Land Under Siege: Militarized Capitalism and Urban Land Dispossession in the City of Goma, Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between militarization and land grabbing in the context of rapid urbanization and protracted violent conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Drawing on two case studies of the dispossession and privatization of public urban land in Goma, Eastern Congo, during the state of siege, the paper examines how militarized land grabs are tied to broader capitalist transformations of land. It shows how violent dispossession carried out by military actors under military rule facilitated and accelerated capitalist accumulation by converting public land as a use value into exchange value. The article argues that the institutionalization of military urban land governance under the state of siege facilitated a logic of militarized capitalism, significantly scaling up ongoing processes of accumulation by dispossession. This militarized capitalism operates through the growing repression of popular resistance to dispossession. The paper clearly shows that the state of siege not only expanded the ability of Congolese military actors to use coercion and violence in land grabbing processes but also increased their capacity to suppress opposition and silence contestation. Finally, it shows that military rule reduced fragmentation in land governance and competition over land, thereby accelerating land grabbing through the logics of what we refer to as militarized capitalism.