ties that existed prior to displacement. In return for the input of labour; moral support to members in need; and financial contributions, members gain access to political goods, such as labour; stronger positions in negotiating joint labour conditions; jointly speaking out against violations of rights by employers or landlords; and can also count on limited social security in case of illness or other misfortunes within the household. Membership in this political community is not inalienable, but conditional and needs to be maintained. The ‘Association for the Promotion of Vulnerable Displaced Women in South Kivu’ is an example of the flexible political communities that the city has to offer to newcomers who are willing to forge ties, which are not derivative of pre-displacement ties.

An empirical approach to citizenship: extending pre-displacement memberships

In Bukavu, house ownership and participation in neighbourhood activities and various associations foster inclusion in the city. In this section we explore IDP’s memberships in pre-displacement communities, and ask to what extent they foster integration in Bukavu in the same way post-displacement memberships do.

The ethnic group

Solange avoided contact with ethnic group members because she accused them of her husband’s assassination. Some other IDPs also refrained from maintaining ethnic membership ties. Marie is a clear example. She is a widowed mother of four young children. She fled her village because she was accused of having used sorcery to kill the neighbours’ children. After a warning by the community’s elders that they would not be able to safeguard her, and incapable of proving her innocence, Marie fled to Bukavu in 2014. Together with her children, she rebuilt her life in the anonymity of the city, and makes a living by selling honey in front of her house. This helped her to obtain a good reputation in the neighbourhood, and made her feel accepted (interview 22.06.2017).

The stories of both women and the ways in which they pursued local integration were rather exceptional. While they did not deny ethnic membership, their ethnic identity was ascribed and resisted rather than asserted, and ‘thin’ in that it minimally organised their social lives (Cornell and Hartmann 1998, 83). The large number of IDPs in Bukavu means that every IDP can find people that come from the same village or territory of origin. To most people these relationships matter, and some connections are usually maintained in displacement. Even Solange maintained some ties that enabled her to benefit from the crops produced in her fields in the village. In displacement, ethnic ties are maintained amongst others through ethnically oriented associations. Comprehensively organising social life, ethnic identities are ‘thick’ and often asserted. In contrast to earning membership in the city (by buying a house; by participating in neighbourhood activities and associations; by showing a willingness to master the local language), membership in the ethnic group is not territorially bound. Even when moving out of a certain territory, ethnic membership does not cease.

Due to its perpetual nature, membership in the ethnic group should be confirmed in displacement, rather than earned, by actively maintaining relations with people of the same origin. Once ethnic membership status is confirmed, members can expect to share in the political goods of the community, i.e. the preservation and cultivation of ethnic identity, through ethnic associations, for example. Many interviewed IDPs explained how their ethnic ties helped them to secure a job because of the mutual trust that existed. Albert, for instance, was still very much connected to other youth from his village and explained that he had helped five others to start a small business along the road next to the landfill. If we understand membership in the ethnic group to be a form of pastoral power, which is exercised over a flock, i.e. a multiplicity in movement (Foucault 2007, 125), then ethnic group membership does not contribute in a direct way to local integration. Instead, there is always the risk that it sets people off against others and it can be rather exclusive, especially for the ones who do not belong to Bukavu’s dominant ethnic group. The membership requirements -shared values and identities- are exclusive and do not contribute to social cohesion in the city in the way house ownership; membership in the neighbourhood or labour association; and, as we show below, membership in the church do. Ethnic membership can be mobilised for the realisation of certain rights, for instance to gain access to employment opportunities. Once such rights are realised, they can contribute indirectly to integration as people become more accepted as active participants to the socio-economic life in the city.

The religious community

Christianity is the predominant religion in the DRC. As elsewhere in the country, both the Roman Catholic Church and a range of Protestant churches have a strong presence in Bukavu, which dates back to colonial times. It could be argued that membership in the religious community draws on fundamental characteristics of membership in the ethnic group. Both memberships are often automatic, perpetual, exclusive (as Parolin 2009, 26 argues is the case for the Middle East), and non-space bound. In practice, however, churches, by virtue of not being ethnically segregated contribute to local integration. It is possible to become a member on the basis of shared religious values and tap into the material resources of other church members. Reaping the benefits of church membership, however, is not immediate and in contrast to ethnic membership, requires a certain degree of active participation. Urbain, a married 48-years old father of five children, states that:

In Bukavu, I attend the same church as [before displacement], and my wife is a chorister in this church during Sunday worship, which she attends with two of my children. It is thanks to her attendance that my children were enrolled in the primary and secondary school of the church (Jacobs et al., 2017, 4).

In their research on church membership in the United States, (Wald, Owen, and Hill 1988) argue that churches are political communities by virtue of the way they sometimes influence the voting behaviour of their members in national elections. The authors, however, still draw on churches in relation to voting practices in Democratic nation-states. The example of Congo shows that churches are political communities in their own right, and reveal an interesting mix of the classical Greek participatory notion of citizenship and the notion of citizenship, which developed in seventeenth-century Europe. In the former, the right to delivery of political goods is conditional upon membership and active participation. In the latter, rights are independent of affiliation in a political community; membership is ‘only’ a way of ensuring these rights (Parolin 2009, 22). Our empirical data clearly show that shared religious values form the basis for church membership, and that their preservation and cultivation is the highest political good. When education, one of the primary means of achieving this goal, is scarce, those who actively participate in church activities are given priority over those who ‘only’ attend church sermons.

Upon arrival in Bukavu, Solange and her children became members of the local Catholic church. Solange was even elected vice-president of a group of widows who organise prayer sessions to support others. To her, this was a confirmation of her respected position in the group. In this position of authority, she turned from a passive into an active member imbued with the responsibility to deliver political goods, that is, working towards the preservation of religious values and identities among the widowed subcommunity of the church. Although not bound to the specific territory of the city, and in contrast to ethnic-group membership, Solange’s church and other churches in Bukavu bring together members of different ethnic groups and in so doing contribute to religious cohesion in the city. At the same time, by strongly encouraging her children to marry a practicing Christian outside their ethnic group, Solange contributes to strengthening the religious cohesion of the global Catholic church and its 1.3 billion members.

Scholars such as Sassen (Sassen, 2002a)have introduced the concept of global or transnational citizenship; a denationalised form of citizenship where rights and duties are claimed and distributed on a supra-national level by ‘global political communities’ (Márquez 2012, 30). Solange’s church received support from the international Caritas for education and food provision for its most needy members. Although the national government is supposed to deliver the Marshallian social rights to education and health care, in the everyday life of IDPs (and non-IDPs) in Bukavu, and Congo in general, local churches are the main providers of these goods and have been so to a large extent since colonial times (e.g. Titeca and de Herdt 2011; Aembe 2017). Their embeddedness in the global network of the Catholic mother church, the largest non-government provider of education and health care in the world, makes this possible (Agnew 2010). Through local church membership, IDPs become members of a global political community, and can count on the delivery of political goods, i.e. the goods all members are entitled to. In the case of Solange’s church, this not only included the provision of food and health care, but also of loincloths for Christmas. Ensuring that all members wear the same- new- Christmas clothing not only underlines the value of the celebration, but also of group membership.

Conclusions

In this paper we presented an empirical investigation of multiple citizenship by looking at IDPs’ informal memberships in various political communities beyond the nation-state, and contributed to filling an ‘empirical void’ in the theoretical debates on citizenship (Kabeer 2005). We argued that citizenship and noncitizenship are embodied in every human being, and presented various informal political communities that are important for IDPs to realise human rights. Usually portrayed in the literature as requiring active participation, we asked how membership in these informal communities facilitates securing fundamental rights, which the Congolese state is unable to provide. Specifically, we looked at participation requirements and to what extent they foster IDPs’ local integration. We showed that an empirical and emic approach is necessary to providing an answer to these questions, for two reasons.

First, an empirical emic approach allowed us to understand under which conditions residents in the place of refuge (Bukavu) consider an IDP to be included or excluded. By looking at both displaced-included and displaced-excluded persons, we did not dismiss from the analysis the often-overlooked category of displaced-included forced migrants, that is to say, the ones who are locally integrated. They are usually not considered as displaced anymore according to the labels that are used by people in the city. The corollary is that mechanisms of inclusion do not come to the fore easily in analyses of policy makers, aid practitioners and researchers alike. By including this category, we developed an insider perspective (Cole 2016) to understand processes of in-and exclusion and the role political communities play in these. Our emic perspective highlights the importance of local integration for IDPs to become ‘displaced-included’ members of the city. By showing their commitment to contribute to the economic, social, and religious cohesion of the city, political goods, such as housing, employment, education, and sometimes even positions of authority are easier to guarantee.

Second, IDPs resort to both pre-displacement and post-displacement community memberships to rebuild their lives. The place that an IDP occupies on the displaced-included/displaced-excluded continuum is the outcome of a multitude of citizenship configurations. IDPs with more post-displacement memberships display greater importance to local integration than those who adhere to non-space bound, usually pre-displacement, memberships in refuge. In pre-displacement political communities, such as the ethnic group, the delivery of political goods is more automatic. In new, post-displacement political communities, which are usually space-bound, there is a stronger pay-off between duties and entitlements and membership is ‘earned’ rather than ‘confirmed’. Here citizenship is strongly associated with economic respectability, i.e. house ownership, paying taxes and employment (Garcia 1996, 7–8; Kabeer 2005, 19). Fostering both local and global integration, churches take an intermediate position, with some rights being unconditional (e.g. cultivation of religious values through worship and celebrations), while others, such as education, are more accessible to those who actively participate in church activities.

It would be tempting to conclude that IDPs relying more on pre-displacement memberships form the group of displaced-excluded persons with a preference for return as a durable solution. Displaced persons, such as Solange, whose memberships are more territorially bound would then constitute the group of displaced-included persons who favour local integration as a durable solution. However, even in the case of Solange, her ethnic membership did not completely cease to play a role. It underlines the multiplicity of citizenship in her, and many other interviewed IDPs, lives.

A better understanding of varying ways in which memberships in political communities other than the nation state help forced migrants to claim human rights, can help international policy makers and humanitarian aid workers to propose solutions that do justice to the choices displaced persons make when rebuilding their lives. In the humanitarian aid context of eastern Congo, recognition of the value of displaced persons’ multiple citizenships could be a first step to help IDPs become more autonomous, empowered citizens of the spaces they inhabit. Methodologically, we encourage other researchers to approach citizenship from an empirical and emic perspective, as this allows respondents to voice their own understanding of processes of inclusion and exclusion. Only in this way can we come to finer understandings of citizenship, integration, and access to human rights.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by NWO/WOTRO under grant numbers W08.400.155 and W08.400.2014.014. We would like to thank Innocent Assumani, Stanislas Lubala, Joachim Ruhamya, and Patrick Milabyo for their inspiring collaboration in the field, and Antea Paviotti for support in data coding.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NWO/WOTRO [W08.400.155,W08.400.2014.014].

Notes on contributors

Carolien Jacobs

Carolien Jacobs is assistant professor at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society, Leiden Law School. Since 2012 she has been involved in research projects in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, mostly with a focus on Internally Displaced Persons and with a socio-legal perspective

Nadia Sonneveld

Nadia Sonneveld is associate professor at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society, Leiden Law School. She does research in legal anthropology/sociology on legal rights of citizens and noncitizens in the Middle East and North Africa.

Notes

1. This does not mean that we deny the importance of conventional approaches to studying citizenship (e.g. Sonneveld and Alagha, 2020).

2. Long-term residents are persons who consider themselves inhabitants of the city, because their ancestors already lived in the city, for example, and who are also seen as such by others.