DESARROLLO URBANO Y ORDENAMIENTO TERRITORIAL

The structures of violence which dominate in the Kivus have had a direct bearing on the social support available to young people. As demonstrated in the first section of this chapter, parents want to provide their children with adequate support, but the constraints of poverty and lack of material resources are in many ways preventing them from doing so. The inability of parents to meet their

56

In January 2009, Laurent Nkunda was arrested in Bunagana, Rutshuru Territory on the border with Rwanda, and then placed under house arrest in Kigali where he remains at the time of this writing.

95

children’s material needs has led to a loss of parental authority; young people are left to fend for themselves in order to satisfy their own needs, adapting their coping mechanisms in order to best survive the structures of violence. Going beyond the psychological perspectives offered by resilience theory, the second section of this chapter has integrated a social, economic and political analysis of patronage relationships in order to demonstrate how the patronage system in contemporary DRC plays a fundamental role in young people’s coping processes.

As seen above, my research participants would emphasise their position of victimhood to prospective patrons in the hopes that they might be able to gain access to resources which would help them in their daily coping efforts. In the patronage-based system operating in the Kivus, the portrayal of one’s own weakness is a carefully nuanced act. In order to be successful in projecting themselves in such a way that can benefit from the norms of patronage, young people need to be sufficiently sensitive to imbalances in power and access to resources within their environments. As narrated by my research participants, young people are sometimes successful in gaining entry to a patron-client relationship and can consequently receive the desired material support to pay their school or medical fees or be given an opportunity to work, but in most cases their efforts to find a patron are unsuccessful.

Given the increasing needs of a majority of the population living in adverse conditions in the Kivus, there are just too many clients who are in need of support to keep the patronage system functioning in a beneficial way for young people. Yet young people’s lack of success in finding a patron does not stop them from continuing to invest in this exploitative system. Buying into a social system of exclusion and inequality usually represents their only chance for improving their short-term survival prospects. The reduced opportunities for young people to rely on social support have been similarly examined by Vigh (2006a), where he shows how the breakdown of the economy and the effects of poverty have reduced the ‘tactical possibilities’ for surviving within a patron-based economy; in such conditions, young people are “experiencing a continuous deterioration of their social possibilities… and becoming increasingly exploited” (ibid., p. 136).

As was described by my research participants in Bunyakiri, their only hope of finding a job or receiving the help they need is try to enter the ‘Court of Nine to One’, even if by attempting to enter it young people reinforce their position of weakness and dependence. Although young people are tactically choosing to portray themselves as weak as a way to increase their opportunities in facing the challenges of everyday survival, by doing so they are also reinforcing patterns of dependence, weakness and inequality. By choosing weakness, young people run the risk of becoming “what they pretend to be” (Lefcourt 1976, p. 19). In this way it is possible to see how the “chronic, historically- entrenched political-economic oppression and social inequality” (Bourgois 2001, p. 8, as cited in Chapter 1) inherent in structural violence is reproduced. Certainly young people in the Kivus cannot be held responsible for the structures of violence in which they live and the lack of social support available to them, yet it is evident that their tactical engagement with these structures also contributes to their continued entrenchment in conditions of poverty and their own lack of personal advancement.

The entrenched poverty and continuing violence offer bleak prospects for the future of social support available to young people in the Kivus. This bleakness was clearly articulated by my research

96

participants who explained how scarcity and competition had long ago destroyed possibilities for social solidarity:

There is no love between Congolese people; once someone has something, the first thought we have is how to get it from them. (focus group discussion, Bukavu, April 2010)

This sentiment was echoed by another young man who explained that “life is difficult here because there is so much jealousy between people. It’s because of competition between us that we can’t advance” (interview, Mushinga, April 2010).

Long subjected by the structures of violence, most young people in the Kivus are at the worst end of what Goodhand et al. (2000, p. 402) have otherwise explained as the natural “processes of exclusion and inclusion” which are engendered by violence. Although in some cases violence has been considered to be transformative- “less about social breakdown than the creation of new forms of political economic relations at local, national and international levels” (ibid., p. 392 cited Duffield 2000 and Keen 2000)- in the Kivus the structures of violence are only reinforcing the breakdown of social support, leaving little in the way of options to effectively support young people’s coping processes.

97

CHAPTER 6:VIOLENCE AND THE ATTRIBUTION OF MEANING

This chapter explores how processes of meaning attribution relate to young people’s experiences of violence in the Kivus. Drawing on the interdisciplinary literature on meanings of violence, it begins by elaborating a meaning attribution framework to support the chapter’s subsequent analysis of meanings attributed to violence. It examines in depth the role of identity-based, victim-perpetrator discourses and the ways in which shame and humiliation relate to brutal violence, and how, in turn, meanings attributed to violence relate to young people’s coping processes. In contrast, it also considers how not attributing meaning to violence- as relates to the use of violence to suppress dissent- has a negative impact on coping processes. Finally, it concludes by emphasising how processes of meaning attribution within the structures of violence can contribute to reinforcing the structures of violence, thus serving to exemplify Bourdieu’s (2000) ‘law of conservation of violence’.

M

To examine the extremely complex processes through which meaning is attributed to violence in the Kivus, an interdisciplinary framework is elaborated in this section, drawing primarily on the anthropological literature on the meanings of violence, but also on sociology, politics and history. This framework considers four key elements: the formation of a habitus of violence- i.e. how violence is integrated into ways of perceiving, thinking and acting; the ‘poetics’ of violence and the roles of victim-perpetrator discourses; social memory; and narratives. This meaning-attribution framework will be used later in the chapter to support the analysis of how the attribution of meaning relates to young people’s processes of coping, and how meanings can serve a psychologically protective function at the same time that they contribute to the conservation of violence.

This meaning attribution framework begins with the application of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus- or “the schemes of perception, thought, and action” (Bourdieu 1989, p. 14 as cited in Chapter 1 above) which produce practices and the means of perceiving and appreciating these practices. Such a ‘habitus of violence’ is a key aspect of how young people perceive and make sense of their experiences of violence. It provides individuals with the framework for understanding events of suffering and loss which may otherwise be difficult to comprehend. This habitus helps to shape not only their perceptions, but also their reactions and responses.

How a habitus of violence becomes integrated into young people’s experiences is documented in studies which explore young people’s experience of war and protracted political crises (Richards 1996, Utas 2003, West 2004, Christiansen et al. 2006, Vigh 2008, Hart 2008), where young people come to experience “disorder and ruin… as the natural order of things” (Vigh 2008, p. 10 cited Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 23) and where knowledge systems are shaped by uncertainty and volatility. In his research among young Palestinians living in refugee camps in Jordan, Hart (2008, p. 287) demonstrates how young people interpret the “asymmetrical relations of power” and how the associated adversities and humiliations of living in a refugee camp have been incorporated into new standards of normality. The habitus of violence remains even after war has formally ended; as shown by West (2004, p. 124) in his ethnography in Mozambique, young women “were less

98

traumatised by their wartime experience than they were by the post-war unravelling of the narrative that had made sense of that experience of that time.”

The second aspect of the meaning-attribution framework is ‘poetics’ and victim-perpetrator discourses. In anthropology, the notion of the ‘poetics’ of violence (Riches 1986, Whitehead 2004), highlights the necessarily subjective and symbolic ways in which meaning is attributed to or derived from violence. From this perspective, interpretations of violence require locally-derived knowledge which is social, cultural and historical (Finnstrom 2005). The concept of poetics of violence requires shared understandings (Riches 1986), yet accepts that the attribution of meaning is neither fixed nor objective. As symbolised by the ‘triangle of violence’ elaborated by Riches, experiences of violence will depend on whether one is a victim, perpetrator or witness to a violent event, even as such subjective ascriptions are usually in a state of constant flux. Taking Riches’ triangle of violence one step further, Leopold (2005) describes how a young girl who is abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda is forced to kill her family then repeatedly raped, thus showing how an individual may be simultaneously a victim, a perpetrator, and a witness according to the poetics of violence.

Key to the notion of poetics is ambiguity, a theme which dominates anthropological inquiries into experiences of war. Whitehead (2004, p. 15) provides an example of the shifting and uncertain geography of conflict terrains, where: “violent scripts are uncertain and ambiguous, subject to the poesis of individual actors- a roadblock passed without trouble in the morning may become the scene of killing in the afternoon.” Documenting her research in Sarajevo during the Balkan wars, Maček (2005, p. 71) describes the ambivalence of moral positioning in experiences of violence, demonstrating how “categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’ were blurred... the aims and causes of the war were not clear any more, the justification of the killing and destruction was not convincing and consequently also the judgements of right and wrong were difficult and ambiguous.”

Such ambiguity tends to be effaced in victim-perpetrator discourses which are often associated with political violence (Kleinman 1995). The ascription of blame and claims of victimhood vary according to one’s historical and social position and according to which ‘regimes of truth’ one chooses (Malkki 1995). Victim-perpetrator discourses manifest perceptions of threat, fear, or competition for limited resources and require an ‘other’ who can be blamed for misfortune and adversity. Frequently, the process of ‘othering’ becomes embedded in contentious, identity-based politics, as seen in contexts as diverse as the Balkans (Woodward 2000), India (Das 2007) or Rwanda (Pottier 2002). Identity- based hate discourses in contexts of political violence often exemplify how ‘predatory identities’ can “arise in those circumstances in which majorities and minorities can plausibly be seen as being in danger of trading places” (Appadurai 2006, p. 52). As will be discussed below, victim-perpetrator discourses are a central aspect of young people’s processes of meaning attribution in the Kivus. The third aspect of the meaning-attribution framework is social memory, a key element in the construction of meanings as well as in the perpetuation of political violence (Malkki 1995). Often, victim-perpetrator discourses look to historical accounts of injustice to justify or legitimise present violence (Malkki 1995). As social memories are selected and evolve, they become

institutionalized and transmitted across generations. These memories in turn contribute to conflict’s intractability, resulting in a self-perpetuating negative cycle. Ultimately such social

99

memories fill determinative roles in the formation of ‘cultures of violence’. (Cairns and Roe 2003, p. 7)

Usually in such contexts, “suffering and traumatic memories are part of a socially distributed reality” (Veale 2005, p. 261). Recalling Bourdieu’s (2000) ‘law of conservation of violence’, social memories are an essential conduit for the transmission of political violence across generations (Cairns and Roe 2003). As the present appropriates the past, processes by which violence is remembered subsequently influence how violence may be transmitted or transformed in the future (Jackson 2005). Analyses of inter-generational transmission of memories show how violence can become “perpetuated by factors quite different from those that caused its emergence” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, p. 61). Social memories thus become incorporated into the habitus of violence, further reinforcing the iterative dynamics and processes of political conflict (Bar-Tal 2003).

The fourth and final aspect in the meaning-attribution framework elaborated in this thesis is the role of narratives, which play a key role in the transmission of social memory and the conservation of violence. Narratives are defined in the politics literature as “the ways in which we construct disparate facts in our own worlds and weave them together cognitively in order to make sense of our reality” (Patterson and Renwick Monroe 1998, p. 315). They are stories which people create and share to help make sense of their lives and the complexity of their lived experience. Narratives shape perceptions of the world and orient how individuals act in their environment (Autesserre 2012). Narratives can be helpful for understanding how violence is interpreted, remembered and reproduced within political, ideological, economic and social processes (Sayigh 1998). Often such interpretations can evolve into a collective, ‘monolithic’ (Gluck 2007) narrative that assumes its own life. In situations where individuals exercise little strategic control (de Certeau 1984, Marriage 2012a) narratives may serve as a mechanism for taking ‘authorship’ of stories which are otherwise politically dictated (Das and Kleinman 2000, p. 12).57

As demonstrated in historical research on how war is remembered and retold, memories of past violence are often used “to lay claim to the future” (Gluck 2007, p. 47). In this way, the past is put to pragmatic use (Jackson 2005), even as original meanings get “lost in public narratives” (Macmillan 2009, p. 42 cited Elshtain 1998). As narratives of violence are transferred across generations, violence often becomes “perpetuated by factors quite different from those that caused its emergence” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, p. 61). Narratives of war provide an example of how history and social memory can be transferred to the present, and show how

the past is not imposed upon the present, but offers itself up, so to speak, to the living as a basis for creatively comprehending their present situation and making informed choices about how it is to be addressed and lived. (Jackson 2005, p. 357- 358)

As events of war are narrated, transmitted and transformed across generations, the ‘memoryscape’ of war becomes a highly charged political space. Social memories are highly malleable, and thus

57

The reliance on narratives has been critiqued by some researchers who consider that a ‘multiplicity of narratives’ will always exist, thus limiting any objective truth (Bloch 1998; see also Chapter 3 above for a discussion on the challenges of verifying narrative-based data). Bloch questions the reliability of narratives, as that which is retold is not necessarily the same as that which is remembere d, a factor which can limit the credibility of narratives as a main source of research data. Caution is also needed when working with narratives in contexts of protracted violence, as victims’ subjectivity will usually dominate the discourse, simplifying the world into ‘victims and villains’ while excluding complexity and silencing the diversity of perspectives (Gluck 2007, p. 50).

100

transcriptions of particular events may be selectively remembered (Cole 2001) or edited, while the concept of ‘purposive memory’- i.e. when events, places or things are remembered for a specific reason (Mistry et al. 2001, p. 29)- can be used for political expediency, as seen in the official commemoration ceremonies of World War II in Japan (Gluck 2007) or in annual commemorations of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.