Doing Gender in the Congo. International Interventions against Sexualised Violence and State Formation Politics in Conflict Contexts

The paper analyses international programmes against sexualised and gender based violence (SGBV) in the conflict-torn eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It centrally investigates how the Congolese gender order is conceived and performed in the interaction between international organisations and local stakeholders, and how those practices are linked to processes of state formation. Since feminism has entered the realm of international politics, bringing the situation of women in war on the agenda of international organisations, the fight against SGBV in conflict regions has become a major concern for humanitarian interventions. In the Congo, the UN peacekeeping mission MONUSCO, UN agencies and international NGOs engage in the domain in order to change local notions and relations of gender. Presumably, altered gender notions and relations may prevent SGBV and mitigate its negative social consequences for survivors and communities. Building on relational sociological and feminist theories, the presentation scrutinizes two principal fields of intervention in which international actors try to change local gender relations: (1) The reform of the justice sector and (2) the socio-economic reintegration of survivors of SGBV. While in the former field interventions seek to promote legal sanctions against perpetrators, to deter potential offenders and to compensate survivors in order to delegitimise SGBV, the latter aims at the empowerment of women to reduce their vulnerability to SGBV and its consequences. It will be shown how in those two fields international and Congolese actors negotiate and enact gender notions and relations and which influence those processes have to on the formation of the Congolese state. The presentation draws on several month of ethnographic field research in the province of North Kivu in eastern Congo.