The Ambiguity of Militarization: The complex interaction between the Congolese armed forces and civilians in the Kivu provinces, eastern DR Congo

Abstract

Drawing on extensive ethnographic field research, this dissertation explores the interaction between the Congolese armed forces (FARDC) and civilians in the eastern DR Congo’s conflict-ridden Kivu provinces. It uncovers the multidimensionality, reciprocity and complexities of this interaction, which arise from and give rise to its fundamentally ambiguous character. This ambiguity is both an outcome and an engine of processes of militarization, which entail structural transformations that generate a dominant position for armed actors and lead to the normalization of their involvement in non-military spheres of social life. Militarization has profoundly blurred the social roles and forms of identification surrounding armed actors in the Kivus, causing the boundaries between categories like military/civilian, coercion/persuasion, victim/perpetrator, public authority/private protector, licit/illicit to be porous and constantly shifting. Adopting the perspective of structuration theory (Giddens, 1984), the study identifies the main social structures, and the dynamics set in motion by these structures, that shape the agency of both soldiers and civilians in their day-to-day encounters. It demonstrates how this agency is informed by on the one hand, structures of domination, signification and legitimation, or discourses, norms and power relations formed over the longue durée, and on the other hand, more fluid dynamics of conflict, insecurity and protection. The latter relate to the interplay between three factors: first, forms of political, socio-economic and physical insecurity; second, the drive to solicit protection from so called ‘big-men’ (or socio-political entrepreneurs acting as patrons who head networks of followers), which may include armed actors; and third, intense conflicts mostly relating to struggles for power and resources, which are often framed in discourses of ethnicity and autochthony. There is a close interaction between the dynamics of conflict, insecurity and protection within the state apparatus, including the armed forces, and these dynamics as they play out within the Kivus’ social order at large. The study concludes that the continuing dominance of the FARDC in the Kivus is the cumulative result of both civilians’ and the military’s everyday practices, which reproduce the militarized structures of domination, legitimation and signification that underpin the FARDC’s position of power. An important engine of this reproduction are the dynamics of conflict, insecurity and protection both within the military and within the Kivus’ social order as a whole. These dynamics lead to a short-term focus that causes civilians and soldiers to engage in practices that sustain the military’s dominance in the long term. Another important element in the reproduction of militarization is the routinization of certain forms of civilian-military interaction. As routine actions draw upon ‘practical consciousness’, routinization hampers the development of awareness among civilians of the effects of their individual practices on the social order as a whole. This shows that militarization is a process that is driven by practices that make sense to individual social agents, but that have outcomes that are disadvantageous at the collective level.