Reading Urban Landscapes of War and Peace: The Case of Goma, DRC

Abstract

Over the past 20 years the city of Goma, the administrative capital of the Congolese North Kivu Province located at the Congo-Rwanda border, has become a regional urban symbol of violent conflict dynamics in eastern DRC, as well as of peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction. The city’s position in the conflict-ridden Kivu, its economic significance in the regional political economy of war and its security position as a destination of internally displaced persons (IDPs) as well as hundreds of humanitarian, development aid and peacebuilding agencies all make Goma a point of ‘central marginality’. Situated in the borderlands far from the national political centre at the violent margins of the state, Goma developed into a booming economic and humanitarian hub with a strong political and military position in the Great Lakes Region (Vlassenroot and Büscher 2013).