Democratic Republic of Congo

36

The Democratic Republic of Congo is unfortunately synonymous with its dreadful past and its terrible present, despite its beauty, complex history and unachieved potential. Locked not only into its own internal troubles but also into those of the Great Lakes region, it has provided more than enough material on forced migration, violence and political quagmires for the latest issue of FMR.

While the articles contained in this issue of FMR make grim reading, they also offer glimmers of hope for better outcomes, at least potentially, alongside analysis of how and why these things have been happening. Authors come from Congolese civil society, UN agencies and NGOs, Congolese and donor governments, and international research – and include articles by the former UN Relief Coordinator John Holmes and the former Humanitarian Coordinator in DRC Ross Mountain. This issue also contains a further seven articles on other forced migration-related subjects.

 

It will be published in English, French and Spanish, with a slightly shorter edition in Arabic.

We encourage you to circulate or reproduce any articles in their entirety but please cite ‘Forced Migration Review issue 36 http://www.fmreview.org/DRCongo/

If you usually receive a print copy of FMR, you do not need to request this issue unless you require multiple copies. (FMR issue 36 will be distributed together with an FMR special supplement on HIV/AIDS, security and conflict, which is already online at http://www.fmreview.org/AIDS/.)

If you do NOT usually receive a print copy of FMR and would like to receive a copy of FMR issue 36 for your organisation, or multiple copies for distribution to partners and policy/decision-makers or for use at conferences/workshops, please contact the Editors at fmr@qeh.ox.ac.uk. We will need your full postal address and details of how many copies (in which language/s) you require.

While we want to share the contents of this issue as widely as possible, we ask you to think carefully about how many print copies you need; please remember that it is available online, that print copies can be shared, and that printing and postage use up more resources than purely money. 

We would like to thank the following donors for providing funding specifically for this issue: Concern Worldwide, Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT), Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC/NRC), International Alert, the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (DRC office), Refugees International and UNHCR’s Regional Bureau for Africa.

You may also be interested in the Refugee Studies Centre report Dynamics of conflict and forced migration in the Democratic Republic of Congo (rapport en français), which summarises a two day experts workshop on conflict and forced migration in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Fifty practitioners, academics and policymakers from the DRC and beyond explored the relation between conflict, displacement, the return of populations and the interaction between armed actors and civilians.