Whenever I went to Bunia, the capital of the Ituri district1 in the north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), I was captivated by the busy life: Mototaxis circulated and honked; women sold their vegetables and fruits on the side of the road; small shops selling food items, household articles, stationary material and clothes lined the streets; markets were crowded and bustling; students gathered on the campuses of the main universities in town and construction sites indicated that people invested in the future. In short, life seemed to go on after the war that had ravaged the district from 1999 to 2003 leading to the death of more than 50,000 and displacing more than 500,000 people (Van Woudenberg 2004, 189; Vircoulon 2010, 209).
The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO), earlier called MONUC and present since 1999, as well as many other international peacebuilding actors substantively contributed to bringing peace back. At the same time, local peacebuilding actors working in Ituri were also instrumental in ending the war and making peace. They created networks to join forces, mediated local conflicts, conducted sensitization activities, brought people from different ethnic groups together in joint activities, started to engage communities with the past and created local peace structures.
However, when spending more time in Bunia, it became obvious that the idyllic scene was superficial. For instance, the amount of files pending at the Commission Foncière de l’Ituri (CFI) showed the high number of land conflicts that still threatened peace. The reluctance of some people to reveal in which area of Bunia they lived indicated the hesitance to talk about ethnicity, which continued to divide parts of the town. Inter-ethnic marriages remained rare. The high number of traumatized people was also concerning. Even more so was the normalization that people made of traumas. As a mototaxi driver told me shrugging his shoulders as we saw a man on the other side of the street who was in torn clothing and had a staring gaze, “He is traumatized from the war—what can we do?” Thus, many people still grappled with the legacy of the war.
At the same time, the travel restrictions to the interior of Ituri indicated the remaining presence of militia groups threatening the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Most of the mototaxi drivers, who at first sight were just youngsters earning their living with a motorbike, were former militia members. They had received motorbikes in a demobilization program in order to make a living and have an alternative to fighting. Violence had not stopped, however, and not all militia members had been demobilized. The high presence of soldiers preparing in Bunia for military operations against the militias confirmed this. Moreover, the lack of tarred roads, electricity, clean water and the fact that international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the United Nations (UN) had often stepped in to rehabilitate houses, schools and hospitals showed that the government did not provide quality services.
Thus, while the district was no longer haunted by open warfare, most people said that peace in Ituri was superficial and that war could potentially re-erupt any time. This led me to the question of why, after more than ten years of peacebuilding by both local and international actors, was peace still fragile?
1.1 Explaining the Fragile Peace in Ituri
Different strands of literature provide insights to explain the fragile peace in Ituri. These include scholarly contributions on the DRC and Ituri, on international peacebuilding success and failure as well as on local and international peacebuilding actors.
1.1.1 Insights on the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ituri
A multitude of authors have written on the situation in the DRC generally2 and Ituri specifically.3 Some of these authors have provided historical accounts of the Zairian or Congolese state,4 of the conflicts in the DRC,5 the national peace process,6 representations and narratives of the DRC7 or the international response to the war in Congo.8 With regard to Ituri, several authors have written on the conflict,9 the international response to it,10 specific issues, such as ethnicity, displacement or humanitarian access11 or the role of Uganda in the conflict.12
The authors who provide insights on the armed conflict in the DRC focus on different levels at which it played out. Some put emphasis on conflict issues13 at the national and regional levels. They link the conflict to the Congolese state’s loss of authority which made it vulnerable to internal collapse and foreign invasion (Lemarchand 2001; Carayannis 2003; Olsson and Heather 2004; Turner 2007; Reyntjens 2007; Prunier 2008a; Stearns 2011). In that context, they mainly see vested interests of national and regional actors as cause for the continuation of the war (Lemarchand 2001; Turner 2007, 2013; Prunier 2008a; Eriksen 2009). As Eriksen (2009, 662) observes, “It is well known that many actors (states, companies, warlords) profit from dealing in (and with) weak, conflict-ridden states … Many groups therefore see continued conflict as being in their interest, since it enables them to continue their business.” These interests are frequently linked to the vast natural resources of the DRC, which several authors consider one of the main factors behind the war (Olsson and Heather 2004; Turner 2007; Fahey 2009). Rwanda’s and Uganda’s ambiguous roles in the conflict further this impression (Prunier 2008a; Fahey 2009; Carayannis 2009). Such insights then lead many authors to conclude that as long as the vested interests of national and regional actors are not addressed, peace has limited chances to grow (Stearns et al. 2017).
Other authors draw attention to conflict issues at the local level, besides the national and regional levels (Van Acker and Vlassenroot 2000; Vlassenroot 2004; Van Woudenberg 2004; Vircoulon 2005b; Autesserre 2010; Veit 2010). They are often inspired by Kalyvas who distinguished national from local cleavages. He stated that “first, actions ‘on the ground’ often seem more related to local or private issues than to the war’s driving (or ‘master’) cleavage; second, individual and local actors take advantage of the war to settle local or private conflicts often bearing little or no relation to the causes of the war or the goals of the belligerents” (Kalyvas 2003, 475–476). Autesserre (2010) provides the most complete scholarly account of such micro-level tensions in the DRC. She argues that “bottom-up rivalries” around political power, economic resources and social status played an important role in “sustaining local, national, and regional violence” (Autesserre 2010, 8).
At the same time, several scholarly contributions as well as policy reports place emphasis on the co-production of violence by different factors, thereby assessing how regional, national and local conflict issues reinforce each other (see for instance Human Rights Watch 2003; Vlassenroot and Raeymaekers 2004c, 387; Van Woudenberg 2004; Vircoulon 2005b; Vircoulon and Liégeois 2010; Veit 2010; Autesserre 2010). With regard to the conflict in Ituri, for instance, Vlassenroot and Raeymaekers (2004c, 387) argue that “the outbreak of violence in Ituri is the result of the exploitation, by local and regional actors, of a deeply rooted local conflict over access to land, economic opportunity and political power.” Thus, the consensus seems t...
