Paper short abstract:

In 2022, thousands protested against the UN peacekeeping force in the Congolese city of Goma. Through violent protest practices, these activists were effectively “worlding from below” by criticizing global regimes of violence and inscribing themselves in a postcolonial, violent mode of production.

Paper long abstract:

In July 2022, thousands of youth and activists protested against the presence of the UN peacekeeping force in the city of Goma, DR Congo. Instead of finding explanations in apocalyptic visions of violence and poverty in slums or areas marked by armed conflict, I look at how these young activists from urban peripheries inscribe themselves in a global future through violent practices of protest. Simultaneously able to deploy their bodies in rural insurgencies or urban protests, these activists embody the barracks as the organizing principle of the postmodern African city (Hoffman, 2011). In socially navigating their peripheral urban surroundings, they deploy shifting (violent) tactics to create new futures for themselves and their country. By invoking anti-colonial imagery in the figure of Lumumba and mobilizing practices associated with nationalist self-defense militias, they offer a critique of global regimes of violence while inscribing themselves in a postcolonial, violent mode of production. This paper is based on long-term ethnographic research among an activist youth groups in the urban periphery of Goma in the eastern DRC. I demonstrate that their activist practices are an example of “worlding from below” (Simone, 2001) in which youth critically analyze the intervention of global actors, locate it in larger histories of imperialism and carve out a space for themselves in the world. If we want to understand how African futures are shaped, we need to incorporate a relational spatial perspective that questions the boundaries between urban and rural or global and local.