This article discusses the social mobility of combatants and introduces the notion of circular return to explain their pendular state of movement between civilian and combatant life. This phenomenon is widely observed in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where Congolese youth have been going in and out of armed groups for several decades now. While the notion of circular return has its origins in migration and refugee studies, we show that it also serves as a useful lens to understand the navigation capacity between different social spaces of combatants and to describe and understand processes of incessant armed mobilization and demobilization. In conceptualizing these processes as forms of circular return, we want to move beyond the remobilization discourse, which is too often connected to an assumed failure of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration processes. We argue that this discourse tends to ignore combatants’ agency and larger processes of socialization and social rupture as part of armed mobilization.

During the COVID-19 crisis in Africa, several contradictory discourses have tried to predict how the continent will experience the pandemic. Based on a qualitative approach, this article goes beyond generalized and arbitrary predictions and analyzes how three countries in the Great Lakes region of Africa have managed the pandemic. We first analyze which measures the respective governments of the three countriesand their decentralized authoritieshave taken. We also analyze up to which extend international prescriptionsas propagated by the World Health Organizationhave influenced their choices. Second, we analyze how government measures have transformed throughout implementation and interacted with the specific circumstances of each context. Authorities, on the one hand, navigated between rigid and more flexible interpretation of national prescriptions, entering into practical arrangements or adopting force. Populations on the other hand have resorted to acceptance, circumvention, contestation or resistance. Our research ultimately points to the way in which political dynamics, resistance, violence, and local redefine both national policies and their international reference frames. In this way, the governance dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic in the African Great Lakes region provide a lens through which we can complexify our understandings of real governance in Africa.

This article analyses the production and reproduction of traditional chieftaincy in war-torn eastern DR Congo, through the case of a succession dispute in Kalima (South Kivu). Kalima has gone through two decades of political instability and violent conflict involving a plethora of local, national and regional actors. During this period of uncertainty and upheaval, the institution of traditional chieftaincy has remained politically salient. We argue, that this salience is conditioned by a widespread belief in the authenticity and sacredness of the institution of traditional chieftaincy and by the ethno-territorial imaginary of the Congolese political order. Both of these are historically produced through rituals, ceremonies and narratives of origin. They imbue the institution of traditional chieftaincy with charisma and enable customary chiefs to accumulate resources and exercise authority in a wide range of domains of public life in rural eastern Congo. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, we call this ability to rule through the notion of 'custom', customary capital. However, we also show that 'customary capital' does not automatically accrue to chiefs as a variety of internal and external actors vie for customary capital. As such it fluctuates over time as different actors move in and out of the capacity to legitimately wield customary capital.

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