Executive summary

For a short while, in late 2013 and the first months of 2014, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) seemed at last to have turned a corner. The M23 rebel movement had been defeated by the Congolese army with the support of the UN peacekeeping mission, MONUSCO. A regional peace agreement had been signed. The Congolese government and its international partners seemed committed to ending the long-running and destructive conflict in the country’s eastern provinces.

However, more than a year later, little is left of this optimism. Hundreds of people have been killed in renewed fighting. Armed groups are hedging their bets and stalling the demobilisation process. Local causes of conflict around land and identity have been left to fester. The government has disengaged from the international community, halted necessary reforms and shifted its focus to consolidating its political power. Mistrust between the Congo and its regional neighbours is as bad as ever.

This report’s fundamental argument is that this should not have come as a surprise. Violent periods always follow these cyclical ‘downswings’ in the DRC. With the aim of explaining this cyclical recurrence of crisis and conflict in the DRC, this report identifies and explores two main causes. First, the government of Congo’s engagement with the eastern provinces is used to maintain and extend a state that is kept purposefully weak so as to better manipulate it on behalf of private interests. This is visible in the government’s emphasis on the trappings of the state (buildings, equipment, training), but not on its actual functioning. None of the state-building programmes introduced are likely to have an impact on the drivers of conflict, which tend to be highly context-specific, related to local security dilemmas and competition around land and identity. Furthermore, long periods of disengagement typically follow these brief spells of activity, during which the situation inevitably worsens.

Second, the international community, MONUSCO first and foremost, has been unable to counter these dynamics due to a series of acute constraints and a limited set of technical formats for interventions. These formats, particularly those involved in ‘restoring state authority’, have become so ingrained that more innovative ways of undertaking peacekeeping and stabilization have been neglected. The result has been an open-ended and largely supply-driven strategy, where MONUSCO does what it thinks it can, and what it has always done, rather than devise a new way of operating.

Unsurprisingly, these constraints are reflected in the International Security and Stabilization Support Strategy (I4S). The I4S experience shows how technical interventions for security and state authority failed, as buildings, equipment, training and generalised development programmes did little to counter conflict. The strategy was fundamentally revised after 2012 to take a more realistic bottom-up approach to peace-building, but even then the continuation of old practices on the ground showed that MONUSCO was unable to look beyond its traditional format of extending state authority – in this case through the notion of ‘Islands of Stability’.

In short, the I4S experience illustrates three points. First, that technical interventions for peace consolidation, popular as they are with the government and MONUSCO, do not ‘stabilize’ the eastern DRC. Second, that the central government is not interested in political peacebuilding or social transformation. And third, that MONUSCO is not capable of engaging with stabilization and peace consolidation in a manner that is not in line with its limited strategy.

This report concludes with a mix of good and bad news. On one side, there is little evidence for optimism about the future. With local conflict left to fester, and regional tensions increasing over the lack of progress against the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) rebel group, future episodes of conflict might very well arise. The international community has proven itself unwilling to engage more strongly with Kinshasa, or to think of a more original approach for peacebuilding in eastern DRC.

On the other hand, the Congolese experience with stabilization and peacekeeping has provided critical lessons for future international engagements. First and foremost, it is crucial to be very careful with certain set formats for interventions, such as those based on ‘phasing’ and the need for a speedy intervention to win a ‘peace dividend’. Second, it is vital to understand the political context. Third, it is important to understand what ‘ownership’ means in the context of patrimonial governance. And finally, the Congolese experience shows us there is a need for strong coordination to keep all partners in line around a joint agenda.