Manchester University Press Everyday Resistance, Peacebuilding and State-Making: Insights from 'Africa's World War' (New Approaches to Conflict Analysis)

This study addresses debates on the liberal peace and policies of peacebuilding through a theoretical and empirical study of resistance in peacebuilding contexts. It locates resistance in the experiences of war, peacebuilding and state-making by exploring discourses, violence and everyday forms of survival as quotidian acts that attempt to challenge or mitigate such experiences. The aim is to not only highlight how contested peacebuilding processes are, but also to examine the practices that constitute, challenge and subvert them. This is important to better understand the dynamics of peacebuilding, the resistance it faces and the mismatch between its stated goals and practices. The book analyses the case of 'Africa's World War' in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the subsequent peacebuilding efforts. The outbreak of the war and the continuation of conflict, despite the deployment of one of the largest and most expensive United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations, cannot be understood without an account of how rural and urban popular classes have rejected the political and economic order brought by war and its aftermath. Different forms of resistance offer rich insights for other cases and act as a good basis for the theorisation of resistance in peacebuilding contexts and beyond. It offers understanding drawn from extensive fieldwork in rural and urban areas and contributes to the analysis of the complex conflict in the DRC in historical and regional perspectives. Everyday resistance, peacebuilding and state-making: insights from ‘Africa’s World War’ will be of interest to students and lecturers in International Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies and Africa/DRC studies.