Violent conflict and ethnicity in the Congo: beyond materialism, primordialism and symbolism

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we investigate the nexus between ethnicity and violent conflict in the Congo. We make three interlocking arguments. First, we argue that ethnicity is a defining political resource in the Congo’s politics and violent conflicts, which we call ‘ethnic capital’. Second, we argue that the high political value of this ethnic capital is sustained by engrained discourses and practices of ethnicity. These discourses and practices permeate the Congo’s political order, shape people’s understanding of politics, conflict and political identities, and have contributed to the formation of an unstable, centrifugal, and fragmentary political order. Third, we argue that conceptualising ethnicity as capital dismantles the artificial dualism between the symbolic realm of identities and the material realm of the economy and makes it possible to move beyond primordialist, instrumentalist and purely symbolic understandings of the nexus between conflict and ethnicity. Ultimately, what is at stake in this competition is the distribution of symbolic and material resources.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic capital
• identity
• social fields
• violent conflict
• resources
• habitus

Acknowledgements

This article is an output of the Conflict Research Programme, led by the London School of Economics and Political Science, and funded by UK aid from the UK government (GB-1-204428); the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK government’s official policies. Moreover, Hoffmann gratefully acknowledges research funding from the European Research Council ((ERC Grant: State Formation Through the Local Production of Property and Citizenship (Ares (2015)2785650 – ERC-2014-AdG – 662770-Local State)). The authors would like to thank Herbert Weiss, Judith Verweijen, Alex de Waal, Mary Kaldor, Leonie Newhouse, Christian Lund, Mattias Borg Rasmussen, Rune Bennike, Penelope Anthias, Cherry Leonardi, Gavin Bridge, Ben Campbell, Peitra Perez, José Ndala, Josaphat Musamba and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, which helped to improve the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Young, Politics in the Congo.

2. Young and Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State, 41–42.

3. Carayannis, ‘Webs of War in the Congo’; Weiss, Political Protest in the Congo; Young, Politics in the Congo; and Lemarchand, Political Awakening in the Congo

4. Weiss, Political Protest in the Congo, 9–10.

5. Young and Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State, Schatzberg, The Dialectics of Oppression.

6. Willame, Banyarwanda et Banyamulenge; Reyntjens, The Great African War; Mamdani, ‘Understanding the Crisis in Kivu’; Mamdani, ‘African States, Citizenship and War’.

7. Lemarchand, The Dynamics of Violence.

8. Tull, The Reconfiguration of Political Order in Africa; Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters; Stearns, North Kivu; Fahey, Gold, Land, and Ethnicity in North-Eastern Congo; Huggins, ‘Land, Power and Identity’; Pottier, ‘Representations of Ethnicity in the Search for Peace’; Raeymaekers, Violent Capitalism and Hybrid Identity in the Eastern Congo; Mathys, ‘Bringing History Back in’; Verweijen, ‘From Autochthony to Violence?’; Jackson, ‘Of “Doubtful Nationality”’; Jackson, ‘Sons of Which Soil?’; Hoffmann, ‘Myths Set in Motion’; Hoffmann et al., ‘Taxation, Stateness and Armed Groups’; Hoffmann and Verweijen, ‘Rebel Rule’; Vlassenroot, ‘Citizenship, Identity Formation and Conflict in South Kivu’; Verweijen and Vlassenroot, ‘Armed Mobilisation and the Nexus of Territory, Identity and Authority’.

9. Vlassenroot et al., ‘Tumukule, Tumumkwepe’. However, it is important to note that Congolese voters have also exhibited an anti-incumbent tendency in voting behaviour since the 2006 elections, signalling their disaffection with the ruling political class, regardless of ethnicity, See, Weiss, ‘Voting for change in the DRC’.

10. Cederman et al., Inequality Grievances and Civil War; Dorronsoro and Groiean, ‘Introduction’; Gurr, Minorities at Risk; Gurr, People versus States; Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict; Wimmer, Waves of War; Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador.

11. Young, Ethnicity and Politics in Africa.

12. Sekulić et al., ‘Ethnic Intolerance and Ethnic Conflict’, 798.

13. Baczko et al. ‘The Civil War in Syria’. For reviews on ethnic mobilization and conflict see Laitin, Nations, States and Violence; Fearon, ‘Ethnic Mobilization and Ethnic Violence’; Wimmer, Waves of War, 145-9. For instructive reviews of the literature on conflict see Wimmer ‘War’; and Blattman and Miguel, ‘Civil War’.

14. Cederman et al., Inequality Grievances and Civil War.

15. Collier, The Bottom Billion; Mueller, ‘The Banality of Ethnic War’; Fearon, ‘Ethnic Mobilization and Ethnic Violence’.

16. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, Weinstein, Inside Rebellion.

17. For a trenchant critique of rational choice theory within conflict studies see, Baczko et al. The Civil War in Syria.

18. Stewart, Horizontal Inequalities and Conflict.

19. Cederman et al., Inequality Grievances and Civil War, Olzak, The Global Dynamics of Racial and Ethnic Mobilization, Wimmer et al., ‘Ethnic Politics and Armed Conflict’. See also Wimmer, Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict, and Wimmer, Waves of War.

20. Wimmer, ‘War’, 176–177

21. Gurr, Minorities at Risk, 2.

22. Brubaker, ‘Ethnicity without Groups’, 164. By ‘groupism’ Brubaker implies ‘the tendency to treat ethnic groups, nations and races as substantial entities to which interests and agency can be attributed … as if they were internally homogeneous, externally bounded groups, even unitary collective actors with common purposes.’ It should be noted that is not due to a lack of awareness about the complexity, but rather a methodological choice between generalisation and abstraction on the one hand, and in-depth historical case studies on the other. Nevertheless, the generalisations that result create a reality effect, which inevitably reifies the state and ethnic groups.

23. Bertrand, ‘Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict’; Connor, ‘The Politics of Ethnonationalism’; Mamdani, Citizen and Subject; Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression; Obershall, ‘The Manipulation of Ethnic Identity’; Vigh, ‘The Colour of Destruction’.

24. Brubaker, ‘Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism, 22–24; Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power; Brubaker and Cooper, ‘Beyond Identity’; Hall and du Gay, Questions of Cultural Identity

25. Brubaker and Cooper, ’Beyond Identity’, 11.

26. In this regard he shares a holistic understanding of the economy with Polanyi, The Great Transformation; Scott; The Moral Economy of the Peasant; Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd’. See, Olivier de Sardan, Anthropology and Development, 62

27. Bourdieu and Waquant, An Invitation, 76.

28. Bourdieu, ‘The Social Space and the Genesis of the Groups’, 724.

29. Bourdieu and Waquant, An Invitation the Reflexive Sociology, 17

30. Bourdieu, In Other Words, 12–13.

31. Hoffmann et al. ‘Courses au Pouvoir’, 127.

32. Bourdieu, Sociologie Générale, 867

33. According to Bourdieu, within the discipline of economics, social exchanges are reduced to a universe of ‘mercantilistic exchange’, which is oriented towards the maximisation of profit. In doing so, it implicitly defines other practices as noneconomic (‘The Forms of Capital’, 46). By the same token, the tendency within identity studies to reduce social exchanges to symbolic exchanges ignores the economic effects of the construction of identities (Brubaker and Cooper, ‘Beyond Identity’).

34. Nziem, Histoire Général Du Congo, 51–55; Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest.

35. Jewsiewicki, ‘The Formation of Political Culture of Ethnicity in the Belgian Congo’; Bawele, ‘La Dynamique Sociale et l’épisode Colonial’; Young, Politics in the Congo, 242–46.

36. Hunt, A Nervous State; Jewsiewicki, ‘The formation of the political culture of ethnicity in the Belgian Congo’, Hoffmann, ‘Ethnogovernmentality’, Newbury and Newbury ‘King and Chief’.

37. Spear, ‘Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa’; Newbury, Kings and Clans.

38. Vlassenroot et al., ‘Contesting Authority’; Hoffmann, ‘Ethnogovernmentality’

39. Young and Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State, 143 Weiss, Political Protest in the Congo.

40. Lemarchand, Political Awakening in the Congo; Weiss, Political Protest in the Congo; Young, Politics in the Congo; Young and Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State.

41. Weiss, Political Protest in the Congo.

42. Turner, Congo, 101.

43. Shanyungu, ‘La creation de la chefferie’; Vlassenroot, ‘Citizenship, identity formation & conflict’; Hoffmann. ‘Ethnogovernmentality’.

44. Dunn, Imagining the Congo.

45. Schatzberg, The Dialectics of Oppression in Zaire; Callaghy, The State-Society Struggle; Young and Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State

46. Young and Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State, 149.

47. Young and Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State; Schatzberg, The Dialectics of Oppression.

48. Reno, Warlord Politics and African States; de Villers and Tshonda, ‘An Intransitive Transition’.

49. Raeymaekers, Violent Capitalism and Hybrid Identity in the Eastern Congo.

50. Vlassenroot, ‘Citizenship, Identity Formation and Conflict in South Kivu’.

51. Ligue des Droits de L’Homme (Zaire), ‘Rapport sur l’Etat‘, 22.

52. BBC, ‘Focus on Africa’.

53. Weiss and Carayannis, ‘The Enduring Idea of the Congo’.

54. Lemarchand, Burundi.

55. Mathieu and Tsongo, ‘Guerres Paysannes au Nord Kivu’; Stearns ‘North Kivu’; Vlassenroot, ‘Land and Conflict’.

56. Bøås and Dunn, ‘Peeling the onion’; Jackson, ‘Sons of which soil’; Hoffmann, ‘Myths set in motion’.

57. Bøås and Dunn, ‘Peeling the onion’; Jackson, ’Sons of which soil’, Verweijen, ‘From Autochthony to Violence?’.

58. van Acker and Vlassenroot, ‘Les “Maï-Maï”’

59. Author interview with former Mai Mai officer, Bukavu, March 2005.

60. Personal notes, Bukavu, 2000.

61. Vlassenroot and Raeymaekers, ’The Politics of Rebellion’.

62. Kitonga, ‘Violence and instability in Ituri’.

63. Vlassenroot and Raeymaekers. ‘The Politics of Rebellion’.

64. Hoffmann and Vlassenroot, ‘Armed Groups’; Hoffmann et al. ‘Taxation, Stateness and Armed Groups’

65. Hoffmann and Verweijen, ‘Rebel rule’.

66. Vlassenroot et al. ‘Contesting Authority’.

67. Hoffmann and Verweijen, ‘Rebel rule’.

68. Congo Research Group and The Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting, ‘All the President’s Wealth’.

69. Verweijen, Stable Instability.

70. Constitution de la République Démocratique du Congo 2006, art 90

71. Englebert et al. ‘Provincial Tribalisation’.

72. Loi organique, art 67.

73. Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters; Hoffmann, ‘Ethnogovernmentality’, 2019.

74. Author interview with Ignace Mupira, former governor of South Kivu, Bukavu, 11 November 2018.

75. Author interview with Balega leaders, Bukavu, 6 November 2018.

76. Marshall D. Sahlins, ‘Poor man, rich man, big-man, chief’, Bayart, L’État en Afrique, 280–288.

77. Michael Schatzberg, The dialectics of oppression in Zaire, 71–98.

78. Hoffmann et al. ‘Courses au pouvoir’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kasper Hoffmann

Dr. Kasper Hoffmann is Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen and Postdoctoral Researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. He has written numerous articles on the formation of political identities, the production of political authority and territory, and emerging forms of governance in conflict settings. He is the co-editor of the special issue: The making of ethnic territories: governmentality and counter-conduct (Geoforum, 2019). He is currently co-authoring a book on the sociology of armed mobilization.

Koen Vlassenroot

Dr Koen Vlassenroot is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Conflict Research Group at Ghent University, Belgium. He is a leading expert in conflict dynamics in Central Africa and the author of numerous journal articles on armed mobilization, public authority and security landscapes. He is co-editor of The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and reality (ZED Books, 2010), and is currently co-authoring a book on the sociology of armed mobilization.

Tatiana Carayannis

Dr. Tatiana Carayannis directs the NY-based Social Science Research Council’s Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum; the Understanding Violent Conflict program; and the China-Africa Knowledge Project. She also curates the SSRC Covid19 series on social research and insecurity. A scholar of international organization and conflict networks in DRC/Central Africa, her third book, “The Third UN: How a Knowledge Economy Helps the UN Think” (co-authored) is forthcoming by Oxford University Press, 2021. Her earlier books are “Understanding the Central African Republic” (co-edited, Zed Books, 2015) and “UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice” (co-authored, Indiana University Press, 2005).

Godefroid Muzalia

Dr. Godefroid Muzalia Kihangu is Professor at the Intstitut Supérieir Pédagogique de Bukavu and Director of the Groupe d‘Études sur les Conflits et la Sécurité Humaine, and Co-founder of the Réseau Congolais de Recherche sur la Paix et Securité. He has published several articles on the conflict dynamics in the Democratic Repub,ic of the Congo. He is the co-author of the edited volume: Vers une bonne gouvernance des ressources naturelles dans les sociétés post.conflits (VertigO 2013). He is currently writing a book on the oral history of violence in the Congolese wars.