Religious Peacebuilding In The Democratic Republic Of Congo PDF Download

Since the nineties, violent conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa have continued to spread throughout the entire region. The consequences of these conflicts are felt mainly in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and North Kivu in particular. To tackle these conflictual situations, several studies have focused on state-building approaches at the expense of non-state local participants, whose role has received scant attention and whose legitimacy has even been contested. The significance of this research lies in its greater depth of understanding, given the role of religious actors in the recent religious peacebuilding efforts in Goma. This derives from the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no such ethnographic investigation related to religious peacebuilding had ever been undertaken in Goma up to 2013, because it was then a city that had recently (November 2012) been under the control of March 23 (M23) rebels. In addition, no other research included Revival churches or significant grassroots religious actors from any religious communities in Goma (DRC). The method was primarily guided by the central question of this research: How do members of the Catholic, 3ème Communauté Baptiste au Centre de l'Afrique (3ème CBCA), and Arche de l'Alliance/Goma (Arche) Churches perceive and describe their roles in the religious peacebuilding in the city of Goma? I therefore applied a qualitative case studies approach to explore the religious peacebuilding roles of the three Christian churches in the capital of the North Kivu province, Goma. Three primary sources of data collection were employed: 40 semi-structured interviews, direct observations in Goma, and a questionnaire with 39 questions (multiple choice and some with more in-depth perspectives). Not only do the findings of this study reveal the important role of religious participants, who in many instances filled the role of the post-colonial Congolese state in providing goods and services, but they also highlighted the nature of the relationships within and between the Catholic, 3ème CBCA and Arche Churches.