Kivu’s intractable security conundrum, revisited

'The Security Problems of the Democratic Republic of Congo continue to puzzle international peace and policy makers'.1 This is how, in 2009, Koen Vlassenroot and Timothy Raeymaekers set out to explain conflict dynamics in the Kivu in this journal. They argued that while the peace process successfully unified the Congo and produced new, democratic institutions, it also led to the privatization of governance and the entrenching of conflicts. Within the new state structures, factionalized elites quickly began to exploit and feed insecurity as a means to leverage economic and political gain, often reproducing local struggles over power and historical grievances over land, identity, and economic marginalization.2 Misdiagnosing the...