More on the DR Congo

The Democratic Republic of the Congo certainly seems to be a popular topic for the blog this week, and rightly so. The DR Congo serves as a country containing numerous elements of civil war and violent conflict such as ethnic conflict, torture, economic issues, and human rights violations. It also provides some examples of the correctness and falsity of authors and concepts discussed this semester.

The DR Congo is marked by the long and arduous rule of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. In power until the 1990s, he led with a iron fist and his time in power was filled with corruption and tremendous economic issues, as well as as allegations of torture and human rights violations. The recovery from his rule has taken twenty years and is still not nearly over. After Mobutu was toppled in 1997 and forced into exile, Laurent Kabila came into power, followed shortly by the nation's deadliest civil war. Finally, there were elections, but those involved violent clashes between opposition parties. An article by Bloomberg News claims that the winner of the most recent election, Joesph Kabila, Laurent's son, tortures people as though he was an authoritarian ruler.

In Thomas Carothers' article "The End of the Transition Paradigm," he discusses a number of assumptions about democratic transitions and then why they are not fully correct. The idea that "any country moving away from dictatorial rule can be considered a country in transition toward democracy," is false and misleading since countries can have features of democracy without the intention of being fully democratic. This is an error made often in articles, as it is in this one by Bloomberg News. Citing elections as an important step in the way to democracy, the article then goes on to describe many characteristics of the society that are not democratic at all. In fact, the central idea of the article is that the "democratically elected" leader is acting like an authoritarian dictator. Similarly, the thought that elections are central to the democratic transition is false because they do not necessarily indicate full participation and government accountability can remain weak.

According to Carothers, the DR Congo has not fully proven its intent to transition to democracy and, in many ways, is still stuck in the ways of the past. The DR Congo is a prominent example of the exhaustion of the transition paradigm and the need for a new way to understand transition.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601116&sid=aZNJ2_SSM0cQ&refer=africa