hundreds of millions of people today. Renewed reflexive attention on the concept of “do no harm” can support a critical examination of how protection efforts might be inadvertently obscuring the global structures that perpetuate violence.15 Such reflection might also illuminate the functions that such obscuration may serve.16 It is through such processes of honest questioning that humanitarian energies may become more usefully channeled toward truly transformative ends.
This book is divided into seven chapters that roughly sketch the trajectory of my own journey into the DRC. Chapter 2 begins with an account of my early years working on the issue of children associated with armed groups. The chapter then takes a historical perspective of the founding violence of the Congolese state, and how these structural violences laid the foundations for the continuing militarized conflict in the Kivus today. Expanding upon Bourdieu’s law of conservation of violence, the chapter ends by looking at the mechanisms through which violence is conserved, including through politically expedient reliance on identity-based discourses to mobilize fear and hate, themes that will be taken up again later in the book.
The third chapter deepens the exploration of young people’s daily lives in the Kivus. Through testimonies of coping and survival, the chapter bears witness to the capacity of young people to endure the unrelenting burden of entrenched poverty and introduces the concept of psychological resilience, considering its relevance in the resource-poor and socially fragmented Congolese context. It demonstrates how young people have little choice but to submit to violence in the hopes of surviving it, and thus yield to continued future violence.
Chapter 4 considers how violence is embodied. It problematizes the international focus on militarized “rape as a weapon of war” and considers the negative impact of such international attention. The discussion then turns to other expressions of sexual violence in the DRC and the negative impacts that accompany the selective addressing of only some manifestations of violence. After considering existing gender relations, and how the international focus on militarized sexual violence contributes to exacerbating existing gender inequalities, the chapter closes with a discussion of how structural violence manifests in the bodies of young girls who have few options for survival other than to engage in transactional sex.
The fifth chapter traces the pathways of survival that many young people in the DRC travel each day. Drawing on the sociological understandings of tactical agency, this chapter examines how traditional, family-based support networks have been so weakened by structural violence as to no longer be able to offer the minimum standards of care for their children. It also offers new perspectives on patronage relationships from the view of the “client,” whose portrayal of weakness is a tactical choice that both facilitates survival and reinforces weakness, further conserving the structural violences that are increasingly difficult to escape.
Meanings of violence are explored in chapter 6, which considers how processes of meaning attribution help people to cope with unending violence. The chapter highlights the paradox of how identity-based discourses that fuel the conflict in the Kivus are also psychologically helpful in coping processes. In contrast, despite the generalized conditions of lost hope, this chapter documents the narratives of young mothers and older siblings who reveal how caring for children and younger siblings can reignite aspirations and hope for a better future. This chapter considers the processes through which young people’s visions of themselves and their aspirations continue to be defined by violence.
Chapter 7 focuses on international approaches to violence in the DRC. It begins by problematizing international protection interventions, highlighting the dissonance between aspirational international norms and lived experiences of violence in the DRC. It critiques the persisting “aid illusion” in the international humanitarian system and strongly argues that more aid money will not end ongoing violence in the DRC. The discussion turns briefly to the global political economy and how it interacts with and fuels violent conflict in the DRC. The chapter concludes by reflecting on how international aid interventions could be reconceived in ways that might do less harm. It suggests that the focus on “doing good” might be more effectively exercised closer to home, with citizens in the global North engaging their political agency to shift the prevailing paradigms of power and inequality that contribute to the conservation of violence in the DRC and beyond.
CHAPTER TWO
Outrages in Congo
SAVING “INNOCENT”: THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE “CHILD SOLDIER”
There is something about the extreme violence and brutality lived on Congolese lands that has long captivated the Western imagination. From the 1990s and through the first decade of the twentieth century, one of the most enthralling narratives about violence in the DRC—as elsewhere on the African continent—was the recruitment of children to armed groups.1 Media coverage widely portrayed the stolen innocence of and irrational savagery perpetrated by “child soldiers” with AK-47s, as newspapers and journals displayed images of half-starved and drugged eight-year-olds manning checkpoints, evidence of the terrorizing barbarity of the post–Soviet era’s “new wars.”2 Even more fascinating were stories about the mystical beliefs and practices of some armed groups that compelled children toward logic-defying engagement with violence; in one interview with journalists during a visit to the DRC in 2009, UNICEF’s executive director at the time described her shock: “A fourteen-year-old boy whose name translated from Swahili to Innocent, told me he was forced to commit acts of sexual violence against women. . . . Another still believed that he was invincible against bullets, a common belief among the Mayi-Mayi traditional armed groups in eastern and central DRC.”3 This kind of testimony fueled conceptions about the diabolic otherness of children associated with armed groups. Such narratives were often deployed within aid organizations’ communications strategies to raise funds from donors.
By the time I arrived in Goma in 2006, commonly cited estimates were that since 1996, more than thirty-three thousand children had been recruited to and used by armed groups in the DRC. Over the following years I would work with hundreds of such children and would soon come to know them as anyone but hapless victims or dehumanized perpetrators. Many of these children suffered terribly, somehow managing to survive brutal experiences of forced recruitment, then agonizing periods of frontline battle and associated labor. Much of my own work in the DRC in 2006–7 and again in 2009 involved the monitoring of recruitment cases and advocacy to ensure the release of children from the armed groups, and the investigation of alleged child recruitment to establish command responsibility for eventual punitive measures through the UN Sanctions Committee.4
Yet as I became more involved in the lives of young former combatants, the complexity of the child recruitment phenomenon began to reveal itself. I learned about the conditions of hardship that led to their recruitment, the limited choices available to them, and their experience during and after armed group engagement. One young man named Joseph eventually became a key informant of my doctoral research. His personal narrative offered rich insights into how young people navigate the extreme complexity of active conflict, how they deal with its aftermath, and how international programs to support the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of children had done little to achieve their stated aims to improve demobilized children’s life outcomes.
In 1996, Joseph had joined the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo–Zaire (AFDL in French)—the main rebel alliance of the First Congo War—when he was just seven years old. He explained the circumstances of his initial recruitment as follows: “In 1996 the war came to [my town]. My family fled to Bukavu, where we stayed for three months. When we returned [home], we didn’t know who was in charge, though Mzee [Laurent] Kabila was leading recruitment efforts. I joined the AFDL with all the other boys I grew up with. We were taken to the Plains of Ruzizi and trained for five months in how to use guns. After the training we were given arms and uniforms and started fighting. By the time Mzee Kabila took Kinshasa, my battalion had returned to [the base near the airport].”
While the AFDL rebellion was successful in toppling Mobotu Sese Seko in May 1997, the configurations of the national and regional war soon altered, compelling Joseph to navigate the shifting front lines of an increasingly complex regional