‘Today, the DRC, and the region of the Great Lakes as a whole, are living a unique moment, with genuine peace and stability finally within grasp. The deadlock of the past years has been broken. Now we can end atrocities and conflict, rape, displacement and child recruitment. Now we can progress on the path to success. Now we can achieve lasting peace. In a long journey together, the region has closed the darkest chapters of the war in Congo (…) the job remains far from finished (…but) we have already made impressive progress. At last, opportunity is on the horizon (…) we are closer than ever to our destination.’

Peace It!, MONUSCO Mission concept, December 2013

For a short while, in late 2013 and the first months of 2014, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) seemed to have turned a corner. The M23 rebel movement, which had taken the strategic eastern town of Goma, 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 re-energised and committed to finally end the long-running and destructive conflict in the country’s eastern provinces. At the time of writing, a little more than one year later, there is not much left ofthis optimism. Hundreds of people have been killed in fighting in the North Kivu province. 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 argues that this should not have come as a surprise. Instead of a gradual transition from conflict towards peace and ‘normalcy’, it is more useful to see the situation in the DRC as cyclical. Because of a complex mix of incentives, Congolese elites have consistently pushed for short-term, technical ‘solutions’ to conflict, and only for the short period of time necessary to prevent the worst from happening, or when their positions of power were threatened. Long periods of disengagement would follow these brief spells of activity, during which the situation would inevitably worsen. The current post-M23 period is a typical example of one of these cyclical downswings and could have been predicted some time ago. The international community, MONUSCO first and foremost, has been unable to counter these dynamics, due to a combination of strong international, institutional and contextual constraints, which have led the peacekeeping mission to rely on an open-ended, supply-driven strategy, and limited technical formats for interventions. These formats have become so ingrained that more innovative ways of undertaking peacekeeping and stabilization have been passed by.

The structure of this report is relatively straightforward. Chapter 1 will give an overview of how the political-military struggle between the government and a number of foreign-supported armed groups has developed over the last few years, and subsequently outline three main ‘cycles’ of (dis)engagement by the government: from the elections of 2006 to the agreement between the DRC and Rwanda in 2009; from the 2009 agreement to the fall of Goma and the subsequent defeat of the M23 by late 2012/early 2013; and finally, the current disengagement post-M23. Chapter 2 will examine why this cyclical engagement does not address the reasons for instability in the east, by looking into the drivers of conflict, the DRC’s patrimonial political system, and the way in which the government has instrumentalised outside attempts at peacebuilding to strengthen the central state. The third chapter focuses on the UN peacekeeping mission, MONUSCO, whichresponds with little more than technical interventions against the government’s machinations. It pays special attention to the deployment of the Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) and shows how this new ‘peace enforcement’ brigade is, in many ways, new wine in old skins.Chapter 4 takes a closer look at the International Security and Stabilization Strategy (I4S). By looking at the results of this programmatic framework, it intends to demonstrate firstly why technical interventions do not stabilize the east; secondly, how the government disengages from the east; and finally, why MONUSCO is unable to develop a more original approach. The final two sections are forward looking: Chapter 5 speculates about what may happen to the DRC and its international supporters in the year to come and proposes a more evidence-based way forward; the Epilogue sets out a few critical assumptions about ‘stabilization’ which outside supporters should be wary of.

A note from the author

It is only fair that I insert a personal note at this point. I was seconded by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs to MONUSCO, and worked in the mission’s Stabilization Support Unit for four years, in Bukavu and Goma, coordinating stabilization programmes with the government and international partners. I have had my share of frustration working with the Congolese government and MONUSCO, and have actively contributed to the ‘paper reality’ of some of what the UN does. Consequently, I am undoubtedly biased in my views. Finally, I hope the reader will understand that this report is a personal analysis that reflects no one’s views but my own. In accordance with the Memorandum of Understanding that I signed with MONUC in 2010, none of the information in this document is confidential.