| This dissertation analyzes the evolution of the state in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC state is noted for its evolution since the colonial era when it had tremendous capacity to extract and mobilize resources towards policy and program goals across its territory, into a fragmented state characterized by ineffectiveness, mismanagement, abdication from the provision of public goods, and retreat into an ‘archipelago’ of enclaves largely based on mining where it still maintained authority and extracted rents. There is disagreement as to what fragmentation and contraction of state capacity signified. Some scholars consider state collapse to be an issue of diagnosis and ‘treatment,’ necessary to make the state work as it ‘should.’ Others consider that something fundamentally new is occurring, whereby war economies, privatization of state functions, and the growth of ‘shadow’ states enabled the emergence of new actors and a new kind of polity. Yet others consider that the DRC is merely staving off final collapse and partition into smaller states. My dissertation analyzes changes in the relations between state and social actors in one enclave: Lubumbashi (Katanga Province), which is dominated by copper mining. I also compare Lubumbashi to the diamond-mining enclave of Mbuji Mayi (East Kasai Province). I analyze how historical patterns of property ownership and public goods provision by social actors shaped state-society relations in the Kabila era, and how these patterns further evolved as a result of the state's re-penetration into society and across territory from which it had long been absent as a result of renewed conflict in 1998. My research, combining eight months of fieldwork in the DRC with economic and social data, indicates that contrary to Africanists' established criticisms of theories of state formation based on the European experience, the ‘engines’ driving the evolution of the state in the Kabila era were precisely those that occurred during state formation in Europe: the search revenue, and war. Colonial legacies shaped but did not supplant these processes. |
