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Democratic Republic of the Congo (population 58.32 million people) is a country in Central Africa that covers an area of 2, 345, 410 km². Interest in palliative care has come to light in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where a group based in Kinshasa is introducing a broader form of care at the general hospital and at the Clinique Universitaire. A nascent home care service is also being pioneered. The International Youth Association for Development and its partner organization, Tout-Age, are NGOs and rely on charitable donations. The International Narcotics Control Board has published the following figures for the consumption of narcotic drugs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: codeine 13 kg; morphine 1 kg; pethidine 1 kg; and diphenoxylate 7 kg. The WHO overall health care system performance score places the Democratic Republic of the Congo 188th out of 191 countries. Moreover, the political economy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is explained.

This chapter illuminates the politics and practices of peacekeeping in the Congo. It begins with a brief historical overview of the conflict and the five phases of the UN mission (1999–2015). It examines each phase, and identifies critical junctures where spoilers obstructed the peace or political process, and/or civilians faced imminent threats or were harmed: situations that, according to assertive impartiality, warranted the use of force. The chapter reveals how judgments as to who was perpetrator and who was victim, as well as to who was the protector and who the party in need of protection, were subjective, fluid, and deeply contested, reflecting dynamics at both the global and local level. As a result of this contestation, implementation of the norm was inconsistent.

The penultimate chapter examines the effects of assertive impartiality on four specific sets of actors: civilians, armed groups, the state, and the UN mission itself. It reveals how the robust role prescribed for peacekeepers raised expectations and created incentives for local actors, engendering behaviour that would not have occurred otherwise. These effects, in turn, negatively impacted the mission and deepened perceptions that the UN was partial. Despite these consequences, the Security Council’s response to policy failure in the Congo, time and time again, was to scale up the mission’s mandated ‘robustness’, which in turn only further tarnished its credibility and leverage to act as a broker of peace. The chapter argues that in the absence of consensus over strategy to resolve Congo’s conflict, without a willingness by member states to commit the necessary political capital and resources, assertive impartiality offered merely the illusion of constructive and active engagement.

This chapter addresses the production of humanitarian photography in relation to spaces of conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In particular, it addresses the changing trends in NGO image content from negative to positive and their relationship to the region’s social and political contexts. Drawing upon experiences as an anthropologist and as an NGO photographer, the author uses ethnographic vignettes to illustrate how image assignments and field logistics lead to photographic practice that often produces a rosy, controlled visual reality. As a result, such upbeat depictions render invisible the nearby emergencies that fuel the very challenges the population strives to overcome, although associated captions and other text bring the conflict back into the images. Ultimately, this chapter advocates for imagery that encompasses the “beauty and the mess” of the region, challenging both the mere marketing of smiles and the simplistic sale of visualized suffering and disaster.

This chapter examines five cases of repatriation in Africa, specifically Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Eritrea/Ethiopia, Southern Sudan, and Darfur. In Rwanda, the Tutsi minority that was driven out or fled in the early 1960s and their descendants returned following the victory of the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Army. In the DRC, the internal displacement is widespread and complex. A process of repatriating refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) within the framework of the government's peace agreement is underway, but it is one in which every group is a minority. In Ethiopia and Eritrea, there have been no attempts to allow the return of those forced or encouraged to leave in either direction. In Southern Sudan, most of the refugees returned home because of the peace agreement that gave the rebels control. Lastly, in Darfur, repatriation was endorsed but not implemented.

This chapter employs the tools of complexity theory to describe the evolution of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) governance system from post-colonial times to the present. It argues that a form of symbiosis emerged among armed groups, traditional leaders, businesses, and state actors, resulting in a highly networked form of governance in eastern Congo. These relationships acted as ‘strong attractors’ in the Congolese governance system, drawing resources and political energy away from state institutions and increasing reliance on violent actors to stabilize the system. During the DRC’s civil wars, this reliance on armed actors grew, while the ability of private businesses to market Congo’s natural resources internationally meant that viable state institutions were never able to develop. The result was a highly resilient, adaptive, largely non-state system of governance that tended to strip central authorities of power and resources even as it appeared to build state institutions.

This chapter explores two conflicts and their related UN missions: Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC and MONUSCO). The chapter conducts qualitative analyses of these missions to explore the effect peacekeeping capacity and constitution on civil war violence, noting the UN’s ability to engage in mechanisms of violence reduction. The conflicts are not two cases of obvious peacekeeping success, and there are clear instances of failure in both UN efforts. However, in many situations, the missions were more effective when capacity and constitution improved, indicating that relative effectiveness increases as UN missions are sufficiently outfitted. The chapter complements the quantitative analyses by highlighting the limits of the theory and the challenges to peacekeeping missions in the midst of war.

Using examples drawn from the authors’ respective operational experiences, this chapter argues that for force to be effectively employed, troops must be well trained and equipped, supported by adequate assets, and led by visionary and proactive commanders at all levels. To allow adequate resources to be mobilized, there must be political cohesion at the strategic level among UN Member States and within the Secretariat with a focus on effects-based force generation. The authors also consider a number of political challenges, including differing interpretations by troop contributors of protection-of-civilians mandates, a lack of political will to implement such mandates to their fullest extent, and the need to hold troop contributors accountable for mandate implementation. Above all, they assert that that there must be a political peace process in place, without which the impact of any military operations will be transitory.

Both environments of mass uncertainty and emergent efforts at radical social change inspire calls for the arts to “get the word out.” Yet the distribution of information is inseparable from the distribution of resources, and the logics of broadcast are inherently colored by the politics of patronage. Moreover, the audiences addressed by such media are not open-ended, democratic masses but rather distinct publics constituted by the very forms of discourse chosen by the works: gender roles are consolidated around songs addressed either to men or women, political preferences swayed through the promotion of certain celebrities, ethnic identities unified or exacerbated via the use of different languages, and so on. However widely it spreads, distribution is never even nor unbiased; it is always colored by processes of disparity.

This chapter offers a reading of V. S. Naipaul's novel A Bend in the River, which chronicles the rapid changes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after independence. It first provides a historical background on the arbitrary drawing or redrawing of national boundaries in Africa before discussing its implications for nationalism or internationalism in the region.

This chapter aims to analyse the strategies used by vulnerable inhabitants of South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to cope with economic hardships. The analysis is based on exploratory qualitative research conducted in June 2011. Economic hardships are understood as financial pressures on the household that result from sudden emergencies or life-cycle events. We first describe commonly reported sources of economic hardships and then risk management and coping strategies. Strategies are grouped into three categories: individual strategies such as self-insurance and income diversification, collective informal, and collective formal strategies. The socio-economic logics underpinning these strategies are then examined through the lenses of the Polanyi framework, which distinguishes between four types of economic integration principles: market, redistribution, reciprocity, and householding. Our research results indicate a plurality of economic logics in strategies used by respondents as well as the predominance of reciprocity and householding principles.

The lack of an international legal framework for the restructuring of sovereign debt, and the voluntary nature of current international debt restructuring initiatives have created opportunities for predatory private commercial entities—called ‘vulture funds’—to acquire defaulted sovereign debts at substantial discounts, refuse to participate in debt restructurings and aggressively pursue repayment of the full face value of the debt through litigation, often in multiple jurisdictions. This chapter discusses current official initiatives designed to curb vulture fund litigation and proposes a rethink of the doctrine of sovereign immunity as a key measure to curb the predatory behaviour of ‘vulture funds’. It also discusses the impact of the activities of these 'vulture funds’ on the realisation of human rights, particularly in developing countries, as well other consequences for the countries targeted by ‘vulture funds’

In nominally “postwar” contexts throughout Africa’s Great Lakes region, participatory theater has been mobilized almost exclusively as a tool for either awareness or healing. The rhetoric prescribed for peace and development is so dominant in the humanitarian market that the artist’s ethos is channeled in directions more ethical than aesthetic. The shared circulation of participatory theater through the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi shows how an aesthetic model is exported and becomes a transnationalized tool, one designed to be tailored to any kind of crisis context. Thanks to NGOs’ powerful influence, this model shapes theater and performance landscapes by influencing generations of writers and actors, uniting creators through artistic networks. This theater is characterized by a strong aspiration to performativity which occurs in texts and performances through the centrality of the chorus, frequent mise en abyme, and the quest for catharsis.

In 2009, the United Nations peacekeeping operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo provided support to the Congolese army for a counterinsurgency mission (Kimia II) against rebel groups with ties to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. While many outside groups were critical of the United Nation's handling of the mission, in particular for exposing civilians to attack both by the army and rebels through lack of an effective protection plan, they typically lauded the general idea of peacekeepers supporting more aggressive missions to defeat “spoiler” groups, or even to carry out such missions themselves – crossing the line into peace enforcement or arguably counterinsurgency. This chapter argues that many of the problems with Kimia II were not just mistakes in implementation, but dangers central to taking an aggressive, force-focused stance. It also argues that there are reasons to be sceptical that such approaches will necessarily lead to longer-term peace, even if they are effective in defeating their targets in the shorter run.

Starting with the humanitarian impact of the Nasdaq “dot.com bubble” in the DRC, this chapter analyses how war economics enhances our understanding of humanitarian crises and responses. It examines the financing of armed conflict, how the costs and benefits of war are distributed, and how the needs for assistance are affected accordingly. Building on a rich literature on the political economy of war, this chapter treats humanitarian assistance as part of war economies, not as an exogenous add-on, and looks at how foreign aid interacts with other political and economic dynamics at play.

Refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) are among the most visible, but perhaps least understood, of the displaced due to the news media. Chapter 5 addresses how forced displacement disrupts the sense of belonging in the lives of refugees and IDPs. Characteristics of belonging, as understood here, include that it is reciprocal, it orients one’s identity, it is dynamic, and it requires practices of remembrance. With only a few exceptions, many IDPs are rejected as outsiders, even within their own countries, instead of being welcomed. Especially since 9/11 and the emergence of the political “management of unease,” refugees are most often relegated to foreigners—those to be feared and managed. Refugees as foreigners become targets of derision and social exclusion. This loss of belonging rejects a moral obligation to care for the other in our midst and results in a loss of belonging. Resilience in refugees and IDPs can and does emerge, even if with great difficulty, in ways that create “pockets of belonging” among the displaced.

This chapter tackles the challenges of security in violent research contexts. It offers in-depth insights into how Judith Verwejien assessed security risks when she researched micro-dynamics of conflict in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It also details practical forms of preparation for potential harm and how to avoid it, such as analyzing patterns of kidnappings or imaging an ambush and practising how to behave in such a situation. The chapter shows that the combination of good security analysis and realistic preparations can help minimize risks even in a highly violent context such as eastern DRC. It also analyzes what counts as knowledge on security dynamics and how does this knowledge translate into guidelines for action.

The conclusion explores the book’s broader implications. The unraveling of the AFDL happened within the same fifteen-month timeframe that would also see the outbreak of a “war of brothers” between Eritrea and Ethiopia (May 1998) and a violent fall-out between the RPF and Uganda's NRM (August 1999)—on Congolese territory. The fall of Kinshasa in May 1997 marked the last successful violent revolution brought about by liberation movements in Africa (save for the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement’s (SPLM) partial victory in Sudan). Existing liberation regimes shifted their focus to internal development and a narrow conception of national interest rather than continuing to export revolution and building deep institutional ties with brother countries. Thus, rather than the AFDL triumph ushering in a new era of liberation politics and regional solidarity that would transform Africa, it was in some sense the Thermidor of the Pan-Africanist, Nyerere-driven vision of unity and security through regime change campaigns. The final pages of the book assess the lasting impact of the liberation project on African politics.