Power-sharing, spoilers and the regional conflict system: an analysis of the conflicts in Rwanda and in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Abstract

Power-sharing has often been used as a way to resolve complex conflicts, because through the sharing of state power it presents itself as a prominent strategy to resolve them. In Rwanda, the existence of spoilers led to the failure of the Arusha Agreement which was provided by power-sharing mechanisms, and consequently to the genocide of 1994. In addition to the impacts on the country itself, parts of the conflict crossed the borders and intensified the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, within the so-called regional conflict system in the African Great Lakes.In this sense, the proposal of this research is to understand, through the cases of Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo, how spoilers groups interfere in the performance of power-sharing agreements and, based on a sequential analysis of the facts, to establish a causal chain among spoilers, power-sharing and regional conflict system.The research will be carried out in a regional conflict systems perspective. It has a qualitative character and it will use the case study method, in which systemic analysis and process tracing will be applied as the main investigation tools. (AU)