The Weight of the Decision: Just War Thinking in Congolese Armed Conflict as Seen Through the Lens of Lieve Joris’s The Rebels’ Hour

Abstract

Ethnic violence and armed conflict continue to ravage the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), particularly its eastern provinces, nearly two decades after the official 2003 end of the Congolese ‘Wars of Liberation,’ which have cost over four million lives since 1996. Traditional Western mindsets—grounded in the doctrine of the just war theory, which informs much of international humanitarian law and international criminal law—find the ethical underpinnings of this violence extremely difficult, if not impossible, to fathom. Through her novel, The Rebels’ Hour, Belgian author and journalist Lieve Joris has, albeit unintentionally, graced us with an eloquent case study with which to explore the 1996–2003 Congo Wars through a just war theory lens. This article briefly describes the historical and doctrinal contexts of Joris’s novel, and traces in Just War terms the story she tells of its protagonist, a fictitious rebel commander. After discussing the implications of the just war theory posed by the situation Joris describes, this article concludes that the West can draw a moral lesson from Africa, and recommends Joris’s novel to Western readers as an excellent entrée to a better ethical understanding of African armed conflicts.