Congo fever: challenges to sovereignty in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

The development of a truly globalized world system has meant that understanding the complex political structures of disparate countries worldwide has become increasingly important. The security concerns of countries now have global relevance and global impact, making their study all the more important. This hyper-globalized system has brought with it, as a result, shifting conceptions of sovereignty, legitimacy and the role of transnational institutions, where the question of the role of the international community becomes all the more important. How will it approach, for example, notions of aid, military intervention and economic development in countries with troubled histories? Should it? To what degree does international problem solving become a breach of sovereignty? The Democratic Republic of the Congo is one such country, with brutal colonization, repressive authoritarian military rule and corrupt democratic governance all elements of the its controversial past. The goal of this thesis is to evaluate the Congo’s role in the globalized world, particularly in light of the far-from-optimistic outlook emerging from the data and from the established voices in the field of International Affairs, who begin to question the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s very existence as a country and sovereign state. By analyzing the Congo’s history and its current state of affairs, this study will first seek to clarify the convoluted legacy of its past, understanding in what way the Congo, as a sovereign state, in being questioned and challenged, and what lessons one can gleam from the its evolution as a failed state. My findings show that the Congo is, in a word, a unique historical and political construct, formed by colonial interests and cold war politics and held together by the sheer force of will of the international community. One could even claim that the Congo can be defined as “a state that never was”, existing in the collective psyche of aid workers, foreign dignitaries and mapmakers. While I see many of the points of such a view, I challenge it, claiming that while the Congo suffers from a great deal of endemic issues, the reality of the Congo is quite different: governmental control is poor-but- within-parameters in the western areas of the country and utterly non-existent in the east. The Congo, as a failed state, is not a single immutable object, but rather a massive collective that requires a more nuanced interpretation than simply labeling it a non- existent state, or a failed state. Given the uniqueness of the situation, I am led to the conclusion that the Eastern Congo has become what I define as a “Non-Governed Region”, a region falling under the purview of the national sovereignty of a nation that is incapable of providing basic services and security to its citizens, which must then be provided by the international community in the form of development assistance and peacekeeping. In order to maximize effectiveness in state-building, peacekeeping and basic development, a new conception of the country is required under this framework. This thesis will provide both a definition and complex understanding of what is meant by this new term, and, in a comprehensive study of the Congo’s history and its political concerns, attempt to contextualize and ground this new idea.M.S.Includes bibliographical referencesby Marc Eric Lan