Parapluies politiques: the everyday politics of private security in the Democratic Republic of Congo

This chapter explores the politics of everyday private security provision in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It rst provides an overview of the private security sector in the DRC, to then provide a discussion of the rise of the sector, and subsequently situate it within the broader politics of everyday security provision by picking out and articulating some of the threads that make up the intricate fabric of Congo’s security multiverse. It puts forward the premise that private security provision is a speci c instantiation of a broader web of productive entanglements between state and society in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this web of associations, the very notions of public and private become subverted and tangled in a complex choreography of security actors at the centre of Congo’s speci c patterns of order-making and accumulation. In order to advance this premise, the exploration of private security provision in the DRC must be premised on, and articulated within, the broader everyday politics of security provision in the country. While for semantic reasons alone private security provision might be considered in opposition to public security, as we will see, this a priori is partially substituted for its opposite in the everyday politics of security provision in the Congo.