Introduction

Since the early 1990s, resource conflict, state failure and criminal violence have dominated the security agenda of many African countries. These emerging threats challenge the traditional notion of security as the protection of territorial integrity, stability and vital interests, mostly through military means. Rather than originating from other states, the above security threats come from within the state. They involve state and non-state (security) actors as main perpetrators of violence, and tend to emerge from adverse socio-economic conditions and national political crises (IPA 2006). The ‘developmental’ underpinnings of emerging security threats are increasingly understood and integrated in multilateral peacekeeping missions and peacebuilding activities that are spearheaded by the United Nations and other western donors. For instance, there has been much attention paid to the role transparent and formalized resource governance can play in preventing conflict and promoting post-conflict recovery, notably through generating official state revenues (EITI 2010; UNEP 2009). Yet there has been relatively little analysis of (1) how resource governance can be improved to enhance security and development for communities at the production level and (2) how post-conflict resource governance, as a development priority, relates to and depends on more conventional security sector governance.

This chapter considers the mutual interaction, or nexus, between security and development through the lens of resource conflict and post-conflict resource governance in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).