Humanitarianism in a Cold War Hot Spot

Abstract

In recent decades, historians, political scientists, and development experts have demonstrated how humanitarian intervention has eroded state sovereignty and even basic governmental rationality in a variety of countries in the Global South. Jeremy Rich’s book builds off of this literature to examine a nation-state that is arguably more of a ‘political assemblage’ than a cohesively bound, fully sovereign country: the Republic of Congo, renamed ‘Zaire’ in 1971, and currently referred to as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). However, Rich’s Protestant Missionaries and Humanitarianism in the DRC adds significant complexity to previous studies. Rich considers nation-building not by a government or indigenous social movement, but rather by a faith-based humanitarian aid organization — the Congo Protestant Relief Agency (CPRA) — whose leaders and volunteers formulated idiosyncratic and ideologically inconsistent strategies for contributing to and strengthening national reconstruction in Congo. Rich’s work stands in sharp contrast to previous analyses of humanitarian assistance and multilateral aid, as these mainly examine the work of foreign governments and global, secular institutions. Instead, he presents the approaches and worldviews of a missionary society and its aid workers who worked to both reimagine and shore up political stability, governmental legitimacy, and administrative functionality in a newly decolonized Africa. Rich concludes that CPRA’s work in early independence-era Congo marked ‘a watershed period in humanitarianism in Africa during the Cold War’ (7). He accomplishes this by deftly illustrating the dramatic exit of colonial government-sponsored missionary societies and their charitable wings and their replacement by a new iteration of humanitarian agent: faith-based relief organizations. While these new intercessors could be influenced by political agendas emanating from the Global North, much like their predecessors, Rich shows how committed they were to the principles of African self-determination. All relief provision and assistance in postcolonial spaces in the 1960s was to some degree political. Cold War rivalries, former colonial powers attempting to reinforce their prestige, domestic leftist insurgencies, and other political developments reified, misconstrued, or manipulated faith-based and other forms of humanitarian assistance in Congo, turning beneficence into the furtherance of some form of power. Even if neutrality was the stated aim of a humanitarian mission (and it often was not), the activities associated with relief provision or technical assistance directly affected governance, and therefore the survival of different political communities. In this highly precarious