Josaphat Musamba

• Researcher at Research Group on Conflict and Human Security

Researching contemporary warfare requires attention to digital connectivity in contexts of crisis and conflict. This article traces the evolution of information warfare with a focus on the digitization, democratization and polarization of conflict-related communication and discourse. We argue that information warfare amplifies with the advent of so...

This report discusses the way in which climate change effects play out locally in South Kivu’s Ruzizi Plain, and how they interact with, add to, or alter existing conflict dynamics in this territory. It has found that both sudden onset climate change impacts, such as flooding, and slow onset impacts, such as drought and changing vegetation patterns...

Scholarly engagement with ethics, epistemologies and positionalities dilemmas in conflict research is marked by a disconnect between self-referential debates in the Ivory Tower and the very places research takes place. If there is reflection on foreign researchers, research brokers or research participants, accounts of genuinely collaborative work...

This article discusses the social mobility of combatants and introduces the notion of circular return to explain their pendular state of movement between civilian and combatant life. This phenomenon is widely observed in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where Congolese youth have been going in and out of armed groups for several decades...

Numerous initiatives are currently trying to reform eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo's (DRC) ill-reputed artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector through formalisation, traceability, and certification of the region's trade in tantalum, tin, and tungsten (3T). While this ethically driven impetus derives from consumer pressure following...

Security sector reform has been a central component of post-conflict reconstruction and development programmes, and the restoration of state authority since the 1990s. However, these reforms have rarely been successful in the long run. In the DRC, police reform has been a staple of statebuilding and governance strengthening efforts. Despite some re...

Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo's (DRC) artisanal mining sector is often linked to the violent conflicts that have beset Central Africa for over two decades. While many analyses emphasise its ‘criminal’ and ‘illegal’ nature, less attention has been paid to the ambiguity of this economy, most prominently incarnated by the intermediate miner...

For decades, the countries of the Great Lakes region of Africa have struggled to work through a complex set of dynamics that fuel insecurity and inequality. Politically, the ‘Great Lakes’ usually refers to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda, even though, geographically, it applies to Kenya and Tanzania as well. Thes...

In the past two decades numerous academic studies have focused on artisanal mining governance in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Nevertheless, researchers, policy-makers and organizations that debate or engage in reforming the artisanal mining (ASM) sector in the region are often unaware of local terminology, which somet...