Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo's (DRC) artisanal mining sector is often linked to the violent conflicts that have beset Central Africa for over two decades. While many analyses emphasise its ‘criminal’ and ‘illegal’ nature, less attention has been paid to the ambiguity of this economy, most prominently incarnated by the intermediate mineral traders callednégociants. Focusing on their entrepreneurship, networks and everyday activities, this essay offers a more nuanced understanding of local mineral trade in the context of a ‘crisis economy’ framed by competing governable orders. It investigates the uncertainty along eastern DRC's mineral supply chains, that are undergoing major regulatory changes to curb the trade of so-called ‘conflict minerals’. Drawing from extensive fieldwork, this essay demonstrates how this uncertainty shapes the négociants’ role as brokers of socio-economic life in the provinces of North and South Kivu.
Scholarly engagement with ethics, epistemologies and positionalities dilemmas in conflict research is marked by a disconnect between self-referential debates in the Ivory Tower and the very places research takes place. If there is reflection on foreign researchers, research brokers or research participants, accounts of genuinely collaborative work are rare. Drawing from a decade of collaborative research in eastern Congo, our essay targets this gap by critically discussing challenges we faced and lessons we learned with regards to our mutual positionalities. In so doing, we join debates calling for situated reflection on ethnography in and of conflict zones. Based on our research experience, we contend that a fully joint approach – including planning, execution, analysis and writing – can be an avenue toward decolonizing our ethics and epistemologies. Moreover, we argue for a pluriversal ethics that accounts for context and positionalities of the involved researchers and allows for collaborative worldmaking.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.