ABSTRACT
The first chapter has several aims. First, it sets out the positioning of the book in the literatures the book is located in, contributes to, and demarcates itself from. To do so, rather than providing a comprehensive overview, the chapter proceeds by discussing a few influential titles that have left a landmark in their field. The literatures dealt with are those concerning the political economy of development aid, the literature on the African state, and recent scholarly writings devoted to the DRC’s state reform landscape and political economy. This serves to provide a starting point for the argument, which relies on a political economy approach analysing the politics of aid in Congo as a power struggle, in which donors and recipients are defending and seeking to pursue their interests, where it is important to avoid privileging one set of actors while leaving another relatively unexamined, as much of the literature often does by taking donors’ rhetoric, objectives, and strategies for granted. Regarding the thesis’ positioning in the literature on the African state, a critique of neo-patrimonialism and related concepts is developed that re-asserts the need to analyse Congo’s aid politics through the lens of a critical political economy, where development policies are investigated empirically, in their implementation, without taking as a starting point the mode on which the state functions. With regards to the literature on Congo, it is argued that while there exist rich studies which have unearthed valuable materials on Congo’s stalled institutional reforms, there is much to be gained by a adopting an alternative viewpoint, which considers reforms less as unequivocal failure and more as reflecting the politics of accommodation between donors and Congo’s political elite - and especially the presidency in the period 2001-2011. The theoretical framework is then laid out: building on the previous considerations drawn from the literature, and motivated by an emphasis on the practical implementation of reforms, the framework adopted seeks to provide way to capture the relationship between donors and recipient in a way attentive to the contradictions in which development agencies have been involved in the DRC. This situation has been largely a product of the superposition of a transition towards peace, liberalisation, and democratisation, whose often conflicting directions have produced deep-seated contradictions. The book proposes to examine the contradictions between the objectives of democratisation and liberalisation in the DRC during the period 2001-2011 - promoted by donors and at least nominally endorsed by domestic political elites, by using some development policy case studies to illustrate the book’s main arguments, which are briefly recapitulated. This chapter is then brought to a close by providing some methodological considerations.
