Conflict, state failure and urban transformation in the Eastern Congolese periphery. The case of Goma

Abstract

This dissertation analyses the impact of protracted violent conflict and state failure on dynamics of urban transformation in the eastern periphery of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The study object is the city of Goma (at the Congolese‐Rwandan border, North Kivu), and the form is a political‐anthropological urban ethnography that starts from the city such as it is today. The central aim of this study is to offer an urban perspective on the Congolese crisis, by at the one hand revealing the particular urban outcomes of conflict dynamics, and at the other hand demonstrating how these particular urban dynamics again produce and influence political processes. The emerging forms of urbanisation and urbanism1 in a conflict and crisis setting is thus the central focus of this dissertation. The last ten years have brought a resurgence of interest in urban Africa. This resulted in several important historical surveys of urbanisation in Africa, along with intensive and often multidisciplinary studies on individual African cities (Bauder 2001; Beall et al. 2010; Bekker & Leildé 2006; Bryceson & Pots 2006; Demissie 2007; Enwezor et al. 2000; Freund 2007; Locatelli & Nugent 2009; Murray & Myers 2006; Myers 2011; Pieterse 2010; Salm & Falola 2005; Simone 2001a; Simone 2002b; Simone 2004; Simone 2005). In general, this fascinating production of literature on the African city covers two ‐contrasting‐ trends. The first one centralises its analysis around ‘crisis’, underlining the problematic political, economic, social and environmental challenges of rapid urbanisation through the continent. From this angle, the African city is represented as a rather gloomy site of failure, experiencing “serious spatial entropy, a decline of infrastructure, the unravelling of traditional institutional and social networks, the erosion of state capacity (...) posing serious challenges to urban stability and sustainability and contributing to alarming reductions in quality of life for the average urban resident” (Enwezor et al. 2000: 14). The second one, to the contrary, focuses on the functionality instead of dysfunctionality of these cities, pointing at their creativity and inventivity to cope with these challenges. From this perspective, the African city is presented as a laboratory of experimental creations (De Boeck & Plissart 2004; Robinson 2006; Simone 2004; Trefon 2004). As such, this recent academic production on urbanism in Africa is sometimes susceptible to either ‘Afro‐ pessimism’ or ‘Afro‐romanticism’, that in its extremes can result in a picture where “urban Africans are either bravely en route to empowering themselves to attain sustainable livelihoods or the debased perpetrators of the most unimaginable acts of misanthropy” (Pieterse & Edjabe 2009: iii). Nevertheless, it has offered extremely rich and valuable material to better understand the ‘centrality of cityness’ (Pieterse 2010) in a continent for a long time subject to an almost exclusively ‘rural’ academic approach.