Kivu's Intractable Security Conundrum

Abstract

The security problems of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) continue to puzzle international peace and policy makers. Despite President Joseph Kabila successfully winning the national elections in August and October 2006, the country has not emerged from its security deadlock. This briefing argues that the current strategy of peace building in the DRC leads to the amplification rather than the containment of armed violence. According to Andreas Mehler and Dennis Tull, over the past fifteen years power-sharing agreements between insurgents have emerged as the West's preferred instrument of peace making in Africa. The gradual institutionalization of this strategy nonetheless runs the risk of creating important ‘incentive structures’ that make violent behaviour increasingly appealing, especially in the pursuit of otherwise blocked political aspirations.1 The underlying sources of this peace-making fallacy are a series of incorrect assumptions about the nature of the Congolese state as failed and collapsed. By continuously underplaying informal forms of governance in the eastern borderlands, the international community is missing a crucial chance to trigger a fundamental political transformation in this central African country. It also significantly underestimates the extent to which international intervention is used as a strategy of extraversion by state and non-state actors alike.2