Grounded Immoral and Irrational Features of Armed Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Authors: Lomami Francis 
Published: December 2024

Purpose: This study aims to construct a moral and rational understanding of the Congolese armed conflict by anatomically decomposing its war violations and stupors. The intensification of armed violence in DR Congo between 1993 and 2003 gave the country an awful notoriety for the systematic crimes against humanity committed. The Congolese armed conflict perfectly manifested war’s immorality and irrationality through numerous and recurrent violent incidents. This study’s approach goes beyond their typical legal and political descriptions, which explicatively attenuate the wrongfulness and harmfulness of these incidents. From moral and rational lenses, it seeks to feature, understand, and explain violent actions against non-liable civilians in the conflict, their contexts, and perpetrators. This novel approach resorts to moral and rational cognitive assumptions to clarify emerging features and provides a different perspective on the Congolese armed conflict.
Methodology: The study used the grounded theory methodology to comprehend the complexity of the Congolese armed conflict's moral and rational considerations directly from the data on violent incidents registered from 1993 to 2003. The study utilized different international, regional, and local reports, mainly the UN Mapping Report on human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1993 to 2003, as its secondary data source. The study applied memoing, coding, and constant comparison to retrieving properties from the reported incidents and their contexts from which it identified, formulated, and developed conceptual subcategories and categories. The study used content and cross-analysis to interpret and discuss the conceptualized data categories, definitions, and background, ensuring a thorough and rigorous research process. The study resorted to armed conflict and cognitive theories to validate findings and enrich the discussion.
Findings: This study is comprehensive research that conveyed a consistent and objective picture of the Congolese armed conflict's immoral and irrational features. Using substantially moral inquiry based on unduly harmfulness to others and rational inquiry centered on favoring common ends, the study found that violent incidents bore four types of harmful actions: subjective, objective, proactive, and extreme, committed by political and military agents from different belligerents. The conflict experienced three harm-prone contexts that cultivated and amplified these harmful actions and conditioned harming agents affiliated with two main categories of belligerents, aspirational and non-aspirational, according to political ends. The political aspirations with moral grounds did not prevent harming agents from committing various harmful actions.
Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice, and Policy: The study articulated a new explanatory approach to African armed conflict studies by exploring human rights and international law violations as manifestations of war’s immorality and irrationality. While many studies substantially explain violent conflict incidents in legal, social, and political terms, this approach emphasizes their comprehension as wrongfulness and harmfulness related to moral and rational cognition linked to contextual conditions. The reflection offered practitioners, politicians, and militaries a blueprint of conceptual dispensation that morally and rationally featured armed conflict’s violent actions, contexts, and perpetrators.