CLASES DE SUCESIÓN INTESTADA

The liberal peace in the Congo shies away from political engagement and limits itself to technical assistance and thus in effect evades the very core of what it claims to be doing: disciplining the Congolese to become good democrats. The International Community chooses to avoid this level of political engagement, whereas the Congolese do not want the international community to engage with it in the first place. This is the political project of local agencies. Local agencies are ignored but maintain a form of resistance. It is a hybrid space in which local agencies shape a new political environment. The core of the liberal democratic hegemonic discourse is rejected, resisted, ignored and avoided. Institutions are

not disciplined, political subjectivities are not touched upon, but through every- day practices these agencies shape an emerging political environment (Richmond 2010, 21-2).

This may lead to the conclusion that post-war state building as a practice of the liberal peace in the Congo has, as in many other countries, resulted in little more than a virtual peace, a shell state made up of shell institutions (Richmond 2005, 227, Richmond and Franks 2009, 204). The outer framework of democracy is being constructed, but the inner workings of these institutions that depend on political subjectivities are being left untouched. However, the case of the Congo shows that this virtual peace or shell state is not just a consequence of the inter- nal contradictions of the liberal peace itself. It is also produced by Congolese actors and their resistance towards the liberal peace. The boundaries of interna- tional engagement in democratisation are set by the Congolese as well as the in- ternational partners themselves. This reflects the model of hybridisation as a pro- cess of engagement and resistance between the liberal and the local (MacGinty 2011, 77-8, Richmond 2009a). However, what we see in the Congo is a variation on the model. The liberal peace may in word seek to comply with local agencies, but as we have seen it in effect does not follow through this project of discipline with its practices. It thus does not incentivise local agencies.

The model sees local agencies only as resisting the model. As we have seen in the analysis above, this interaction is more complex. The liberal not only depolit- icises its own practices, it also silences the political project of local agencies. It is therefore not merely the resistance of the local, but also the disengagement of the liberal that produces ‘zones of mutual non-engagement and irrelevance’ – that is ‘areas of lives that the liberal peace is uninterested in, and areas of the liberal peace in which local communities have no interest’ (MacGinty 2011, 88).

If international partners do not wish to engage in a reinvented mission civilisa- trice and if the Congolese do not want to allow this to happen, the consequence is that the liberal peace is unable to connect with local agencies. These local agen- cies will then shape the way in which the institutions will function and the politi- cal role they will play. This means that responding to the failures of the liberal peace is not just a matter of improving its praxis. The previous analysis suggests that it is also a matter of perceptions about the partnership and the partners itself, and the ability of the liberal to meaningfully connect with its local partners. The outcomes might thus depend less on praxis and more on agencies that are less tangible and therefore less manageable. Even more so, because of this mutual disengagement state building may actually take place not within the liberal peace, but outside it (Richmond 2010, 18), in these ‘zones of irrelevance’ and hybrid spaces.

The concept of a shell institution is therefore unfortunate, because it easily leads us to think of these newly formed state institutions as being empty shells, a framework on paper, a building, a budget, but little substance. Such a perspective ignores agencies within these empty shells. This perspective is widely shared by practitioners in general. By accepting these newly built institutions as empty shells, the mechanisms and processes of consumption that make these institutions function are ignored as being irrelevant. Even more so, by pretending it is only possible for these institutions to function (according to the liberal democratic norm) or else be an empty shell the ‘dissensus about their detail, contextuality and the mechanisms of governance, control and power that put them together for others’ are ignored as well (Richmond and Franks 2009, 15). Below the institu- tional level of these empty shells reside local agencies that shape hybridity. This is a site of struggle, a site of resistance, and a site of consumption. But paradoxi- cally, also, as this chapter has shown, a site of negligence and evasion. The fol- lowing two chapters explore the practices of consumption of local agencies that occur in these hybrid spaces, focusing on the site of the National Assembly and its agents.

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