The Moral and Rational Inquiry of Sub-Saharan Africa’s Armed Conflicts: Wars and Peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Abstract

How do morals and rationales impact the development of Sub-Saharan Africa's armed conflicts? Built around this primary research question, this study explores the relationship between immoral and irrational actions and the development of Congolese armed conflict into a protracted, deadly, and destructive cycle of violence between 1993 and 2003. The study used grounded theory methodological processes with a social constructivist perspective on secondary data collected mainly from the United Nations report titled “DRC: Mapping Human Rights Violations 1993-2003.” The study implied moral virtue-consequentialism, rational choice theory, and a poverty-centered paradigm to induce moral and rational reasoning. The study found that subjective, objective, proactive, and extreme harmful actions by political and military agents from different belligerents during the four conflict episodes caused the escalation and highly destructive consequences. The harm-prone contexts of the conflict cultivated these harmful actions and produced multiple harming agents, resulting in the harmful development of the conflict. The study formulated these findings into a middle-range theory termed Congolese Armed Conflict Moral Chaos to explain the relationship between harmful actions, harm-prone contexts, and harming agents that resulted in multiplicity, complexity, extremity, and uncontrollability of harmful development of the conflict. The study devised a functional moral and rational compass, MORAC, that puts forth fundamental maxims and components about moral reasoning and implementation to guide actions and moral inquiry during an armed conflict, especially in a poor African country, to moderate its harmful development.

Disciplines

African Studies | Ethics and Political Philosophy | Political Science

Department

International Relations (INR)

First Advisor

Symeon Giannakos

Second Advisor

Yvan Ilunga

Date of Award

12-2024

Third Advisor

Luigi Bradizza

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

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