Toward a Transitional Justice Approach to Long-Term Protection of Civilians in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

Introduction

Transitional justice (TJ) practitioners and scholars in the Democratic Republic (DR) of Congo increasingly utilize victim-centric and participatory approaches in processes seeking redress of grave human rights violations. However, addressing the challenge of civilian protection that any TJ initiative in the country must inevitably face is crucial. The article's main argument is that building a long-term protective environment for civilians in ongoing violence requires a multidisciplinary approach and suggests that the field of TJ, specifically its pillar of guarantees of nonrecurrence (GoNR), provides a valuable starting point for expanding the concept of protection of civilians (PoC) toward a long-term goal. It achieves this purpose by examining how the episteme of TJ could recast three dimensions of the PoC under the humanitarian toolkit, namely (1) accountability towards affected civilians, (2) decolonization, and (3) community-based approaches to protection. Jointly, these three dimensions provide a steady foundation for meeting civilians’ expectations beyond immediate emergency assistance.

Despite previous setbacks, including a failed Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2003 (Kiyala, 2019), the DR of Congo has recently renewed its focus on efforts towards TJ. In August 2020, the Council of Ministers in Kinshasa highlighted the importance of TJ in establishing justice and the Rule of Law, which was echoed by President Félix Tshisekedi at the United Nations General Assembly the following month. This has encouraged TJ experts and academics to advocate for creating a national strategy for TJ. However, progress on the ground has been hindered by security concerns and a state of emergency, particularly in the North Kivu province, where hostilities have resumed with the resurgence of the M23 rebellion and a new configuration of security actors competing for control of the rich-mineral province. Despite these ongoing challenges to civilian protection, the push toward TJ remains an important step for the country toward addressing the legacies of violence.

The paper is divided into sections discussing disciplinary complementarity, the relationship between TJ and PoC, research methodology, a case study of North Kivu, and the implications of the findings. The conclusion summarizes the key points.

Beyond Complexity and Toward Complementarity

Is the cup as half full or half empty? One of the biggest challenges for justice practitioners and researchers in the DR of Congo is the overwhelming evidence of prolonged violence and the consistent failure of the justice system to establish law and order. It can be disheartening to realize this, but in this paper, I strive to overcome any intellectual cynicism and consider how different disciplines can work together to find solutions. Towards this end, justice practitioners must first acknowledge the documented and devastating consequences of violent conflicts on civilians and the challenges faced by duty-bearers. Then they must also recognize that while TJ and PoC have developed independently, their shared concerns for victims of violence provide an opportunity for cross-fertilization in contexts of ongoing violence. Given this assumption, the central question of this paper is no longer whether TJ can contribute to long-term PoC in such contexts but how?

To properly answer this question, it is crucial to acknowledge the priorities between addressing emergencies and ongoing crimes through TJ activities. While it is true that PoC activities may take priority in some situations, this approach overlooks two important factors. Firstly, it fails to address the root causes of violence against civilians, including unaddressed historical injustices that continue to resurface. Secondly, it limits the potential benefits of exploring the relationship between PoC and TJ. A recent example from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) demonstrates how TJ initiatives can enhance PoC interventions in violent contexts.

Between 2016 and 2018, the Kamuina Nsapu crisis in Central Kasaï led to over 260 women being raped, over 3,000 people killed, and around 1.4 million displaced ¹ during a widespread attack by Congolese security forces against the Kamuina Nsapu militia group. To deal with human rights violations committed during the crisis, parallel to emergency humanitarian and relief assistance provided to victims and survivors, public consultations held in 2019 and 2020 between the UN joint human rights office (UNJHRO), the Kasai provincial authorities, and victims resulted in the creation of a provincial truth and reconciliation commission and reparations program. At the time of the paper's writing, the Truth Commission has brought forward evidence leading to the trial and sentencing of two senior Congolese security officers for participating in these crimes. This provincial TJ initiative is lauded by TJ scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in the DR of Congo as a best practice of the contributions of decentralized TJ to addressing human rights violations in violent contexts (Arnould, 2021) and creating enabling conditions for long-term PoC. Therefore, in contexts of ongoing violence, it is possible to strike a delicate balance that allows undertaking some emergency and TJ initiatives to address specific underlying threats to everyday civilian protection. Moreover, by so doing, meet victimized civilians’ protection expectations in both the short and long terms. Finally, I draw insights from tenets in the emerging critical TJ literature to further elaborate on this argument.

The paper refers to a civilian as any person not a member of the armed forces or an organized armed group with continuous combat function and does not directly or indirectly participate in hostilities. ² The fundamental physical protection challenges this article addresses include large-scale violence, arbitrary detention, rape as a weapon of war, forced recruitment, mass displacement, starvation, torture, kidnapping, and indiscriminate attacks carried out by armed groups in ongoing violence. The primary category of civilians concerned by the paper is victims, survivors, and human rights defenders at the forefront of advocacy efforts for civilians’ physical protection in contexts of ongoing violence. Physical protection refers to shielding civilians from direct and indirect threats to physical integrity in violent armed confrontations.

Toward a PoC and TJ Nexus

International protection discourses (military and nonmilitary) emerged at the intersections of the human rights regime, humanitarian interventionism, and peacekeeping, three critical institutions around which the 1990s international intervention cooperation gravitated. Some of the key events shaping the protection of civilians during this period included the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal to address human rights abuses committed to civilians in the former Yugoslavia, the Rwandan genocide, and the beginning of the Congo conflicts, among others. These events made PoC a prevailing paradigm governing international peace and security and a central priority of UN peacekeeping missions (Katshung, 2009). This period also foregrounded the need to create the Rome Statute, ³ a treaty signed by 123 UN member states. This led to the International Criminal Court with jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute international crimes committed against civilians (Labuda, 2015).

PoC concepts developed by the humanitarian, human rights, and peacekeeping communities have evolved on different tangents, resulting in disparate understandings of the associated normative bases, substance, and responsibilities (Willmot & Sheeran, 2013). Although PoC in conflict is a recurring feature of the humanitarian discourse, in military doctrines, it has long been understood as the responsibility of arms bearers to uphold their commitment to international humanitarian law (Gordon, 2013). The scale and complexity of protection challenges in the Balkans, Rwanda, Darfur, Libya, Sierra Leone, and the DR of Congo have demonstrated the complexity of threats facing civilians in violent contexts and the imperative necessity for multistakeholder collaboration to address these threats (Babatunde, 2012). An important feature that both the military and nonmilitary definitions of PoC share concerns the timeframe of interventions. The existing literature on the definitions and interventions for PoC often focuses on short-term outcomes, which, while important, fail to address the root causes of historical grievances threatening everyday civilian protection in contexts of ongoing violence. There is, thus, a need to expand the understanding of PoC to account for the long-term challenges of civilian protection in violent contexts.

While there are essential rifts between the military and nonmilitary understandings of the protection of civilian regimes, a broad consensus exists within both the humanitarian community and military doctrine on three key elements: compliance by all parties to conflict with international humanitarian and human rights law; mitigating or reducing the threats and vulnerabilities of civilian populations; and, in the longer term, building a protective environment, including strengthening the capacities of the host state and local communities’ (Metcalfe, 2012).

The Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Policy on Protection in Humanitarian Action defines the PoC as “all activities aimed at obtaining full respect for the rights of the individual per the letter and the spirit of the relevant bodies of law (i.e., International Human Rights Law (IHRL), International Humanitarian Law (IHL), and International Refugee Law (IRL).” The article is interested in the nonmilitary strand of PoC for three reasons: (1) nonmilitary approaches to PoC are driven by principles of nonviolence as the preferred method of CSOs and humanitarian actors to address challenges of protecting civilians in oppressive and violent contexts (Stephan & Chenoweth, 2008). (2) Nonmilitary strands to PoC are open-ended and allow diverse initiatives to coexist in pursuing PoC—unlike military approaches, which are restricted to armed state actors and peacekeeping missions (Mahony, 2013). (3) In contexts of ongoing violence where victimized civilians are perceived as passive recipients of PoC services, nonmilitary approaches to PoC allow conceiving civilians’ agency in advancing their protection (Rhoads & Sutton, 2020). As the article discusses much later, these considerations are critical to envisioning long-term PoC in which victimized civilians are not passive peripheral observers but are front and center of the planning and implementation phases of PoC initiatives.

TJ gained momentum at the end of the 80s, with Trials of the Juntas in Argentina in the early 90s of democratization processes. TJ usually refers to the legal, political, and moral dilemmas arising from gross human rights violations and political violence in conflict and postconflict societies. The United Nations defines TJ as “the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society's attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, to ensure accountability, serve justice, and achieve reconciliation.” TJ's traditional toolbox includes Criminal Prosecutions, Truth Commissions, Reparations, and the GoNR through institutional reforms, mainly in the Justice and Security sectors (De Greiff, 2010).

Based on recent studies on the expansion of TJ in aparadigmatic contexts, including in contexts of ongoing violence (Destrooper et al., 2023), ⁴ I adopt in the paper the understanding of TJ as a toolkit with relevant instruments to help address the underlying challenges threatening the everyday protection of civilians in violent contexts. This definition complements previous definitions of TJ by taking into account TJ's messy and nonlinear logic in contexts that are neither postauthoritarian nor postconflict. A range of contemporary TJ processes aimed to address the legacies of human rights violations suggest different ways the field of TJ mechanisms may contribute as an impetus for PoC. For example, criminal prosecutions also targeted perpetrators of violations that led to displacements, such as the deportation and forcible transfer of population cases at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) (Harris Rimmer, 2009). In addition, the provisions of the TJ pillar of GoNR can protect groups through, for example, establishing a Bill of Rights or national human rights institutions and oversight bodies that oversee justice and security institutions and ensure that they are exercising their functions fairly and without discrimination (Sarkin, 2021). Furthermore, material reparations to victimized civilians, like building schools, health centers, and community markets, may enhance civilians’ protection by alleviating the recovery process of affected civilians (Cernea, 2000; Chan, 2015).

Similarly, informal and formal truth-seeking efforts may provide the basis for clarifying violations committed against victimized civilians and enable humanitarian workers to carry out civilian protection activities equitably in a way that does not exacerbate injustices among affected civilians (Bradley, 2012; Ku & Nzelibe, 2006). Furthermore, memorialization initiatives may contribute to PoC when they illuminate specific human rights violations and their societal impact (Whigham, 2017), thus enabling humanitarians to assess their roles throughout specific moments of a given conflict. Against this backdrop, the field of TJ should not be perceived as a silver bullet to PoC challenges but as a field continuously evolving by interacting with other fields in contexts of ongoing violence while dealing with its limitations, including its colonial undertones.

Indeed, increasingly critical TJ scholars are opening up some of its old paradigms and recasting its statist and colonial biases to make TJ relevant to contemporary challenges of dealing with the legacies of human rights violations, including in contexts of ongoing violence like Afghanistan, Mali, Uganda, Colombia, and the DR of Congo. The prevalence of political violence or internal conflict as a dominant cause of serious human rights violations differentiates these TJ contexts from the traditional ones (Budak, 2015). In these contexts, meeting the basic survival needs of victims, including access to humanitarian relief support, is critical to elicit victim participation in TJ processes (Vinck & Pham, 2008). Sharp contends that TJ is mainly concerned with the underlying politics of local and international TJ approaches and the need for greater socioeconomic justice—which he argues have been peripheral issues in TJ discourse. He adds that if dynamics producing massive human rights violations are poorly understood, creating a distorted narrative of conflict that relegates economic issues to the background, this may lead to biased policies in the wake of conflict. Similarly, several other scholars have cautioned that the field's narrow focus on retributive justice may ignore the root causes of violence and privilege civil and political rights over economic, social, and cultural rights, and by doing so, marginalizing the needs of women and people with low incomes ⁵ (Laplante, 2008; Miller, 2008; Muvingi, 2009; Nagy, 2008).

“Localizing Transitional Justice” traces how ordinary people respond to—and sometimes transform—TJ mechanisms, laying a foundation for more locally responsive approaches to social reconstruction after mass violence and egregious human rights violations. A Western understanding of an ideal type of justice has broadly defined the TJ paradigm in conflict-affected societies, leading to direct clashes between the international understanding of justice and local realities and aspirations (Mieszkalski & Zyla, 2021). As I argue elsewhere, the failure to recognize bottom-up TJ initiatives, including youth efforts in addressing gross human rights violations in contexts of ongoing violence, limits TJ's full potential to unfold in these contexts (Cirhigiri, 2022). By foregrounding the relevance of bottom-up TJ initiatives, critical TJ scholars are pushing the field toward recognizing emancipatory grassroots practices by the affected civilians in response to everyday threats to their fundamental human rights—in this case, the right to protection from physical violence.

Lastly, an increasing number of TJ scholars question TJ's linear logic and acknowledge the messiness of TJ temporalities, which are nonlinear and require the recognition of their ongoingness, multilayeredness, and multidirectional trajectory (de Haan & Destrooper, 2021). This feature of TJ is relevant for long-term protection as it posits the need for proponents of PoC to operate within multi-dimensional temporalities. It also adopts a thicker understanding of how past and present interventions overlap to address or exacerbate the root causes of historical grievances for civilian protection. The following section explores the methodological approach used for the empirical phase of the research that led to this article.

Research Method

Between May and October 2021, I conducted 40 semistructured interviews and focus group discussions with TJ, CSOs, and humanitarian actors in Kinshasa and victim groups in Goma as part of my doctoral fieldwork. Interview sites, Kinshasa and Goma, were selected with two considerations in mind: first, the resumption of TJ discussion in January 2020 among TJ experts and policymakers on a national strategy generated important tensions that needed further study. Second, Goma was selected as an interview site given its growing presence of victim initiatives working with a TJ paradigm. Participants’ selection was conducted through a rigorous and purposive sampling process. The sample comprised individuals who had directly experienced or witnessed violence, including survivors, victims’ families, and affected community members. Ethical guidelines, including informed consent, confidentiality, and respect for participants’ autonomy and agency, were followed throughout the research process. Some interviews were as short as 30 min because of respondents’ limited availability and sensitivity to the topic, while others lasted almost an hour. Due to travel restrictions posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and a volatile political environment resulting from a state of emergency in North Kivu, I could not travel to Goma during the data collection. Thus, I hired a research assistant to do the interviews in Goma. While remote data collection was possible and the only way to progress in the study, it also presented challenges, including limited internet connectivity and communication delays.

I invited respondents to describe their experiences preventing human rights abuses, prompting them to think of the challenges they faced in this endeavor. I received consent to record interviews and to take notes, which I also shared with participants afterward. None of the respondents articulated what long-term PoC meant and how to achieve it because they did not see it that way and shared that PoC is a short-term emergency matter. This question prompted my interest in further investigating the potential of the field of TJ to contribute to the formulation of long-term PoC. The interviews were conducted in French and Swahili by the Research Assistant and myself, who are fluent in both languages, and I used Nvivo to conduct a thematic analysis of the data collected.

Given the sensitivity of our conversations, most participants preferred to remain anonymous. For this purpose, I have used nonidentifiable pseudonyms in the paper. An important limitation of the paper is the scarcity of literature and references on the nexus between TJ and PoC. My identity as a Congolese researcher with years of experience working and living in eastern Congo provided some advantages and disadvantages to fieldwork. While on the one hand, I had access to a network of actors with relevant insights about TJ & PoC, which was helpful in the data collection, on the other hand, my own experiences of conflicts in this region could have interfered with objectivity in data analysis. To mitigate the risks of biases, I also received helpful feedback from my research colleagues at JusticeVisions on alignment with the broader JusticeVisions research.

Case study: Protection of Civilians in North KivuThe context of PoC in North Kivu is tightly linked with the legacies of the Belgian colonization followed by a 32-year dictatorship and the protracted violent conflicts in the DR of Congo dating from 1996. Congo conflicts are estimated to have caused the death and displacement of millions of civilians, making Congo's wars among the most destructive and disastrous since the Second World War. Over the past two decades, the North Kivu province has been the epicenter of conflicts in the DR of Congo, and it is here that the most formidable challenges to the stability and protection of civilians persist today (Stearns, 2012). The interplay of local, national, and regional dynamics has been emphasized by numerous scholarly and NGO reports—with competition for natural resources (Autesserre, 2009; Vlassenroot & Huggins, 2005) and land conflicts often pinpointed as one of the key drivers of violence and human rights abuses (Bøås & Dunn, 2014; van Acker, 2005). Since the first wave of Congo wars in 1996, the eastern Congo has seen a proliferation of local and international human rights and humanitarian organizations working on various initiatives to protect civilians. For example, the Mugunga Refugee Camp is the oldest camp initially built to welcome Rwandan refugees fleeing the 1994 Genocide. In addition, four other refugee camps have been built, namely Katale, Kahindo, Lac Vert, and Sake, jointly hosting nearly a million refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs).

Unsettled historical grievances underpinning ethnic conflicts play a crucial role in shaping the landscape of PoC in North Kivu. As noted by Taki, a TJ actor in Goma, “If there are communities that have faced persecution in the past and there has been no space or an opportunity for them to seek some form of justice, then that community is at a higher risk of committing atrocities in the future.” In the 20th century, Belgian colonial administrators relocated over 85,000 Hutu and Tutsi people from overpopulated Rwanda to the sparse Kivu provinces in Congo. In the 1960s and 1970s, various waves of Tutsis fled there to escape ethnic cleansing in Rwanda. ⁶ Although there are much more minor and more local intergroup conflicts, the most significant faultline of ethnic conflict in the eastern DR of Congo is between Rwandaphone (Hutu and Tutsi) and non-Rwandaphone (all other communities) (Mahony, 2013). Several armed groups have used these historical tensions to legitimize armed confrontations, making protecting civilians more complex. A more recent case of such renewal of violence took place in 2022 by the M23 rebels, allegedly supported by Rwanda, who disrupted the security apparatus in North Kivu as part of their strategy to force the Congolese Government to renew negotiations.

While the article does not focus on UN-related protection efforts, it is worth noting that MONUSCO, the UN peacekeeping operations in the DR of Congo, has been a critical actor involved for decades in PoC with a strong presence in the Eastern parts of the DR of Congo. Established in 1999 after signing the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement, ⁷ MONUSCO (previously known as MONUC) is the third-largest UN Peacekeeping operation with around 18,300 peacekeepers. ⁸ The UN Security Council established the Mission to support the Congolese Government in addressing civilian protection in ongoing conflicts and to prevent the repetitive violations of international law and attacks on the state's territorial integrity by armed groups(Whittle, 2015). The UN mandate included protecting civilians under threat of physical violence, disarmament, demobilization, repatriation, and reintegration of armed groups, and assisting to rebuild infrastructure in the Eastern provinces (Lake, 2014). In response to ongoing criticisms regarding its effectiveness over the past two decades in the DR of Congo in advancing PoC, the Mission is gradually rolling out its exit strategy by 2024. In this broader context, CSOs and humanitarian agencies are called upon to fill gaps in PoC during and after MONUSCO's complete exit. In this quickly changing landscape, the article suggests three relevant lessons from the field of TJ that can contribute to organizing long PoC in the DR of Congo. The following section explores these lessons and the complementarities and tensions between TJ and PoC in violent contexts.

Lessons Learned From TJ: A Pathway to Long-Term Civilian Protection

Increasingly, state and nonstate actors in the DR of Congo foreground the TJ paradigm as a preferred approach to address legacies of human rights violations against civilians and by ricochet contribute to PoC efforts. As a result, after a long period of inertia since the early failed TJ attempts in 2003, the DR of Congo seems to be reawakening to the potential of TJ to address the country's two-decade-long legacy of mass human rights violations (Arnould, 2021). In the DR of Congo, the field can be perceived as a process with multiple sets of outcomes contributing to both the short-term goals of protecting civilians (e.g., by prosecuting perpetrators of human rights abuses) as well as the long-term protection aims (e.g., by advancing needed institutional reforms to prevent the recurrence of human rights violations). Thus, in this section, I do not seek to retheorize the humanitarian concept of PoC but rather illuminate how the episteme of TJ could recast three dimensions of the PoC under the humanitarian toolkit, namely (1) accountability towards affected civilians, (2) decolonization, and (3) community-based approaches toward a long-term aim.

The paper understands long-term PoC as a process undertaken by either state or nonstate actors in contexts where state actors are inexistent or have weakened legitimacy to address the root causes of historical grievances. This process comprises initiatives that enhance criminal accountability for human rights abuses; recognize the central role of local leadership and agency in PoC, and preclude future recognition of threats to civilians’ physical safety. In terms of temporality, the added value of this lens is disrupting the dominant piecemeal orientation of PoC initiatives—mainly in the form of short-term disaster and emergency responses. The lens forces us to think of protection as a continuous process that goes beyond the immediate protection needs of civilians to address the root causes of historical grievances.

This framing hopes to contribute three ideas to the existing definitions of PoC under the humanitarian toolkit. First, by adopting a long-term lens, it underscores protection concerns overlooked in literature but which are part and parcel of the lived experiences of civilians in contexts of ongoing violence. Second, unlike perceiving the responsibility of protecting civilians as solely the State's (Labuda, 2020), the lens also allows an appraisal of community-based practices that address threats to civilian protection in the short term and long term. Third, by underscoring the prevention dimension, the definition highlights areas of intersection between the PoC literature and the field of TJ in advancing the nonrecurrence of threats to civilian protection.

Accountability Toward Civilians

TJ emphasizes holding perpetrators accountable for human rights abuses and violations. This lesson can be applied to the protection of civilians in ongoing violence by establishing mechanisms to ensure accountability for those responsible for harming civilians (Priscilla, 2011), which includes domestic or international tribunals, truth commissions, or hybrid courts that investigate and prosecute perpetrators (Robins, 2012). By pursuing criminal accountability for grave human rights abuses, TJ can send a powerful message to perpetrators that impunity will not be tolerated, thus acting as a deterrent and contributing to the overall aims of PoC. Furthermore, through institutional reforms of the justice and security sectors, the field of TJ can facilitate and strengthen the rollout of PoC and peacebuilding initiatives in contexts of volatility (Mayer-Rieckh, 2017).

By their proximity to civilians in contexts of ongoing violence, CSOs, and international humanitarian organizations are often the direct witnesses of crimes and atrocities committed against civilians. Humanitarian organizations can advance criminal accountability by denouncing, documenting (Alter et al., 2013), and reporting human rights violations to competent national and international jurisdictions and creating evidence that human rights organizations can use to amplify advocacy initiatives to prevent specific human rights violations (Posner, 2014). Jirima, a CSO actor interviewed in Goma, commented, “By denouncing human rights violations that the civilian populations endure daily, CSOs exert pressure on national authorities to increase protection for civilians and to be accountable to citizens.” Dubuet also notes that by denouncing violations, CSOs, and international humanitarian organizations can obtain, whether through dialogue or confrontation, an immediate improvement in the conditions for protecting and assisting endangered civilians.

CSOs and INGOs operating in violent contexts can also contribute to preventing threats to civilian protection by drawing national and international attention and support for targeted reforms to address specific violations affecting a vast segment of civilians (Lake, 2018). For over a decade, CSOs and rights INGOs in the DRC significantly contributed to activating accountability toward affected civilians in the DR of Congo through by using the mapping report as a basis for advocacy inititives. This report documents 617 incidents of gross human rights violations committed by armed actors between 1993 and 2003. By this paper's writing, several CSOs and humanitarian and human rights organizations are advocating for a national strategy on TJ in the DR of Congo using the Mapping report as evidence. As an advocacy instrument, the Mapping Report identifies key actors, holds them accountable, and endorses a victim-centric approach to justice and reconciliation. In the interviews, some people stressed the importance of an updated Mapping Report that would record recent serious violations and enhance the basis for carrying out a thorough Transitional Justice strategy. Nevertheless, the existing report has set a benchmark for safeguarding civilians beyond simply providing aid and addressing the root causes of their suffering.

While these nonstate actors play important roles in advancing PoC, in some cases, they may also be perpetrators of human rights violations against civilians. Thus, accountability should also apply to them. Mwavita, a research participant in Goma, observed this: “We should not quickly assume that all those supposed to help displaced civilians have good intentions. Sometimes they do the wrong things. We should keep an eye on them, too.” Through the concept of “humanitarian impunity,” Alex de Waal ⁹ surfaced the imperative for criminal accountability among CSOs and humanitarian actors, highlighting how their actions may unintentionally enable violence and suffering. Branch further examines this dynamic in relation to contemporary humanitarian interventions. By recasting accountability as a multifaceted instrument in violent contexts such as the DR of Congo, the field of TJ can also contribute to accountability among humanitarian workers (Yusuf, 2010), thus supporting the aims of long-term PoC. For example, while cases of sexual misconduct and corruption by humanitarian actors remain primarily undocumented in the DR of Congo, they ultimately chip away at civilian trust in concerned humanitarian organizations. In these contexts, the field of TJ can set guardrails to prevent costly reputational damage to PoC interventions altogether by vetting abusive individuals in humanitarian organizations and banning them.

The field of TJ can set guardrails to prevent costly reputational damage to PoC interventions altogether by vetting abusive individuals in humanitarian organizations and banning them.

Decolonization

While in TJ literature, both decolonial and community-based approaches seek to address the limitations of traditional, state-centric mechanisms that fail to meet victim needs in TJ settings, decoloniality mainly engages with the colonial and Eurocentric underpinnings of TJ at the basis of exclusion of Global South epistemologies. Mohamed Sesay's work on decolonial approaches to justice and governance shed a critical examination of how colonial legacies continue shaping contemporary power dynamics, particularly in the Global South. His scholarship primarily insists on recognizing and valorizing the epistemologies and legal traditions of non-Western societies, which are frequently marginalized or ignored in global discourses on justice (Sesay, 2021). Similarly, scholars like Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado-Torres argue that decoloniality is not just about political independence but involves challenging the dominance of Western knowledge systems and advocating for the recognition of indigenous and non-Western epistemologies.

The TJ and PoC literature strongly lean toward a Western understanding of an ideal type of justice and protection–leading to direct clashes between the international understandings and local realities and aspirations. Decolonization can contribute to long-term PoC in ongoing violence by challenging and dismantling the inherent western-centric power imbalances and oppressive structures that contribute to violence and harm. In the PoC literature, a nascent strand of scholarship focused on civilian self-protection efforts in conflict-affected societies, a growing move towards decolonizing humanitarian interventions. This body of literature provides an essential corrective to previous conceptualizations of civilian protection “as an activity done to civilians by others, as opposed to an activity done by civilians themselves” (Rhoads & Sutton, 2020). It is precisely here where the two fields of TJ and PoC intersect as they increasingly foreground local agency.

Sesay's decolonial approach also critiques the international development and governance frameworks supporting TJ initiatives. He argues that these frameworks are steeped in neoliberal ideologies that prioritize market-driven reforms and state-centric governance structures over community-centered and participatory approaches (Sesay, 2021). Funding access is also an essential component of decolonizing PoC. From the 2011 New Deal for Engagement in the Fragile States to the recent Grand Bargain, several humanitarian and donor institutions voiced the need for international cooperation to better support CSOs and international humanitarian organizations in conflict-affected contexts. Despite the Grand Bargain's recognition of the importance of enhanced support for localization, a significant gap between rhetoric and reality persists in conflict-affected contexts. The Grand Bargain's commitment to getting funding to National and local actors “as directly as possible” was subsequently watered down to include “funding to a single international aid organization (including a federated/membership organization) that reaches a local/national actor directly from that one intermediary.” This arrangement implies that globally, there is a significant decline in funding support to local CSO initiatives from 3.5% in 2016 to 2.1% in 2020. ¹⁰ The intermediary role of INGOs is perpetuated by local dependency on international support. Bridging this resource transfer gap more effectively would require decolonizing the aid infrastructure and donor practices to ensure adequate funding to advance grounded PoC initiatives.

The intermediary role of INGOs is perpetuated by local dependency on international support.

Grounded Approaches for Civilian Protection

While in TJ literature, both decolonial and community-based approaches seek to address the limitations of traditional, state-centric mechanisms that fail to meet victim needs in TJ settings, these approaches are, however, distinct in their conceptual underpinnings, their focus on power dynamics, and strategies for achieving justice. Decolonial approaches are concerned with the broader power dynamics between the Global North and the Global South, particularly how colonial histories continue to influence contemporary international relations and legal frameworks. Community-based approaches, while also critical of top-down, externally imposed TJ mechanisms, are more focused on the power dynamics within specific local contexts.

Similarly, community-based approaches in TJ and PoC recognize the power dynamics in a crisis setting and ways victimized civilians in ongoing violence develop grounded coping mechanisms to negotiate power and deal with everyday safety threats. In these settings, CSOs and humanitarian entities can advance grounded approaches for PoC by, for example, supporting civilian-established oversight mechanisms that actively engage with security actors to demand improvement in security measures. As observed by Lonza, a CSO actor interviewed in Goma, “There is a network in North Kivu, called Wish, which uses a strategy called SMS (Short Message Service) marmite whenever a Human Rights Defender (HRD) is arrested or receives threats. SMS marmite consists of finding the phone contact of key security actors in Goma and asking all Wish members to simultaneously send similar messages demanding accountability for the safety of the HRD and his loved ones.” In some cases, through this strategy, CSOs and humanitarian actors successfully secure the release of an illegally detained HRD and contribute to bridging the trust deficit between civilians and security actors.

Designing interventions based on the actual expectations of affected civilians can enhance the credibility of PoC interventions and incentivize local participation and ownership of undertaken initiatives. Grounded PoC requires CSOs and humanitarian organizations to consult with affected civilians in the predesign phase of interventions. It also necessitates a feedback loop mechanism allowing affected civilians to continuously provide input about their perceptions of the overall quality of interventions. Malkia, a CSO leader in Goma, commented, “Participation in protection humanitarian cluster meetings is one way we collaborate with INGOs and bring up voices of civilians in the debates around protection.” This feedback loop mechanism can also enhance accountability toward the affected civilians by addressing specific missteps by humanitarian and CSOs that may inadvertently cause harm to specific groups (Castle et al., 2024). For example, some groups may feel excluded from PoC processes due to a lack of information on initiatives. For PoC initiatives to achieve their long-term potential, they should level the ground of knowledge of affected civilians and ensure that all communities clearly understand what initiatives can and cannot achieve. This way also manages expectations and reduces the risks of initiatives’ unintended negative consequences.

By creating or supporting community structures that bring together historically divided ethnic groups to collaboratively address the drivers of human rights violations, CSOs and INGOs may contribute to the immediate protection of civilians and promote social cohesion.

Discussion and Conclusion

A recurring justice perception that emerged in 20 interviews was that participation in TJ in the form of group mobilization in demanding state accountability for specific human rights violations could contribute to the long-term protection of civilians trapped in violent conflicts for almost three decades. While the fields of PoC and TJ have distinct epistemes and evolution trajectories, both fields are at the core concerned with the protection of victimized civilians in crisis settings. Whether it is by developing mechanisms that foreground justice for perpetrated violations or addressing the risks of direct threats to civilian protection, the two fields seek to address challenges to civilian protection while aiming to develop measures to prevent their recurrence. However, there remains a scarcity of literature and research on the nexus between both fields. By challenging the conventional separation of these fields and arguing for a more integrated, interdisciplinary approach, this article shifts the conversation towards a more holistic understanding of how justice and civilian protection can be pursued simultaneously, ultimately contributing to sustainable peace.

In the DR of Congo, achieving justice and reconciliation is a complex task due to various factors contributing to violence against civilians, including the spillover from conflicts in neighboring countries. Addressing civilian protection in such a context requires more than immediate security measures; it requires a long-term interdisciplinary approach aimed at reconciliation and peacebuilding. Using the DRC as a case study, this article contributes to addressing this gap by examining how TJ principles, particularly under the GoNR pillar, can contribute to enhancing civilian protection in ongoing conflict scenarios. Specifically, it highlights three key aspects: accountability, decolonization, and community-based approaches, which can expand the understanding and implementation of long-term PoC. The paper argues that TJ mechanisms, like truth commissions, should be integral to PoC efforts, offering not just accountability but also the possibility of addressing the deep-rooted causes of violence. By integrating TJ into PoC, these efforts can move beyond short-term fixes to foster sustainable peace and protection.

Operationalizing long-term PoC is however challenging, as it requires a delicate balance between prioritization and sequencing of interventions among multiple actors. While in contexts of ongoing violence, PoC initiatives can be disjointed, and it may seem challenging to focus on long-term goals, ignoring underlying threats to civilian protection can undermine the legitimacy and local ownership of PoC interventions. Finally, humanitarians face a potential conflict with the Do No Harm principles when investigating and denouncing the underlying causes of human rights violations against civilians. Remaining silent may protect access to affected civilians, but not denouncing these violations can affect humanitarians’ credibility. Further research could examine how a conflict-sensitive approach to TJ and PoC integration can be carried out to ensure to address context-specific tensions in areas where TJ and PoC interventions are needed thus enriching the knowledge base on the necessity for a more intentional marriage of the two fields?