Overview

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is widely considered the archetypical ‘predatory state’. At the national level, political elites rely on the state to enrich themselves. On a local level, civil servants ‘fend for themselves’ in the absence of a state salary. Corruption, though, is about much more than this – it is part of a broader structure of informal revenue extraction, with multiple layers of accountability, negotiation and invention. In this unique book, Titeca and Nkuku analyse these processes in detail, revealing how corruption is organised and contested in the DRC’s capital Kinshasa. Exploring a variety of ‘spaces’ within the city – from transportation- and police-services (street spaces) to businessmen and markets (market spaces) to football and bars (spaces of pleasure) – the authors shows how the various actors navigate, contest and circumvent this predatory environment. In doing so, the book not only sheds light on corruption and contestation, but also on the myriad ways in which a key African capital city itself is organised.

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9781786996886

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Kristof Titeca lectures at the Institute of Development Policy and Management, University of Antwerp. He was previously a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics. He has been a regular contributor to the Washington Post, and has also written for outlets such as Al Jazeera, African Arguments and others. Albert Malukisa Nkuku is a Professor at the Catholic University of Congo (UCC) and a Postdoc Researcher at Antwerp University. He has published in a range of academic journals, including Canadian Journal of African Studies and Revue international des études du développement.

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