ABSTRACT
This first case study focuses on the “politics of dirt.” Waste management in a city is key to keeping it clean, which depends on ownership and belonging. These are forms of expressing statehood. Thus, waste management can reveal a way to understand the processes of statehood through performance and enactment of authorities and citizens in areas of disputed territory. By interviewing the administration, including the highest officials and public servants in Bukavu, the main authorities tend to ignore any form of sanitary governance, while street-level bureaucrats perform minimal services. The waste problems highlight the interdependent spaces in the city: the private, the common, and the political. Citizens keep their daily problems of waste at bay by throwing garbage into common spaces (rivers and the lake). The common spaces are discussed as the responsibility of the municipality and/or the “state.” Political spaces, such as roundabouts where monuments are erected by the regime and political speeches are held are kept clean by communal workers on a daily basis.
