"Trading on War: New Forms of Life in the Debris of the State" by Yixin Li

Patience S Kabamba

Deposited 2008

Abstract
This study challenges the assumption that failed state is equivalent to failed society. Within the context of a absent or failed state, we assume (from Locke, Hobbes, etc.) that selfishness will reign; thus, a failed state affects in adverse ways the lives of all who believe in its aegis, and its weakness insures suffering among all except those who manage to find ways to circumvent the system. In the Nande territory of Beni-Lubero where the study took place, the state is most certainly weak (or even absent). Nande have, however, thrived within this context; to call their actions 'corrupt' however offers a one-dimensional view of what is in fact a very complex picture with a complicated history. It is a paradoxical situation because of the assumption outlined above. The Nande traders are rich, but the entire area prospers; they do amass fortune, but, they fed these back into the community, such that this is among the few regions with a thriving economy, decent schools, and health care. They don't rely on the nation's ports but, rather, have strong ties that take them regularly to the Middle East and East Asia. The present study has mobilized an ethnographically informed perspective to illuminate what is remarkable, innovative, resilient and creative about Nande transnational networks and their transnational production of "local" community in North Kivu Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yet, the thesis also exposes how this particular formulation of transnationalism and "ethnic" insularity colludes with an internecine (even genocidal) violence in the very near periphery of its seemingly remote "ethnic" homeland in the distant borderland of a "collapsed" state. This means that horrendous civil wars of the sort that has racked the DRC may in fact be merely opportunities for the cynical restructuring of the global capital accumulation in places where what matters to global capital is effective access to valuable resources and what is utterly expendable is the life and limb of the human beings who inhabit that particular corner of the planet.