[A former M23 officer and two Congolese army officers operating under Mudahunga’s orders told the Group that, on 24 February 2013, both Mudahunga and Muhire had distributed arms to Rwandophone (Hutu and Tutsi) young people and cattle herders in Kitchanga and in the nearby Kahe camp for internally displaced persons and incited them to attack ethnic Hundes.] UN report (2013), par 122, page 27
[… the coalition of the Alliance of Patriots for a Free and Sovereign Congo (APCLS) and Nyatura simultaneously attacked Friday 1 July in the morning several FARDC positions in Masisi …] Radio Okapi, July 2016
[…the APCLS combatants are controlling villages around Kitchanga to protect as much as possible the members of their tribal community (Hunde) when they need to go for farming, because they were threatened and prevented from accessing their land by the Congolese Hutu fighters of the Nyatura militia, close to the FDLR, the Rwandan Hutu.] Forum des As, June 2017
This study was inspired by a scholarly debate about the persistent violent conflicts in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo and how peacebuilding interventions have been dealing with conflicts over the years. During the past decade, there have been serious critiques by scholars emphasizing the failure of state-building attempts by international donors who could not provide a strategic plan for a long-term solution (Trefon 2011, 2013). In this debate, the failure is associated with the use of top-down approaches and, as result, there have been new arguments advocating for particular attention to the local dynamics of conflict (Autesserre 2008).
While it is widely agreed that the nature of conflict in the eastern DR Congo is essentially local, pointing to the triangle of land, power and identity as the main drivers of violence, this study asked why peacebuilding interventions working at the local level for years continuously fail to address the causes of violent conflict in spite of the huge resources allocated. Why and how was the ‘local community’ constructed and how is it used to implement peace building programs? What are the limitations of focusing on the local community and how does this constitute the local trap? Finally, what were the processes of scale production by diverse actors and how can peacebuilding interventions relate to the politics of scale? The general objective of this study was to analyze the processes of the emergence of local actors as well as the conditions under which these actors contributed to the production of multiple scales. The aim was to understand why current peacebuilding interventions continue to fail in addressing the causes of violent conflict and to what extent the politics of scale could provide a thorough understanding of this failure. After answering
177 the above questions through the empirical chapters (four, five and six), the main findings of this study can be formulated around the following points.
By examining the context and strategies of peacebuilding interventions at the local level, the construction of the ‘local community’ level has been a way to legitimate a new form of intervention different from the top-down approach. By working at the local level (Masisi), I demonstrated in chapter four that other levels (especially provincial and national) have been ignored while overestimating the capacity of ‘local communities’ to deal with the causes of conflict. This is because the choice of so-called local communities as the focus for intervention has led to the reappearance of ethnic groups who hardly engage in dialogue with state institutions, as well as powerful individuals and even leaders of armed groups. Moreover, attempts by international peacebuilding NGOs to involve Congolese civil society organizations as partners to facilitate the implementation of projects in the communities has raised the question of the legitimacy of these organizations on the local level. Even with a long period of interventions, peacebuilding organizations have simplified the complexity of conflict dynamics (land, power and identity) to issues only of land. Furthermore, Congolese civil society organizations continue to play the role of ‘brokers’, only facilitating the implementation of projects, while having limited scope to participate in any other role due to a lack of their own strategy as intermediary bodies between international organizations and local populations. In addition to the lack of strategy, Congolese civil society organizations have become clients in the peacebuilding ‘market’ where money is promised to organizations which can prove their ability to make a project acceptable on the local level.
Albeit peacebuilding interventions focus on the local level, I demonstrated in chapter five that land, power and identity are structural issues (imbedded in a set of laws and institutions sometimes with competing authorities) at multiple levels of institutions (local, provincial and national). The analysis of the legal and institutional framework of land, nationality and power questions allowed me to identify other levels where these questions are at play and to understand how scales are constructed and deconstructed by actors through diverse strategies and practices. Ignorance of this multi-scalar character of the conflict is what explains to a large extent the failure of peacebuilding interventions. Although there is empirical evidence regarding land-related violence at the local level, attempts to find local solutions to multi-level problems has proven to be counterproductive in the long term. One example is the land reform process. It was argued that land reform is a
178 political process that requires a strong political involvement, rather than just a technical matter of supporting civil society advocacy actions. Furthermore, the current ambiguity of the legal and institutional framework characterized by the conflict of competences at local, provincial and national levels continues to be an obstacle to any attempt towards peaceful access to land. In Masisi, land has been a powerful driving force of violence, by setting Banyarwanda against Hunde with regard to land rights. While for the Hunde in Bashali the use of autochthony was a weapon to exclude Banyarwanda from accessing land, the land law of 1973 (while remaining ambiguous about the role of customary chiefs in land management) opened up the possibilities for the Banyarwanda to access land, not through the local Hunde chiefs but by obtaining title deeds at the provincial and national levels.
Worth saying is that this analysis of land, power and identity as multi-level issues has been a point of departure to grasp how actors construct and navigate across scales, using violent means such as wars and exactions through armed groups as a strategy to claim and to control land, power or any other political gain. The analysis of the formation of armed groups (chapter five) has shown how land, power and identity claims have been brought to the table in different political agreements between armed groups and the government and how armed groups contributed to the emergence of powerful individuals, becoming ‘string pullers’ while playing official roles in state institutions.
The analysis of armed conflict in the context of Masisi and in many other places in the eastern DR Congo suggests that issues of power, land and identity are still at stake. While tensions among different groups in Masisi continue to occur at the local level, ‘string pullers’ behind armed groups have managed to create political and security strategies to operate at the local level, sometimes with connections to other levels depending on the profiles of these ‘string pullers’.
It is in this set up of actors who navigate across levels that an example of a conflict transformation program implemented in Bashali was used to illustrate the difficulty of peacebuilding interventions to integrate a multi-level approach in their programs. Attempts to involve ‘string pullers’ in some peacebuilding projects at the local level continue to fail because of the informal character of political alliances, economic and security networks and the ‘string pullers’ behind them, while remaining fluid, unpredictable and embedded in the history of struggles that each of the groups experienced in the past.
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7.1 Contribution to the theoretical debate
7.1.1 Politics of scale beyond the top-down and bottom-up dichotomy
In political geography, the call to consider how individuals through political or economic struggles contribute to the process of producing scales is made by several authors (Sayre and Vittorio 2009, Marston 2000). It is argued, for example, that individuals are situated at multiple scales at the same time, and that jurisdictions such as city governments or national legislatures are composed of members who constantly negotiate different interests depending on the level of jurisdictions these individuals are at (Cidell 2006). Because any governing body is comprised of individuals with conflicting interests, Cidell posits that the authority or power of a particular jurisdiction depends in part on the goals, abilities and even personalities of those individuals. As I discussed in chapter five, when the Banyarwanda nationality was denied after the independence of the DR Congo at the same time as Hunde traditional chiefs contested Banyarwanda access to land, the Banyarwanda elites developed new strategies. One of the strategies was to abandon struggles on the local scale (Masisi) and focus on other scales where they could gain the right to nationality. The appointment of Barthélémy Bisengimana as head of President Mobutu’s cabinet resulted in the grant of nationality to Banyarwanda in 1972, with implications for land access. This example shows that actors with an interest at the local scale can move to other scales to negotiate their interest. In this sense, struggles for personal goals and/or collective interests can lead to their production of more than one scale, which suggests that scales are not ontologically given. In the same way, Martin (1999) advocates for transcending the fixity of jurisdictional scale. She insists that while jurisdictions and institutions are fixed by scale (local, provincial, …), actors (individuals) are not bound by, but rather, transcend scales in an attempt to articulate, defend, and secure their interests.
The debate on whether scales are constructed in the epistemological moment (as observational measurement) or whether scales are produced in the ontological moment, in a process that occurs independently of any act of observation continues to divide scholars in political geography (Sayre and Vittorio 2009). Even when Moore (2008) is concerned by the consequence of failing to make a clear distinction between scale as a category of practice and category of analysis, he at least suggests that scales are rather produced in the ontological moment, through practices formally and informally, which makes scales problematic as a category of analysis. However, the analysis of the emergence through political struggles (nationality, elections, rebellions) of powerful
180 individuals who have become ‘string pullers’ does not fall solely into one of the two categories (epistemological or ontological). I found that both categories are complementary in the sense that one can observe practices across different scales and at the same time identify diverse actors who plan and generate those practices and even the interests behind them. In the case of Masisi, one cannot assume the armed groups operate without the support and often the leadership of well-known powerful individuals who at the same time occupy high political positions in the state institutions. The analysis of land, power and identity to explain different moments of struggles helps to identify different scales where these issues have brought several actors into confrontation.
Although it is difficult to say whether these scales were vertically or horizontally negotiated and produced (see Howitt 1998), the result of the Banyarwanda struggles, nonetheless, have produce visible scales, namely local, provincial, national and regional. How can one distinguish scale from level? In this study, I named ‘levels’ the political and administrative divisions in terms of a hierarchy from the local to the international (see figure 2 in chapter three), whereas a scale is the representation of a level where different actors are in confrontation but the scale in question is not bounded to any visible or fixed level.
For example, during the RCD rebellion, Goma at the provincial level, became a strategic scale for local, national, regional and international stakes. Goma became therefore a scale produced by multiple and diverse actors who came from different places (eastern DR Congo, Kinshasa, Rwanda, Uganda, …) whereas the issues at stake went beyond the provincial level per se. During the government of transition (2003-2006), Kinshasa became an important scale where actors from different levels were at play. With the difficulties of this transition and the rise of the CNDP rebellion against the government in 2005, the local level (Masisi) became a scale for a new political deal. Later on, the Goma peace agreement between the government and armed groups in March 2009 made Goma, again, an important scale. While actors occasionally produce scales in a given geographical area at a particular moment of negotiation or tensions, levels are politically and administratively fixed. However, there is a trend to see scale production processes across state institutions at different levels. This has been shown through the analysis of land, power and identity as legal and institutional issues. One can argue that the analysis of scale making processes needs existing structures and institutions to better account for how scales are produced and how they shift, as well as the strategies of different actors. Nevertheless, while it is possible to observe powerful actors at the levels and their ‘official’ role in state institutions, some strategies used by