Local violence, international indifference? Post-conflict 'settlement' in the eastern D.R. Congo (2003--2005)

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, why did international peace builders succeed in imposing a settlement only at the international and national levels and not at the subnational level? Based on field observations in Kinshasa and the provinces of Katanga and the Kivus, document analysis, and over 250 interviews conducted in the Congo, Europe, and the U.S., my dissertation examines how international peace builders have approached the problem of continued local violence in the eastern Congo during the first two years of the transition from war to peace (June 2003-June 2005).; Economic, social, and political antagonisms at the local level led to violence long before the wars of the 1990s. During the wars and the subsequent transition, local violence was motivated not only by top-down causes (regional or national) but also by bottom-up agendas. However, diplomats, UN staff, and some non-governmental organizations focused on elections over peace, portrayed local violence as a humanitarian problem and not as a political one, passed onto each other the responsibility of working on local level violence, and paid attention only to specific issues and areas at the expense of many important others.; The explanations present in the literature do not adequately explain this puzzling inattention to local violence. Contextual and material constraints as well as the major powers' lack of national interest in the Congo influenced the international approach to local conflict. However, these explanations do not resolve the puzzle and raise many additional questions. This dissertation develops a complementary approach, analyzing the framing processes by which international peace builders understood the violence and the peace process. Peace builders analyzed the Congolese "post-conflict" situation in Hobbesian terms: only the reconstruction of the state could end continued local conflict. Diplomats and UN staff saw elections as the most appropriate tool for state building, national representatives as their only legitimate partners, and humanitarian actors and local conflict-resolution experts as the best counterparts for local militias. These sustaining mechanisms interacted in such a way that, unless mitigating processes shocked the peace builders into intervening, there was no correction of the normalization of local violence.