Networks of Protection: Infrastructures of Intervention in Northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo
Open AccessIn rural northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, many people living among multiple armed actors understand their vulnerability to violence as related to their remoteness. For the last decade, two non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have built a conflict early warning system using two-way radios known locally as radiophonies to alert villagers about armed group activity, thus mediating and intervening upon these understandings of connection and insecurity. This dissertation moves along radio networks, engages with local and international NGOs, and traces the activities of armed actors, drawing on ethnographic and archival research to show how humanitarians take up vernacular technology and the ways in which local actors redefine the sites and modes of international intervention. This dissertation provides an analysis of the network and the security conditions surrounding it, showing how humanitarian interventions are defined, enabled, and structured by the infrastructures through which they are channeled.Extending existing missionary radio networks, humanitarians seek to utilize locally relevant modes of communication to transform isolated villages into connected—and thus protected—communities by providing alerts and mobilizing responses. This dissertation demonstrates that the connectivity of the radiophonie is often contingent and requires unique communications pratices, that humanitarians improvise and innovate solutions to meet demands on the ground, and that multiple meanings of security render the promise of protection always partial. Humanitarian and security efforts are thus mediated through the radiophonie, producing an intervention that is made possible and constrained by the infrastructures on which it operates.The dissertation moves from technology to humanitarianism to security to show how the early warning network sits at the intersection of these ideologies and infrastructures. Chapter one situates the radiophonie in a media ecology of long-distance communication across colonial and postcolonial history, revealing how a network used by missionaries for daily updates became an early warning system. Chapter two takes up the humanitarian mantra that the network “connects remote communities” by inquiring into what it means to be remote, what types of connections people desire, and the dangers of conflating remoteness with vulnerability and connection with protection. Chapter three is an ethnography of NGO-community engagements, demonstrating how interventions are constituted by humanitarians and rural residents through a series of performances and enactments. Through ethnographic listening, chapter four demonstrates what it is like to talk on the radio through static, emphasizing the particular speech techniques required by the contingencies of radiophonie technology. In chapter five, this contingency extends as radio posts become sites of contestation as different actors compete over access and ownership. The chapter analyzes village conflict over who gets to use the radio, inter-NGO conflict as organizations compete for resources and mistrust manifests, and competing ideas of intervention between NGOs and the state. Chapter six contends that armed actors of varying legitimacy offer security as well as the threat of violence, complicating narratives of protection by showing how Congolese soldiers and UN peacekeepers fail to uphold their role as protectors while park rangers offering protection bear histories of impunity. Chapter seven turns to community self-defense groups’ effective response, which was met by criminalization, and juxtaposes it with the recent arrival of pastoralist groups who are often seen as threats but easily become victims, gesturing towards a new potential security concern in the region. Taking the instability of radio and the uncertainty of living among armed groups together, this dissertation shows that the connections that undergird social and political life—obligations of care or protection, expectations of coexistence—are similarly unstable and negotiated. It reassesses the technologies and relations that interventions rely on, showing how in fact produce particular kinds of intervention and thus shape the possibilities and limits of humanitarianism and security.
- All rights reserved
Notice to Authors
If you are the author of this work and you have any questions about the information on this page, please use the Contact form to get in touch with us.