the East for fear of allowing insurrection to reach the capital. What he feared nonetheless happened, when in 1997 a Rwanda- and Uganda-backed rebel force swept across the country, taking town after town and eventually overtaking the capital Kinshasa. Ever since, eastern Congo has remained mired in conflict, the region’s roads transformed into sinews of war. The number of armed groups has, over time, exploded, with larger groups fragmenting and new militia popping up. By the latest count, there are well over 120 armed groups active in Eastern Congo (Kivu Security Tracker 2021), many of which maintain connections to networks of patronage inside the Congolese army–which has itself been called the country’s largest armed group, for the similarities in its mode of operating on the ground. Over decades of conflict, government forces and militia alike have sustained and enriched themselves as much through extracting rents from artisanal mines and farmers as from road users through roadblocks (Schouten 2022). While dynamics are extremely fluid and can, at times, be volatile, overall, government agents and larger armed groups such as M23 have competed for control over main roads, while government soldiers and smaller militia have tended to dominate rural connections in the countryside. Indeed, in 2017, 70% of the roadblocks with a government/army presence in North Kivu sat on national or provincial roads, while 79% of rebel roadblocks sat along tertiary/feeder roads (Schouten 2022, pp. 117-118). However, such patterns are highly unstable over time, with rebels periodically overtaking control over main roads. Roads are, therefore, magnets of continuous and often violent contestation among different types of authorities and road users over how goods, people, and capital circulate and who gets to benefit. According to the Congo Research Group (CRG 2019, p. 6), almost half of all violent events between 2017 and 2019 took place at or near roads, as opposed to mines or villages (cf. (O’Mealia 2022)).

In this context, stabilization operations by the international donor community have sought to intervene by coupling peacekeeping, humanitarian, and development efforts with ambitious road rehabilitation efforts. Rehabilitating roads would bring down the cost of logistics for aid and peacekeeping, kickstart economic development, and facilitate the extension of state authority (Bachmann and Schouten 2018, p. 14). To wit, the UN-led stabilization strategy for Congo spearheaded that roads are key because _‘rural areas are completely isolated and armed groups in the east have been able to move unhindered, populations have been cut-off and commerce has all but disappeared... Rebuilding roads and creating jobs in the process, expanding the transport grid and clearing corridors of checkpoints will not only destroy key profit centres of the remaining armed groups, these actions will also accelerate the economic reunification of the east, return markets to their past vibrancy and permit people to move freely.’_ (DFID 2011, p. 14)

# **2.2 Theory Background**

The premises upon which such strategies rest have been subject to a lively academic debate, which posits contradictory linkages between roads and violence.

Conflict studies typically assume that low road density, rough terrain and inaccessibility are enabling conditions for the onset and duration of civil war, arguing that rebels thrive 6