Progressive and reactionary schools of thought may disagree on a wide array of issues, but when it comes to analysing and describing Africa, and its presumed problems, there are some striking parallels despite all ideological divergence. Through so-called modern history, the continent continues to be conceptualised as an amorphous bloc, conceptualised either a victim void of agencyi or a rough, tumble reservoir of obscure, chaotic violence. These narratives conveniently juxtapose emptiness and backwardness with savagery and greed, depoliticising agency of the African Other.
Progressive, anti-imperialist perspectives highlight the persistence colonial durabilities and the plunder of natural resources to explain what they perceive as the instability and fragility of contemporary African states. Reactionary perspectives, in turn, insist that colonialism and imperialism are insufficient to explain current inequalities, preferring to attribute these problems to bad governance and corruption. Their interpretations diverge, but both perspectives lock Africa into a reductive narrative: war, violence and corruption are inherent modes of government in Africa. Politics as such, in these interpretations, are simply absent and despite ideological differences, both lines of thought tend to reduce Africa to a mere recipient body of politics from elsewhere. Progressives, despite often superficially criticising that notion, and reactionaries thus both perpetuate the idea of the “white man’s burden” and thus justify international intervention under the pretext of peace, stability and development.
Peace, stability and development. These three recurring slogans create an analytical vacuum. They prevent us to fully grasp the elusive presence and purported absence of politics in Africa. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (Africa’s second-largest country by territory and probably its third largest by population) is a recurrent pars-pro-toto for such narratives.
There, the persistence of physical and structural violence – inherited from colonial periods and more recent ruptures – has forged the image of a depoliticized social landscape. Such narratives are framed by neo-colonial desire to define what Congo is not. Unsurprisingly this tells us little about what Congo actually is, and how the tension that pits colonial legacy against current affairs shapes a broader framework, which combines economic constraints, social pressures and everyday political competition. Hence, although progressive and reactionary schools of thought start from different perspectives, they ultimately contribute to shaping Western discourse and policies in quite similar ways. This process constantly feeds into a vocabulary that has served to obscure and simplify the political complexity and the intricate and inherent political character of African agency.
By and Large Defined Through Western Lenses
The absence of politics as a category of analysis contributes to misconceptions that frame discourse of and about Congo which can lead to the implementation of ill-conceived international policies and fuel the perpetuation of violence. This fosters a persistent depoliticization imbued with a colonial perspective, which erases the political role of the DR Congo, its history, its people, its conflicts and role in Africa and the world more broadly. Depoliticization is a powerful strategy in media discourses as well as in scientific and political documents, which often proceeds by isolating and overvaluing certain elements of explanation.
Contemporary Western thought tends to highlight a single factor, either a historical context (colonization, dictatorships, wars and their effects on the state), or an institutional context (governance mechanisms), or a conjunctural context (external factors influencing African politics). Few analyses address these three dimensions as interdependent and contingent, which contributes to reinforcing the idea that the DR Congo is a perpetual, backward victim, always defined according to what it is not and does not have in relation to the West.
Understanding the DR Congo necessarily involves taking into account Congolese agency in both analyses and interventions. This requires freeing oneself from colonial, ideological and normative illusions. These illusions are further perpetuated by assigning notions of progress to international interventions that rely on preconceived ideas of peace, stability and development.
Peace Through Elections?
The first example concerns the positivist idea of Western-style democratic elections as a symbolic “return” to an ideal state marked by peace and democracy. Here again, progressive and reactionary voices, despite differing points of departure, converge around a discursive artefact void of actual politics. If elections are hailed as major achievements in recent Congolese history, a closer look reveals a race to the bottom when studying the four polls since 2006. While the 2006 election is widely seen as the ceremonial end of the reunification of Congo after a de facto division during the 1996–2004 wars, the 2011 electoral cycle faced more substantial criticism – notably because of political violence during the campaign, but also of alleged fraud.
The 2016 elections, finally, were envisaged as yet another consolidation of liberal peace in which, for the first time ever, a sitting Congolese president would transfer power. However, amidst tense political conditions, marked by controversy over a constitutional amendment that would allow Kabila a third term, the ballot was postponed. After a long and tense pre-election period that sparked a new wave of social movements fighting for democratic change and respect for the constitution, incumbent President Joseph Kabila, who had succeeded his late father in 2001, finally held the polls in 2018. Faced with domestic and international pressure, he decided to self-finance the elections and refuse to accredit Western observers.
Facing a fragmented political landscape, Kabila chose Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary as heir apparent. Despite his de facto control over the Constitutional Court and the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), his candidate came in far behind. Kabila then arranged for the least troublesome alternative, Félix Tshisekedi, to be declared the winner. These results contrasted with what poll watchers across the country were reporting: data leaks from CENI, observer of the Catholic Church, and reports from a civil society organization called SYMOCEL all saw both Kabila’s candidate Shadary and Tshisekedi trailing Martin Fayulu by large margins.
Political Intrigue
The aftermath of the 2018 elections was an intense moment of politics. Kabila and Tshisekedi hammered out the details of a power-sharing deal that some observers said was a Plan B that had been in the works for months. Fayulu toured embassies and issued public statements claiming victory. For about 24 hours, the country remained in limbo until, in an unprecedented move, the United States and then most other Western embassies in Kinshasa decided to accept the outcome. Tshisekedi was sworn in in January 2019 and formed a fragile coalition with Kabila’s bloc that had won large majorities in both chambers of parliament. This coalition, which collapsed after less than two years, is a stark reminder of the primacy of politics in the DR Congo and the ability of actors to act beyond the goodwill of international partners when necessary. While foreign experts have highlighted governance deadlocks and the time lost in conducting reforms, this sequence is also clear evidence of the predominance of politics.
Since then, Tshisekedi has co-opted the Kabila camp, and then proceeded to dismantle the coalition initially formed between his and Kabila’s block. Subsequently, he went on to take control of key organs of the state: the courts, diplomacy, parastatal and regulatory bodies, and – timidly and much later – the security sector. In the run-up to the 2023 elections, Tshisekedi successfully marginalized the opposition, notably by preventing an alliance between Kabila, Fayulu and Moïse Katumbi. He also skilfully exploited nationalist sentiment by positioning himself as the only leader capable of countering the “terrorist” threat of the foreign-backed M23 insurgency. While this allowed him to win a landslide victory of more than 70%, no count of the late 2023 vote has ever been made public.
Fighting for Stability
A second example concerns the armed conflicts that have beset DR Congo for three decades. If actual conflict dynamics have evolved from open internationalised war to a fragmentation of belligerents, discourses on violence and insecurity have changed little and continue to shape the peacekeeping and peacebuilding initiatives of the United Nations and other actors. In the name of stability, these actors strive to position themselves as altruistic, supportive allies of the government and the population. Yet, they claim a moral entitlement and invoke framings that rely on Otherness and the “permission to narrate” what is legal, licit and legitimate and what not. Intervention, as a highly political act, thus paradoxically denies the political expression of Congolese agency.
In slick neoliberal fashion, UN officials and diplomats nowadays often classify armed groups as mere criminal gangs and bandits. This has two functions: it allows international actors to congratulate themselves on reducing armed groups with legitimate grievances to mere criminals, reformulating persisting problems as a simple matter of law and order – a depoliticized perspective challenged by the resurgence of the regional conflict around the M23 or by the massacres perpetrated by groups such as the ADF or CODECO. This apolitical reading recalls clichés from elsewhere, for example how gangs in other places – from Los Angeles to Johannesburg – are described even though they are often deeply political expressions of historical social conflicts and disenfranchisement. It also ignores the fact that many Congolese armed groups advance political claims – justified or not – and seek recognition from populations and the government.
In all this, Kinshasa often appears as an indecisive arbiter, listening to the opposing camps. While it runs operations against armed groups that grow into threats of national amplitude, it also often subcontracts other armed groups to perform the bulk of fighting. With support by UN peacekeeping, this has – since the defeat of the M23 rebellion in 2013 – contributed to the atomization of belligerents. Still, this seemingly erratic behaviour may actually rather be an expression of tactical and political agency than its absence. The interventionist fixation on a stability as an artefact of peacebuilding thus curiously contributes to perpetuating insecurity, power struggles and a situation of neither war nor peace.
The post-colonial present of Congolese politics somehow reflects what Peter Ekeh once called the “Two Publics”, that is, the way in which colonialism and local politics have shaped and encouraged clientelism in complementary ways. Armed groups, in their public discourses, present themselves as leaders of political struggles for concrete demands. Interestingly, these demands are often couched in the same developmentalist language used by foreign interveners, who seek to demobilize them through deception or force, without addressing the political dimension of their existence. The intertwining of what Ekeh calls the primordial public (linked to ethnic and community affiliations) and the civic public (associated with state institutions) is well understood by Congolese politicians, businessmen, and armed groups, but remains largely invisible to external interveners struggling for a simplistic perception of “stability.”
A Geological Scandal
The third example concerns the contestation between the Congolese government multinational corporations and international donors foreshadowing the reform of Congo’s mining legislation. The country’s previous Mining Code, which dates back to 2002, was inspired by ideas from the World Bank. Resolutely neoliberal, it aimed to attract investors after two devastating transnational wars. It encouraged developing the mining sector through foreign direct investment, joint ventures and generous tax breaks for international mining companies. For the Congolese government, the application of overly favourable conditions was part of a strategy to attract investors in a difficult operating environment, but also to extract rents. In 2018, the Congolese government undertook to reform the 2002 law, making it more advantageous for the Congolese population and the country.
While the context had changed radically in 2018, most foreign mining companies operating in DR Congo opposed the proposed changes. The new law notably proposed removing the “stability clause” in the 2002 law, a hidden tax cap. In other words, companies feared for their fiscal advantages. Indeed, the 2002 law, partly ghost-written by World Bank officials, had identified “instability” as a major risk for the industrial development of the mining sector and inserted this provision. In 2018, foreign mining companies reacted by expressing their opposition to the removal of this exemption, citing “instability” and the risks associated with foreign direct investment in so-called post-conflict contexts. This also alludes to a more generic stereotype of the DR Congo, describing the country as a “geological scandal” where violence would take precedence over politics – the notion of “conflict minerals” reflects this idea. Employing this depoliticized imagery, mining companies justify fiscal deregulation as due compensation for the Samaritan act to invest and operate against all odds. Yet, tax exemptions may figure among the central aspects that prevent the population and the country from benefiting from mining.
(Under-)Mining Development
Foreign mining outfits opposed clauses that could have benefited the DR Congo and the Congolese population, such as increased state participation in existing joint ventures, increased royalties, new obligations to repatriate profits produced abroad, clauses limiting subcontracting to persons and entities legally recognized in the DR Congo and with a Congolese capital base, or a tax on super-profits, provisions through which the Congolese legislature intended to balance fluctuations in the global market. This new tax for gains would kick in when the price of a “strategic mineral” would experience an unusual rise of more than 25% in comparison to weighted forecasts. Such tax provisions are common elsewhere, but in the DR Congo, foreign mining companies denounced them as protectionist and isolationist, thus going against the aspirations of Congolese miners.
What followed was a tug-of-war between multinationals and the Congolese government, marked by rare public visits by reclusive CEOs weary of shrinking profit margins. This created an impasse—not without displeasure of foreign and Congolese mining barons who continued to operate under the 2002 regulations—that has yet to be resolved. While the industrial copper and cobalt sector operates largely independently of the Congolese population and its workforce, much of the artisanal mining sector, focused on coltan and tin, had just recently undergone a reform that perpetuated colonial patterns of expropriation for access to and control of Congolese resources by creating a monopoly of buyers.
In sum, this reflects the reluctance of external interveners to consider political intentionality as a legitimate and serious expression of agency in Congo. On the contrary, Western-inspired paradigms (transparency or the fight against corruption and poverty) dominate the discourse to the detriment of examining the balance of existing powers, and therefore of understanding the struggles of the weakest part of the game: local populations.
Analytical poverty
These examples, far from being exceptional, highlight the need to take seriously the agency and multiplicity of Congolese actors. It is crucial to pay attention to temporality (colonisation, independence, dictatorships, wars, “post-conflict” periods etc.) and space (geopolitics, infrastructure, cross-border dynamics etc.) Moreover, structure (coloniality, neo-colonialism, extraversion, etc.) and agency (in its individual, scalar, institutional, identity dimensions, etc.) are often neglected. Post-structuralist theoriesii teach us that contingency is essential to understanding politics. Hence, to understand Congo now and then, we need to embrace contingency, rather than clinging to frameworks that put forward abstract notions of peace, development or stability, concepts that are meaningless in their universal application.
A look elsewhere highlights the analytical poverty of these vocabularies: the Covid-19 pandemic has convincingly shown that “state capacity” in Europe or the United States can be fragile in the event of a major crisis. Regional disparities in rich post-industrial countries like France or Germany, and the general trend towards outsourcing and subcontracting of work, as illustrated by companies like Amazon, or the creation of non-productive wealth via platforms like Uber or Airbnb, should prompt us to reassess what liberal ideas of “development” actually mean.
Similarly, notions of peace and peacebuilding are tainted by Western military adventures in countries such as Afghanistan or Iraq. The term “instability” is often used in an essentialist way, to define a problematic Other. Yet, under what premises can we consider the governance of countries such as Belgium, a state characterized by strong political inertia, or recent political developments in the United States as examples of “stability,” unless “instability” is simply defined as anything that differs from the reality of the so-called “Northern” countries?
A Constantly Unstable World
These examples also highlight the limitations of the analytical toolkits used by both progressive and reactionary political approaches to understanding the world. The DR Congo is a particularly pertinent example to illustrate this point in detail – not so much because of the reality of the country itself, but rather because of how it is imagined from the outside throughout history. Doctrines of forceful, unsolicited international intervention or negotiated deals – which rarely address questions of agency – such as UN peacekeeping and demobilisation programmes or mineral traceability schemes follow linear assumptions from orthodox international relations analysis. They present liberal peace as decontextualized, ahistorical panacea applicable to any “conflict-affected” country.
This is not to say that there are no serious endogenous problems in the DR Congo that need to be identified, debated, and addressed. Rather, we argue that it is important to be rigorous in the definition and use of concepts, as well as in the scientific foundations that give them meaning. Indeed, the negation of politics and the neglect of agency, typical of Western thought, serve to justify unequal relations in a postcolonial world, but they represent a major cognitive obstacle. As our examples above illustrate, understanding the political configuration of the Congolese state, its policies, and the diversity of its actors in a specific force field (distinct from others) is crucial to grasping this agency.
If we conceptualize states and societies – including the DR Congo – our analysis should not start from normative, often lazy, Western-imposed definitions such as poverty, security, or good governance. Instead, it should take into account interests, opportunities, and constraints at different scales, the effects of which are contingent, while emphasizing the historical and social contexts in which actors operate, whether individual or collective. What we too easily call “instability” may be only a temporary result of multiple contingent factors. In this view, the whole world is constantly unstable.
Legitimate Violence as a Privilege of the Rich
Accounting for the systemic complementarity of racism and capitalism, as well as their tendency to depoliticize violence, can help us better recognize these contingencies. Racism and capitalism converge in promoting material and discursive oppression, justifying negative and contradictory Western images of African elites, perceived as devoid of reason (without agency), and yet as savage and greedy (with negative agency) at the same time.
Such visions depoliticize violence and power by assigning agency exclusively through the prism of Otherness, while violence is only considered legitimate when it is “clean,” the prerogative of wealthy nations with access to high-end technology to kill from a distance. This not only confuses our understanding of politics, but also constitutes a persistent form of epistemic violence. Western thought, having constructed the prisms to analyse the DR Congo, also insists on its exclusive right to redefine these prisms. In this, progressive and reactionary international politics, despite their divergences, form a tragic common front. This, finally, complicates our efforts towards true decolonial emancipation.
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