Methodology of the excluded: conspiracy as discourse in the eastern DRC

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to theorise the importance of locally produced narratives of conflict and peacekeeping which can be used to diversify our understanding of conflict. These narratives are often dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories’ by international peacebuilders and disregarded as ‘unverifiable’ by researchers. But the people who articulate these narratives often have extensive lived experience of conflict. Consequently, they demonstrate sophisticated informal theorising, resistance to malevolent power, and experience-led knowledge in their narratives. Engaging more seriously with these narratives can, therefore, make important contributions to our understandings. Drawing on narratives and stories collected over more than a decade of interview-based and ethnographic field research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this article shows how conspiracy narratives can be analytically useful in questioning the powerful and enduring logics of international intervention and reveal important yet oft-ignored aspects of peacebuilding failure that need to be addressed if peace is to succeed.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge production
• decolonial thought
• methodologies
• UN
• conspiracy

Introduction

It has been over 20 years since the Second Congo War ended. The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO), one of the largest and longest peacekeeping missions in the UN’s history has, in its various forms, been present in the country since 1999.¹ Yet despite this extensive and expensive peacekeeping mission – and the concomitant support from a plethora of NGOs, charities and considerable development assistance – the lived reality for many in the country is one of persistent violence, insecurity and underdevelopment. For years Congolese civilians have protested against MONUSCO’s failure to carry out its mandate to protect civilians from the threat of armed groups and, at the time of writing this article, the Mission is in the process of withdrawing from the country. Academic discussions of peacekeeping in Congo have also pointed to the Mission’s inability to address the multiple complexities of the conflict in which myriad local, national and regional dynamics compound each other to create intractable and pervasive insecurity.² MONUSCO’s repeated failings speak to a wider body of empirical evidence about the limitations of the top-down liberal peacebuilding toolkit in conflict-affected states,³ vindicating the demands of the ‘local turn’⁴ in seeking bottom-up alternatives.⁵ Indeed, several articles published in this journal, which critique the hegemonic coloniality of liberal peacebuilding and its dislocation from local communities, have discussed at length the importance of applying postcolonial,⁶ decolonial⁷ and locally-driven⁸ lenses to our understandings of peacebuilding in modern conflicts. Writing specifically about Burundi and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter DRC or ‘Congo’), Leeuwen et al note that localising peacebuilding should enable intervention to focus more on everyday experiences of violence and local understandings of how to deal with these experiences, ‘which would make peacebuilding more sustainable as a result of local ownership and legitimacy and could contribute to emancipation’.⁹ And yet, as they conclude, in practice localising peacebuilding does not automatically empower or emancipate local stakeholders.¹⁰

The politics of knowledge production is at the heart of this impasse. While peacebuilders may have heeded calls to listen to local voices, in the case of the DRC this ‘listening’ (if it is done at all) is often done through the earpiece of externally constructed frames – which homogenises and reduces ‘local voices’ to a narrow set of particular actors. Consequently, those picked to represent the ‘local’ are often those who internalise the logic, or reproduce the frames, of external intervention. The process of selecting the local can itself then generate conflict and distrust both within local populations and between local and international actors¹¹ and ‘international peacebuilders need to better understand how their ideas about localizing peacebuilding might obstruct important contributions of local stake-holders to structural peace and state-formation’.¹² As Cruz has argued: ‘In the colonising practice of the North, the voices, the context and the idiosyncrasy from below are made invisible, ignoring that there is also a kind of peace that arises from the local. To that extent, the peace below faces several paths; collide, dialogue or resist the peace from above’.¹³

This article is therefore concerned with examining the ways that international peacebuilders may have obstructed important local contributions by looking at narratives constructed by local populations about international peacebuilders. I argue that located within these narratives are important sites of resistance and collision in which the local theorises about the international. While international peacebuilders may have been ignoring certain local perspectives, those local perspectives have not been ignoring international peacebuilders, and accordingly many local perspectives have been shaped precisely by their marginalisation and exclusion. Such understandings can be thought of as decolonial – acknowledging the coloniality of power that has excluded certain voices, seeking to render visible that which has been made invisible, and de-silencing those narratives that have long been silenced.

This article seeks to make visible this decolonial informal theorising, which I argue can also strengthen academic understandings of peace and conflict in Congo, by engaging with locally-produced explanations and discussions of conflict and peacekeeping. Such explanations are often dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories’ by international peacebuilders, and often disregarded as ‘unverifiable’ by researchers. Following Catherine Walsh, my concern ‘is with the knowledges resurging and insurging from below (that is from the ground up) and within and through embodied struggle and practice, struggles and practices that, in turn, continually generate and regenerate knowledge and theory’.¹⁴ The aim of this article is neither to prove nor disprove the veracity of the theories themselves, but rather to use them as a starting point through which to uncover some of the processes that are often ignored by Western-centric liberal analyses¹⁵ of conflict. I argue that by engaging seriously with the substance and form of discourse articulated by internationally silenced local actors we can begin to open up a pluriversal understanding of peace and conflict in the DRC. From this, actors engaged in peacebuilding¹⁶ can move to re-imagine alternatives to hegemonic peace in which ‘another world is possible because another real and another possible are possible’.¹⁷

I am aware that the use of the term ‘local’ is one that is problematically homogenising especially in the context of the DRC where tensions over autochthony and its concomitant rights mean the notion of ‘local’ is itself part of the conflict.¹⁸ There are political tensions regarding which locals to listen to, and ‘the local is constantly made and remade, making it hard to identify and generalise about the local’s actual nature’.¹⁹ As Rigual notes, the local turn can implicitly reproduce the hierarchisation between local and international while also reproducing domination and coercion of minority communities.²⁰ For the purposes of this article, however, ‘local actors’ is simply being used as an umbrella-term shorthand to describe the Congolese populations who construct and circulate the narratives and discourses that I am discussing. These local actors tend to be silenced and ignored by international scholarly and policy actors.

This paper emerged from a series of narratives that I have encountered while conducting fieldwork in the eastern DRC for both academic and policy purposes over the last fifteen years. While I have mentioned these narratives to policy and academic audiences alike, they have tended to be dismissed as anecdotal evidence which, in the words of one policy-maker, ‘were interesting’ but not ‘methodologically rigorous’ or ‘analytically useful’.²¹ As I have argued elsewhere,²² the focus on ‘neat’, ‘verifiable’ and ‘rigorous’ data in academic knowledge production obscures the messy realities of conflict zones, which are overwhelmingly characterised by a lack of access to reliable information and opacity regarding the workings of power. Neither external peacebuilders nor local populations are using data that has been gained in what might be called a ‘methodologically rigorous’ fashion. Focussing on sanitised ‘clean’ data within research often obscures more than it shows. This paper therefore contributes to the growing body of critical literature that recognises the need for embracing complexity in peacebuilding research,²³ and calls for ‘a more nuanced, trans-national, and tran-scalar conception of how conflict and peace are interrelated within states, internationally and globally’.²⁴

Writing in this journal, Elizabeth Dauphinee has argued that ‘an enhanced understanding of the impact of war and the subsequent logics of peacebuilding require narrative techniques and strategies that re-focus our attention on lived experience’.²⁵ In this article, I build on her work and use conspiracy theories as a form of narrative that can shed light on a plethora of individual and collective lived experiences as experienced by the speaker. I argue that we can better acknowledge complexity by engaging more seriously with stories that are frequently dismissed as ‘conspiracy’ – not necessarily as sources of fact – but rather as indicators of competing incentives, opinions and interests. From this we can open up new worldviews, understandings and dialogues, better theorise the politics of intervention, and imagine other ways of fostering deeper and more lasting peace.

In the following section, I explain what I mean by ‘conspiracy’ and the way in which we can conceptualise it. I then move to look at three different types of conspiracy narrative which I categorise according to the truths they reveal: those which centre around the fact that UN workers are largely disincentivized to work for peace; those which centre around the fact that the UN frequently repeats its past mistakes; and those which recognise that the UN does not operate within a geo-political vacuum. In each case I show that, by taking these local narratives seriously, we can uncover many factors which are analytically useful in that they enable us to better engage with the complex realities of conflict. I conclude by returning to the assertion that we cannot have a ‘local turn’ without paying more attention to locally-derived theories and methodologies, and argue that a greater focus on that which is dismissed as conspiracy could be one-such avenue to engaging with local forms of knowledge production.

Conspiracy and epistemic de-silencing

This paper questions the epistemological, ontological and axiological foundations upon which peacebuilding and intervention in the DRC are built. In doing so, I posit conspiracy as an analytical lens through which these foundations may be challenged. Dauphinee notes an academic complicity with international institutions²⁶ in the way that both try to make sense of conflict and craft from it a stable historical narrative:

As a result, academic writing – particularly in fields that are deeply connected to institutions of political power, such as international studies – ordinarily generalises what is highly specific, and ignores or pathologises challenges to the dominant beliefs that animate their disciplines and policy needs: the central concern with political stability the presumption of the reliability of observers and informants, the privileging of the ‘verifiable’ and the requirement to produce closure through the solidification of a stable narrative history of conflict that all parties are expected to accept and reproduce.²⁷

In this context, plurality is treated as an obstacle to overcome, rather than a positive that can be nurtured.²⁸ Contestation of the stable narrative, if and when it is acknowledged, is apolitically absorbed into that narrative.²⁹ The scholarly desire to produce stable narratives comes from the creation of epistemic privilege and epistemic inferiority in the Western scholarly tradition.³⁰ This, Ramon Grosfoguel argues, stems back to Cartesian mind/body dualism in which the ‘I’ of Decartes’ seminal statement ‘I think therefore I am’ ‘can produce a knowledge that is Truth beyond Time and Space, “universal” in the sense that it is unconditioned by any particularity, “objective” understood as equal to “neutrality” and equivalent to a “God’s-Eye view”.’³¹ As a result, knowledge that does not depend upon the myth of separation from bodily experience or from geo-political location is disregarded as ‘biased, invalid, irrelevant, unserious; that is, inferior knowledge’.³² Consequently, this latter kind of knowledge has been subject to various forms of epistemic silencing – with the speakers being marginalised, ignored, and in many cases even killed, for the knowledge that they possess.

Nonetheless there have been scholarly challenges to these processes of epistemicide. Such responses seek to de-mythologise epistemic privilege and de-silence that which has been deemed inferior by the myth of neutrality.³³ Valuable works have been produced extolling the virtues of standpoint epistemologies³⁴ and situated knowledges,³⁵ and within this canon there has been a call for pluriversality – to resist the universal and acknowledge a world of many worlds.³⁶ Olivia Rutazibwa invites those seeking to de-silence that which has been ignored to ask:

(1) ‘Who are (not) the experts?’ (and connect this question to the ways in which silencing manifests itself); and (2) ‘What do we (not) consider expertise?’ (to engage with the systematic exclusion of the vast majority of other knowledges or ways of knowing).³⁷

In the context of my research in the DRC, the Congolese citizens who I spoke with, who have lived their lives as conflict- (and subsequently peacebuilding-) affected populations are not regarded as experts because Western epistemic communities do not consider their experiences – and the way they make sense of their lives, the workings of power and their relation to it – as constituting ‘knowledge’. Here, I would like to reinstate Congolese citizens’ knowledge as valid, valuable, and necessary knowledge, but a problem arises as to how – given the ontological limits of the universal imagination.

Scholars interested in understanding conflict need a way of understanding the way conflict-affected populations talk about conflict as a form of knowledge, and they need to be able to understand it in a way that is open to its intuitiveness, its emotion, its lived-ness, flexibility and instability, its logical complexities, and its interests. Epistemologies concerned with universality, objectivity and neutrality will never achieve that. We need to be comfortable with uncertainty and resist the need to establish certainty which will always benefit the powerful at the expense of the marginalised.³⁸ This will require engagement with, and the development of, innovative and diverse ways of seeing the world, and it is here that I offer conspiracy as one such lens through which to view other knowledges.

It is useful at this point to establish what I mean when I am talking about conspiracy since, as others have observed, it is difficult to pin down as an empirical category.³⁹ This is in part because of a tension between whether the term conspiracy serves a descriptive or a valuative purpose in a given context. If taken to simply be a description, a conspiracy narrative is one which argues that a particular (series of) action(s)/event(s) ‘advances the interest of a select group while working against the common good’.⁴⁰ While there is a tendency to think that conspiracy theorists characterise these groups as a shadowy cabal of hidden actors,⁴¹ relatively few conspiracy theories do this. As such, several scholars tend to ‘define conspiracy theories in relational terms, as a set of ideas that challenge mainstream knowledge and officially sanctioned truths’⁴² and which search for alternative reasons as to why a particular situation may have come into being. Understood in this way, conspiracies are just another form of theorising within the human sciences⁴³ albeit one which recognises that, throughout much of history, people have conspired and sought to hide/deny their conspiring.⁴⁴ However, the term ‘conspiracy theory’ is rarely understood as merely descriptive, and often carries with it a value judgement on the perceived rationality of the theoriser. In this sense, ‘conspiracy’ is used as a justification for dismissal of a particular theory. The connotation is that a ‘conspiracy theory’ is based on ‘flawed, irrational and dangerous understandings of reality’.⁴⁵ In this usage, the label of ‘conspiracy’ epistemically silences its proponent and stigmatises ‘people with beliefs which conflict with officially sanctioned or orthodox beliefs of the time and place in question’.⁴⁶

But in the tension between the descriptive and valuative I argue that there is data of great analytical value. Because in both their content (i.e. what they posit as the reason for something happening), and in the way that they are dismissed, conspiracy narratives reveal and challenge the power-relations of knowledge. They are deemed irrational because they draw together different levels of knowledge and foreground the personally felt, believed and experienced at the expense of what might be more universally verified or observed. As I will demonstrate below, the speakers of the conspiracy narratives pay little lip service to neutrality and objectivity; they nakedly seek to undo officially sanctioned ‘truths’ because they recognise that the forces of power that are conspiring against them are the same forces of power that have created and sanctioned these ‘truths’. They recognise that all knowledge emerges from power, and they neither trust that power nor the knowledge it produces. Furthermore, the officially sanctioned truths do not reflect their lived experiences, and therefore the ‘official truths’ cannot be their truths. Indeed, the epistemic injustice that they face through the dismissal of their truths at the expense of the promotion of the ‘official truths’ is part of the conspiracy and subsequently also constitutive of their experiential truth. Conspiracy understood in this way is the inverse of Cartesian mind/body dualism: My mind cannot be tricked into believing what my body (and the bodies of the people I know and trust) does not experience, therefore some demon⁴⁷ must be trying to trick my mind, and I must resist this demon by seeking some other explanation that makes sense to my body.

Conspiracy narratives about peacebuilding

In the section which follows, I am going to discuss three challenges to the mainstream peacebuilding narrative in the DRC which are prominent in local narratives of conflict but are often dismissed as conspiracy by Western scholars and peacebuilders alike. Before doing so, however, it is worth briefly discussing the methods I have used to collect and analyse these narratives. Between 2008 and 2016 I carried out several field trips to the eastern DRC and the Rwandan border conducting doctoral, post-doctoral and policy research into the persistence of armed groups and the failures of peacekeeping in the region. Since 2016 I have also been remotely gathering data on local resistance to external intervention.⁴⁸ The narratives I draw on here are taken from conversations that I have had over the years with a diverse range of (civilian and military) Congolese citizens and international peacebuilders. Some of the narratives emerged in the context of formal interviews, but other information was gathered through ethnographic ‘hanging out’.⁴⁹ While not strictly following the same methodology, this was carried out in a similar vein to Gearoid Millar’s description of trans-scalar Ethnographic Peace Research (EPR) to study ‘the radical differences between fundamental concepts which underpin approaches to peace and conflict, the actions they motivate, and the expectations and experiences of those actions in the life-worlds of different individuals, communities, organizations and institutions across scales’.⁵⁰ Where information has been used from ethnographic encounters, I have not disclosed any further information about the speaker, location or time in order to ensure that the identity of those quoted is fully protected.

Initially, conspiracy narratives were not the main focus of my research trips and structured interviews. Rather, this research emerged from a critical reflection on my own positionality and the politics of knowledge production. While critical of liberal intervention, my original methods nonetheless internalised these interventions’ assumptions⁵¹ and need for bureaucratic legibility.⁵² But local populations’ responses to my questions showed that the assumptions and concerns of intervenors were not particularly relevant to them and their analyses of peace and conflict.⁵³ My ethnographic research showed that Congolese populations discussed peace and conflict in epistemologically and ontologically radically different ways to external peacebuilders, and therefore I sought a methodology that would allow me to capture both their knowledge and these epistemological and ontological differences. It is here that I have found narrative analysis useful. I collected what Gediminas Lesutis terms ‘ontological narratives – subjective stories that one tells oneself and others about one’s place in the world’⁵⁴ – from local populations. These narratives were then presented to international peacebuilders to respond to. The international intervenors’ responses also constituted ontological narratives, and I analysed the differences between these two narratives in order to identify sites of resistance and collision.

Congo’s colonial history is important to bear in mind when considering contemporary Congolese narratives of peacebuilding in the country. There is a strong rationale for questioning whether external peacebuilding is actually trying to build peace, which is rooted in a deep historical understanding that humanitarianism has previously been a guise for extraction, and a lack of evidence that anything has changed to prevent that from happening again. Further compounding this suspicion is the living memory of Congo’s post-independence history, in which the needs of the Congolese population have repeatedly been ignored at the expense of other states’ geo-political concerns. Many of the Congolese people I spoke to are well-versed in this history. The assassination of Lumumba, for example, was often cited as the point at which many of my interlocutors dreams of peace, and their faith in external intervention, were dashed.

Conspiracy narratives matter because people have conspired in Congo, and the articulation of these narratives is a way to resist the forces of power that want the Congolese people to forget their trauma and deny the truths of their histories and experience. I focus on three particular truths that are routinely ignored by external intervenors, but which underpin these alternative narratives of why peacebuilding has failed: Firstly, that UN workers are largely disincentivized to work for peace; secondly that the UN has a poor institutional memory of its past mistakes; and thirdly that the UN does not operate within a geo-political vacuum.

The conspiracy narratives I discuss below are unfortunately stabilised and shoe-horned approximations of narratives that are dynamic and pluralistic by their very nature. The dynamism of these narratives has made them very difficult to write about, because different speakers have invoked conspiracy in different ways – drawing on different personal stories, different histories, different geo-political forces. Reflecting various epistemologies of the South,⁵⁵ these narratives are voracious in the way they seek and use knowledge, they mix analytical levels and logics, and do so in a way which demonstrates a strong sense of self, of history, of structures and agency. As such, the way I have described them below should be taken as a partial summary which itself is rendered problematic by my own curatorial decisions, and the limiting structures of academic publication. I have purposely picked the conspiracies which I feel are most intelligible to an outside audience, and in doing so I recognise the limits of this method. Nonetheless, I believe that even a small window into the world of knowing what silenced knowers know can open up other ways of imagining the world and challenge the problematic assumptions that perpetuate conflict.

The conspiracy that UN workers are not (primarily) motivated by peace

During fieldwork in 2015, I encountered a Congolese lawyer who was quite vocally against the UN Mission and declared that ‘MONUSCO sont voleurs’ (MONUSCO are robbers). He explained how expatriate UN workers were using aid money to throw lavish parties, exploit sex workers, and engage in illegal drug-taking rather than using that money to help Congolese citizens. Similar stories were told to me by other Congolese interlocutors, with multiple allegations of sexual exploitation. I was repeatedly told stories about the ‘deuxieme bureaus’ (literally meaning ‘second offices’) which refers to the practice of UN troops from other countries taking a Congolese ‘wife’ and having a Congolese family while deployed in the country, and then leaving these women (often destitute) when they return back to their home countries. I was also told that young UN workers wanted to be deployed to Goma because it is a ‘party town’ where they can get paid a lot of money to drink and take drugs, while claiming to live in ‘danger’ and advancing their careers. These narratives indicated quite clearly a frustration that international peacebuilders were not particularly interested in peace as their primary motivation for being in Congo.

The allegation that individuals within the UN do not necessarily consider peace as their primary goal is one that was (partially at least) admitted by some UN workers that I interviewed. This admission, however, was always deflected away from the individual admitting it to being a problem that they saw in (nameless) ‘others’. Speaking to me about the tensions between civilian and military staff within MONUSCO, a civilian officer noted that one of the reasons peacekeeping had not been effective was because the majority of peacekeeping troops were unwilling to fight for peace. ‘They’re just here to get the money for their own countries, they don’t care if the war continues or not’.⁵⁶ Indeed, I collected stories from UN civilian officials and Congolese citizens alike which both agreed that UN peacekeeping troops were ineffective at keeping peace – even in the days when MONUSCO was still MONUC. During fieldwork in 2008 and 2010, the UN’s (in)action against the Congrès national pour la défense du peuple (CNDP) was frequently cited as an example of peacekeeping troops’ indifference towards violence.⁵⁷ For Congolese interlocutors, however, the question of why the UN was unable to prevent the CNDP violence in North Kivu was not simply an apathy on the part of peacekeeping troops, but rather reflected the idea that, as one Congolese actor described it, ‘conflict is just another resource in the DRC for outsiders to extract’.

While the Western media-aid complex⁵⁸ at the time attributed the failures against the CNDP to a UN peacekeeping force that was unsupported and under-resourced,⁵⁹ several Congolese observers were sceptical that the lack of troops was the problem. In fact, some believed MONUC inaction was deliberate: Stories were circulating that the UN chief at Kiwanja had ordered his troops not to fight the CNDP. The exact details varied, but almost all of them alleged that the peacekeeper in question (who in most of the stories that I heard was an Indian General) had said to his troops ‘Nkunda N’job’. In saying this, the General was reminding peacekeepers that if they actually succeeded in capturing the CNDP’s leader Laurent Nkunda and dismantling the CNDP, then their peacekeeping task would have been accomplished, and the justifications for their high salaries would end. It was therefore not in their interests to protect civilians and fight the CNDP.

Some years later I interviewed a high-ranking Indian Officer in charge of one of the UN’s peacekeeping battalions and asked him about this story. While he believed that it was unlikely to have happened, he did admit that the leader in question would have had very few incentives to go after armed groups, even if the UN mandate had permitted it. Ultimately, he (like all UN troop commanders) is not accountable to the Congolese people. India will get the money for troop provision for his battalion regardless of whether his troops’ actions contribute to peace. He is, however, answerable to his superiors in India and the families of his soldiers. If he were to order his troops to take combat action against any armed groups, and if his soldiers were to be killed, he would have to explain to them why he let Indian soldiers die in a conflict that has nothing to do with India. This admission vindicates local narratives that Congolese conflict is being used as a resource to enrich other countries: If the peacekeeping mission is paying for troops to ‘bring peace’ to Congo, but those troops do not see Congolese peace as their main priority, what is all that money actually paying for? The answer seems to be other countries’ military budgets through the exploitation of the fact the Congo is continually in conflict. And this gives much credence to the belief that conflict, like Congo’s vast natural resources, is a source of extraction and exploitation rather than a problem to be solved.

We must therefore question the underlying assumption that peacebuilding in the Congo has peace as its main goal. Rather than dismissing the Nkunda N’Job narrative, we can use it to question whether peacebuilders are actually incentivised to build peace. If the answer, as seems to be the case, is ‘no’, why then are we continuing to believe that MONUSCO as an organisation is doing peacebuilding? This question is one which several Congolese actors have asked for many years, and yet when they try and draw attention to it, it is often dismissed and silenced by external actors as conspiratorial rumours and lies spread by an uneducated population. But this narrative is alluding to an observable and incontestable truth experienced by local populations: That those charge with peacebuilding within the UN system have little or no incentive to build peace and that affects the entire ontological and epistemological basis on how peacebuilding is perceived. By spreading these narratives about the incentives of the UN, local populations are calling out and drawing attention to what they perceive as an inherent injustice in the UN system, which need to be better addressed in peacebuilding.

The conspiracy that the UN is wilfully ignorant of its mistakes

There are some external intervenors (such as the Indian General that I discussed above), who may be willing to admit that they are not incentivised to work for peace. But for some this is not an admission of personal implication, but rather an admission of systemic failure. Several peacekeepers I spoke to admitted that they also felt that the MONUSCO mission was ineffective, but they were simply cogs in a much larger machine, and therefore powerless to effect change. When I spoke to a Congolese friend about this, he understood but was not sympathetic. ‘But then why are they taking UN money to do a job?… [They] should not call themselves humanitarians [when] they’re not serving humanity, just themselves’.⁶⁰ But many of the peacekeepers I spoke to did believe they were serving humanity. While they admitted institutional (in)capacity was were preventing their lofty goals of ‘doing good’ from materialising to its full potential, their presence was nonetheless a net good, which was improving day on day. This was not evidenced in fact necessarily, but it was a belief that was genuinely held. These peacekeepers often dismissed Congolese narratives which questioned their intentions by arguing that what the Congolese authors of these narratives were failing to appreciate is the complex nature of peacekeeping in Congo. They argued that although the lack of progress in peace was as much a disappointment to them as it was to the Congolese, without the UN presence things would be so much worse. For these actors, what local conspiracy narratives believed to be a deliberate collective endeavour to prevent peace within the UN could really be explained by the fact that, in a complex and ever-changing conflict like Congo, peacebuilding is a process of trial and error. MONUSCO would inevitably make many errors, but these errors were entirely unintended. When peacekeepers point to the unintended consequences that are seemingly so pervasive in peacekeeping, they are echoing Western philosophical arguments for the dismissal of conspiracy theories that ‘shit happens’⁶¹ and nobody is responsible⁶² for these random outcomes.⁶³ Furthermore, even if you can point to those who are logistically responsible for negative outcomes, they argue that it is more rational to believe it to be the result of an accident rather than a purposeful attempt at sabotage. Neil Levy points to the old adage: ‘If you have to choose between explaining something as cock-up or a conspiracy, choose cock-up every time’.⁶⁴

However, Congolese narratives are often sceptical of the ‘cock-up not conspiracy’ repudiation. This is because when local voices point out that certain initiatives, actions or programmes will not achieve their desired outcomes, and inevitably lead to further problems, these concerns are often ignored. For example, in 2015 I spoke to several Congolese interlocutors who were objecting to Pakistani UN peacekeepers supporting (with money and resources) the building of mosques in areas that they were stationed. Congolese objectors felt that, by giving preferential treatment to small Muslim minorities in these areas (where resources were generally scarce), they would create and/or exacerbate religious tensions which would contribute to conflict. When I spoke to UN officials about this, the concerns were dismissed and I was told that what troops do in their spare time (as long as it does not violate UN rules) is beyond the control of the UN. While the extent to which this has had a significant impact on conflict remains to be seen, there are nonetheless recent Western rhetorical concerns about the so-called ‘Islamization of Congolese armed groups’.⁶⁵ For Congolese populations who believe this to be a problem, many see it to be one of the UN’s making.

Furthermore, it is evident that a lot of programming mistakes are periodically repeated every few years because institutional memory about what has been tried before (and not worked) is poor.⁶⁶ As a result, UN workers often repeat ill-conceived ideas that have failed in the past. But for Congolese populations who have lived through numerous cycles of failed intervention, it is very difficult to believe that these are merely unintended consequences, and the constant dismissal of their objections is seen as a deliberate unwillingness to learn.

Congolese populations know that these interventions will not work, and by continuing to ignore Congolese perspectives and choose instead to blindly just believe that it will be different this time, there is an extent to which a conscious decision is made to not put Congolese concerns first. What happened may have been an unintended consequence, but it certainly was not an unforeseen one. And the fact that external intervenors are systematically failing to see consequences that Congolese people can see is why many believe the failure of intervention is purposeful rather than accidental. It is also important to acknowledge the power differential underpinning these different perspectives: Those trying to explain away conspiracy by randomness and/or cock-up are usually either in positions of power, or belonging to a demographic that is either advantaged or untouched by the nefarious nature of power. You may be more willing to believe that the protracted nature of conflict in Congo is an unintended consequence of misguided intervention rather than actively caused by intervention if you are not the one who has had to live through more than 20 years of bad policy.

The conspiracy the UN is entangled in wider geo-politics

The conspiracy theories discussed above might be considered internal – in that they argue the UN is not well-designed to build peace, and the conspiracy is limited to actors within the UN who are covering this up. However, the last set of narratives that I will discuss posit a much more widespread conspiracy involving (often non-specific or unknown) actors outside of the UN as well as within it. These conspiracy theories allege that peacekeeping is failing because MONUSCO is in fact a front for something much more nefarious. Many non-Congolese peacebuilders that I mentioned these stories to were at best entirely dismissive, and in most cases actively hostile, towards these narratives. However, for proponents of these narratives the function of MONUSCO was a deliberate conspiracy, not just to prevent sustainable peace from materialising, but to ensure that conflict remained ever-present so that external actors could, under various guises, loot the country’s natural resources.

I had heard multiple stories of individual UN workers who had an illicit business alongside their UN job smuggling gold, coltan and cassiterite out of the country. On various occasions, Congolese civilians who had worked informally for UN workers (as domestic or logistical help) had mentioned certain UN personnel offering them illicit jobs dealing with drugs or minerals, or arranging for (often underage) local men and women to attend their homes and parties for sex work. The informants I spoke to claimed to have turned down this type of work but argued that the UN personnel in question knew that there were many (other) Congolese people who needed the money even more than they did and would not turn it down. They believed that the prevalence of these types of actors within MONUSCO meant that the UN was both directly and indirectly responsible for creating and facilitating vast networks of illicit conflict economies.

All these stories were connected to wider geopolitics and show a strong awareness of the fact that the UN is ultimately driven by the multi-faceted interests of its (more powerful) member states. For example, one person explained to me that it was no coincidence that armed groups in the eastern DRC proliferated in 2008 at the same time as the global financial crisis. He claimed that, prior to 2008, China was becoming increasingly involved in Congo, and had signed contracts to provide massive infrastructural development⁶⁷ in exchange for coltan and cassiterite concessions. The West were worried that they were no longer able to compete with China in Congo, as a result of the financial crash, so they created multiple armed groups so that they could put off Chinese investment by creating ‘security concerns’ and an international discourse of shame around ‘conflict minerals’. This narrative speaks to a number of Congolese frustrations about the continued lack of development in the country and the persistence of insecurity. Despite the UN Mission, there are now more armed groups in the eastern DRC than there were during the Second Congo War and this proliferation began in the aftermath of the 2006 elections – which the UN often claims as one if its key successes. A failure to acknowledge the follies of liberal peacebuilding have led some Congolese observers to believe that this was a deliberate strategy to rupture Congo’s post-conflict peace.

The link between the financial crisis and armed groups in the DRC speaks to a link made by the US government. In 2010, in response to the financial crash, US Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Section 1502 of this act contained a provision which required U.S. publicly-listed companies to report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) if their supply chains contained minerals such as tin, tungsten, tantalum or gold from the DRC. The effective result of this provision, however, was that most American companies stopped officially buying minerals from Congo altogether. Thus, the US’s response to both the financial crisis and the proliferation of armed groups was an effective boycott of Congolese ‘conflict’ minerals which resulted in widespread damage of Congolese livelihoods and failed to prevent armed group creation, recruitment and mobilisation.⁶⁸ Understood in this way, the narrative of armed groups being created by the West as a deterrent to China points to a number of truths and factors that conventional conflict analyses of Congo largely ignore. This Congolese informal theorising also finds ways to take into account the fact that conflict in Congo is never independent of wider global geo-politics – something which Western understandings of Congolese conflict are less adept at incorporating into their analyses.

Conclusion

In this article, I have attempted to show how the concerns of Congolese people, who question the underlying logic of external intervention in Congo, can be used as a starting point for thinking more openly about locally-driven and locally-conceived peace. These speakers have been marginalised from mainstream political spaces and modes of participation, but as a result they are not bound by the epistemic constraints of knowledge-making that is focussed on the needs and limitations of mainstream policy-making. For them, conspiracy can be a tool of empowerment for making sense of the world on their own terms. I argue that engaging more seriously with these narratives can be of great analytical value to those seeking more complex and trans-scalar understandings of peace and conflict, because it reveals much about how the speaker understands power – who has power, what they seek to do with it, and the position of the speaker in relation to that power. Seeing power relations from the perspective of those not in power enables us to question the logics that perpetuate that power and see other possibilities and understandings of the world.

This approach has implications beyond the DRC. In contexts around the world, conflict-affected populations are theorising from their own lived experience and demonstrating the radical alterity of expectations and experiences across scales.⁶⁹ Conspiracy narratives reveal sophisticated theorising which interconnect these scales. Better engagement with these narratives allows us see the dynamics which mainstream approaches render invisible or tangential, but which are integral to understanding why interventions such as MONUSCO ultimately fail. Engaging with these narratives also allows us to go beyond understanding failure: We can recast our imaginations of peace to shift our understandings away from the ‘peace from above’ towards the peace that is insurging from ‘below’. The dissatisfaction that conspiracy narratives convey towards intervention is not one which speaks to the logics of intervention or dynamics which are necessarily bureaucratically legible to external policymakers, but rather one which speaks to conflict-affected populations’ hopes and desires of living lives of peace. By foregrounding conflict-affected populations’ imaginations of peace as the starting point of peacebuilding, and not assuming that logics of intervention are the way to necessarily bring about that peace, we can start to think about radically different ways to building peace which are relevant to the lives of people living in conflict.

Acknowledgement

The Author is extremely grateful for the helpful and constructive advice offered by two anonymous reviewers, Anna Stavrianakis, Grace Carswell, Sarah G. Phillips, Chrisanthi Giotis and Paul Gilbert. None of the fieldwork used in this article would have been possible without the help and support of Victor Anasa. This article is heavily indebted to him and the Congolese and international actors who generously gave up their time to speak with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Suda Perera

Suda Perera is a Lecturer in International Development at University of Sussex, UK. Her research centres on the politics of knowledge production and intervention in conflict-affected states and decolonial approaches to justice-led peace.

Notes

¹ The United Nations Organization Mission in Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) was established in 1999 under the terms of the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement. In July 2010 MONUC became MONUSCO to reflect what the UN described as ‘a new phase in the country’ (https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/monusco) although it is not exactly clear what that new phase entailed.

² Koen Vlassenroot and Timothy Raeymaekers, ‘Kivu’s Intractable Security Conundrum’, African Affairs 108, no. 432 (2009): 475–84; and Timothy Raeymaekers, ‘Post-War Conflict and the Market for Protection: The Challenges to Congo’s Hybrid Peace’, International Peacekeeping 20, no. 5 (2013): 600–17.

³ See for example Josaphat Musamba Bussy and Carol Gallo, ‘The Great Lakes Region of Africa: Local Perspectives on Liberal Peacebuilding from the Democratic Republic of Congo’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Disciplinary and Regional Approaches to Peace, (eds) O.P. Richmond, S. Pogodda, and J. Ramović (Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2016) or Severine Autesserre The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

⁴ Roger Mac Ginty & Oliver Richmond, ‘The Local Turn in Peace Building: A Critical Agenda for Peace’, Third World Quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013): 763–83.

⁵ I am aware that within this literature there is huge variation as well as crossover in this literature. My intention here is to draw attention to the fact that much of the literature tends to focus to varying degrees on critiques of liberal peacebuilding framings and approaches that focus on the national level and suggestions to place more emphasis on ‘local-level’ dynamics and solutions.

⁶ Vivienne Jabri, ‘Peacebuilding, the Local and the International: A Colonial or a Postcolonial Rationality?’, Peacebuilding 1, no. 1 (2013): 3–16.

⁷ Juan Daniel Cruz, ‘Colonial Power and Decolonial Peace’, Peacebuilding (2021).

⁸ Mathijs Van Leeuwen, Joseph Nindorera, Jean-Louis Kambale Nzweve and Corita Corbijn, ‘The “Local Turn” and Notions of Conflict and Peacebuilding – Reflections on Local Peace Committees in Burundi and Eastern DR Congo’, Peacebuilding 8, no. 3 (2020): 279–99, p. 280.

⁹ Van Leeuwen et al., ‘The “Local Turn” and Notions of Conflict and Peacebuilding’, p. 280.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 299.

¹¹ Suda Perera, ‘Bermuda Triangulation: Embracing the Messiness of Researching in Conflict’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 11, no. 1 (2017): 42–57.

¹² Van Leeuwen et al., ‘The “Local Turn” and Notions of Conflict and Peacebuilding’, p. 298.

¹³ Cruz, ‘Colonial Power and Decolonial Peace’, p. 6.

¹⁴ Catherine E. Walsh, ‘Decoloniality in/as Praxis’, in On Decoloniality, (Eds.) W. Mignolo and C. Walsh (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018) 15–104, p. 19.

¹⁵ I follow for example, Aasim Sajjad Akhtar and Ali Nobil Ahmad, ‘Conspiracy and Statecraft in Postcolonial States: Theories and Realities of the Hidden Hand in Pakistan’s War on Terror’, Third World Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2015): 94–110.

¹⁶ This includes, but is not limited to researchers, local and international peacebuilders, donor agencies, media organisations and grassroots movements.

¹⁷ Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), ix.

¹⁸ Stephen Jackson, ‘Sons of Which Soil? The Language and Politics of Autochthony in Eastern D.R. Congo’, African Studies Review 49, no. 2 (2006): 95–123.

¹⁹ Van Leeuwen et al., ‘The “Local Turn” and Notions of Conflict and Peacebuilding’, p. 283.

²⁰ Christelle Rigual, ‘Rethinking the Ontology of Peacebuilding. Gender, Spaces and the Limits of the Local Turn’, Peacebuilding 6, no. 2 (2018): 144–69.

²¹ For more on this, see Elizabeth Dauphinee, ‘Narrative Voice and the Limits of Peacebuilding: Rethinking the Politics of Partiality’, Peacebuilding 3, no. 3 (2015): 261–78 where she argues that narrative voice and emotional investment are self-censored and silenced by ‘scholars who want to be taken seriously in the policy world’ p. 262.

²² Suda Perera, ‘Bermuda Triangulation: Embracing the Messiness of Researching in Conflict’.

²³ See for example Cedric de Coning, ‘From Peacebuilding to Sustaining Peace: Implications of Complexity for Resilience and Sustainability’, Resilience 4, no. 3 (2016): 166–81 and Elisa Randazzo and Ignasi Torrent, ‘Reframing Agency in Complexity-sensitive Peacebuilding’, Security Dialogue 52, no. 1 (2021): 3–20.

²⁴ Gearoid Millar, ‘Toward a Trans-scalar Peace System: Challenging Complex Global Conflict Systems’, Peacebuilding 8, no. 3 (2020): 261–78.

²⁵ Dauphinee, ‘Narrative Voice and the Limits of Peacebuilding: Rethinking the Politics of Partiality’, p. 261.

²⁶ See for example Katherine McKittrick’s argument that academic ‘Discipline is Empire’ in Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021) p. 38.

²⁷ Dauphinee, ‘Narrative Voice and the Limits of Peacebuilding: Rethinking the Politics of Partiality’, p. 264.

²⁸ Ibid., 265.

²⁹ Ibid., 264.

³⁰ Ramon Grosfoguel. ‘Epistemic Racism/Sexism, Westernized Universities and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long Sixteenth Century’, in Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge: Debates on History and Power in Europe and the Americas, (eds) M Araujo and SR Maeso (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015), 23–45 see also McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories.

³¹ Grosfoguel, ‘Epistemic Racism/Sexism, Westernized Universities and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long Sixteenth Century’, p. 25.

³² Ibid., 27.

³³ For more on this see Olivia Rutazibwa, ‘On Babies and Bathwater: Decolonizing International Development Studies’, in Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning, (eds) S de Jong, R Icaza, and OU Rutazibwa (London: Routledge, 2018), 158–80, p. 169.

³⁴ Sandra Harding, ‘Rethinking Standpoint Epistemologies: What is “Strong Objectivity”?’, in Feminist Epistemologies, (eds) L Alcoff and E Potter (London: Taylor & Francis, 1992), 49–82.

³⁵ Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99.

³⁶ Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena, ‘Pluriverse: Proposals for a World of Many Worlds’, In A World of Many Worlds, (eds) M. de la Cadena and M Blaser (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 23–52.

³⁷ Rutazibwa, ‘On Babies and Bathwater: decolonising International Development Studies’, p. 169.

³⁸ Suda Perera, ‘Conclusion’ in Hirblinger et al., ‘Forum: Making Peace with Uncertainty’, International Studies Perspectives (2023): 1–41.

³⁹ Elzbieta Drazkiewicz Grodzicka and Jaron Harambam, ‘What Should Academics Do About Conspiracy Theories?’, Journal of Cultural Research 25, no. 1 (2021): 1–11.

⁴⁰ Eileen Culloty, ‘Evaluating Conspiracy Claims as Public Sphere Communication’, Journal for Cultural Research 1, no. 25 (2021): 36–50, p. 38.

⁴¹ See for example the way that conspiracy theories are discussed in Neil Levy, ‘Radically Socialized Knowledge and Conspiracy Theories’, Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4, no. 2 (2007): 181–92 or Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, ’Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 17, no. 2 (2009): 202–27.

⁴² Grodzicka and Jaron Harambam, ‘What Should Academics Do About Conspiracy Theories?’, p. 2.

⁴³ Martin Parker for example has argued that ‘Marx, Durkheim and Weber – and the many others who preceded and followed them – all claimed access to some level of explanation which was somehow beyond the apprehension of ordinary persons … all these theorists of the human have claimed to explain what was not previously understood’ in much the same way as conspiracy theorists do. Martin Parker, ‘Human Science as Conspiracy Theory’, The Sociological Review (2001): 191–207, p. 192.

⁴⁴ For more on this see Charles Pigden, ‘Conspiracy Theories and the Conventional Wisdom’, Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4, no. 2 (2007): 219–32.

⁴⁵ Jaron Harambam, Kamile Grusauskaite, and Lars de Wildt, ‘Poly-Truth, or the Limits of Pluralism: Popular Debates on Conspiracy Theories in a Post-Truth Era’, Public Understanding of Science 21, no. 6 (2022): 784–98, p. 786 argue that this tendency to pathologize conspiracies stemmed from works by Karl Popper and Richard Hofstadter

⁴⁶ David Coady, ‘Conspiracy as Heresy’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 55, no. 7 (2023): 756–59, p. 757.

⁴⁷ Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, first published in 1641). Descartes argues that it is not possible to be tricked into imagining ones existence, because even if a demon were trying to trick him into believing he exists when he does not, he would have to first exist in order to be tricked.

⁴⁸ I am heavily indebted to my colleague and research partner Victor Anas who has helped me facilitate remote data gathering as well as the several anonymous research participants who have given their time to this process.

⁴⁹ see Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep Hanging Out’, New York Review of Books 45, no. 16 (1998): 69–72.

⁵⁰ Gearoid Millar, ‘Trans-Scalar Ethnographic Peace Research: Understanding the Invisible Drivers of Complex Conflict and Complex Peace’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 15, no. 3 (2021): 289–308, p. 290. I carried out much of this research prior to the publication of Millar’s work on trans-scalar EPR but found that his focus here resonated very closely with the ethnographic research I was conducting.

⁵¹ See for example Kai Koddenbrock, ‘Recipe for Intervention: Western Policy Papers Imagine the Congo’, International Peacekeeping 19, no. 5 (2012): 549–64, p. 510.

⁵² Sarah Phillips, ‘Making al-Qa’ida Legible: Counter-Terrorism and the Reproduction of Terrorism’, European Journal of International Relations 25, no. 4 (2019): 1132–56.

⁵³ Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012). Smith invites researchers to ask: ‘who defined the research problem?’ and ‘for whom is this study worthy and relevant?’ p. 175.

⁵⁴ Gediminas Lesutis, ‘The Politics of Narrative: Methodological Reflections on Analysing Voices of the Marginalized in Africa’, African Affairs 117, no. 468 (2018): 509–21.

⁵⁵ Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 2014).

⁵⁶ Interview with MONUSCO civilian officer, 1 September 2014.

⁵⁷ Human Rights Watch, Killings in Kiwanja: The UN’s Inability to Protect Civilians (New York: HRW, 2008) reported that In October 2008 the CNDP took over the strategically significant towns of Kiwanja and Rutshuru in North Kivu, killing an estimated 150 civilians and displacing 27,000 more. It was reported that MONUC troops at a base nearby simply watched the massacres unfold and did nothing to stop the CNDP.

⁵⁸ see Judith Verweijen, ‘Coping with Barbarian Syndrome’, in Social Science Ethics for a Globalising World (eds) K. Nakray, M. Alston, and K. Whittenbury (New York: Routledge, 2015), 243–47.

⁵⁹ Human Rights Watch noted a lack of cooperation from the Congolese armed forces and the fact that there were on 120 UN troops stationed at Kiwanja at the time. They reported that the UN had requested an additional 3,100 troops. Human Rights Watch itself called for the EU to urgently deploy ‘bridging troops’ to meet the immediate need in the Congo.

⁶⁰ Interview with Congolese local August 30 2015.

⁶¹ Peter Mendik, ‘Shit Happens’, Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4, no. 2 (2007): 205–18.

⁶² Brian Keeley, ‘Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition!’, Journal of Social Philosophy 1, no. 34 (2003): 104–11.

⁶³ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (London: Penguin, 2004).

⁶⁴ Neil Levy, ‘Radically Socialized Knowledge and Conspiracy Theories’, p. 181.

⁶⁵ See for example Tara Candland et al., The Islamic State in Congo (George Washington University, 2021).

⁶⁶ Suda Perera, ‘To Boldly Know: Knowledge, Peacekeeping and Remote Data Gathering in Conflict-Affected States’, International Peacekeeping 24, no. 5 (2017): 803–22.

⁶⁷ Indeed there had been a story circulating in 2008 that China were going to build a road in the Congo that connected Goma to Kinshasa – which many saw as vital for the East’s power and influence in the nation – however, when I asked about what happened to the road (which had not been built) in 2014, people claimed that the deal fell through but they didn’t really know why.

⁶⁸ In 2014 a large number of prominent researchers and activists working on and in the DRC signed an open letter in which they noted: ‘Nearly four years after the passing of the Dodd-Frank Act, only a small fraction of the hundreds of mining sites in the eastern DRC have been reached by traceability or certification efforts. The rest remain beyond the pale, forced into either illegality or collapse as certain international buyers have responded to the legislation by going ‘Congo-free’ (https://ethuin.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/09092014-open-letter-final-and-list-doc.pdf)

⁶⁹ Gearoid Millar, ‘Trans-Scalar Ethnographic Peace Research: Understanding the Invisible Drivers of Complex Conflict and Complex Peace’.