| This research critically examines the intersection of feminism, neocolonialism and neoliberalism as a hindrance to empowering directly-impacted women and girl survivors of the rape crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). By examining the different key players of globalization, this study demonstrates how world courts, international nongovernmental organizations and international financial institutions utilize feminist ideology to further depress the DRC's economy. In narrowing the scope of rape to only reflect the rape of individual bodies and not the historic and material foundation of the rape of resources, feminist ideology has become a powerful weapon to misdirect the culprit of oppression to warlords and not the international system that has relied on first classic colonialism, and now neocolonialism, to maintain hegemony on the DRC's material wealth. This study provides a historic narrative and contemporary examples of how this dynamic plays out in the political terrain of the DRC since the beginning of the crisis in 1994. Furthermore, this study explores an alternative matri-focal paradigm to reassess the wartime rape of women and girls in eastern DRC as an extension of the centuries-long rape of DRC's mineral wealth. By finding linkage in the economic practices in pre-colonial matriarchal societies that granted women control over markets and familial/communal wealth, this study gives policy recommendations through the exploration of the case study of Justine Masika Bihamba---a modern-day matriarch in eastern DRC. This research attempts to answer the following questions: 1) What is the history and role of feminist ideology in development and underdevelopment in the Democratic Republic of Congo? And by extension, how does this ideology inform economic policy and institutional arrangements derived to address the current rape crisis? 2) How do such political superstructures informed and influenced by feminist ideology impede or inspire social transformation? If determined detrimental, what alternative framework is recommended for true resolution?... |
