In and out of the state: Working the boundaries of power in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Abstract

Anthropology has often renewed itself by studying collective self-organization beyond the reach of the state. The idea that power usually flows top-down from a state monopoly is increasingly questioned in an era of networks fuelled by interactive decision-making processes that include non-state actors. Power theoretically understood as potentia – the elementary power through which human beings deploy their productive capacities and creative possibilities – is ontologically prior to power expressed as an obsession with order that is often repressive ( potestas). Granting precedence to potentia over potestas inevitably leads us to question the conceptual centrality of the state. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which has long stood – and stands today – as a symbol of the antithesis of social order, offers much material for reflection on this issue. While this paper considers how people negotiate the boundaries between state and non-state power in the contemporary DRC, its lasting contribution is to revive in a distinctly new way a tradition of anthropology to use the study of stateless societies to pose big critical questions about the institutions on which modern societies rest.