Ethical perspectives on mining-induced dislocations in Eastern Congo

Abstract

It might be unusual to identify the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as a country where expulsions put at flagrant risk thousands of small farmers to make way for economic projects or natural resources extraction, as is the case in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, India, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. The lack of documentation and data greatly contributes to silencing the victims of dislocations in Eastern Congo. This research, therefore, voices six critical claims by raising the ethical question: how can Christian ethics—in the only African country with the greatest proportion (43.2 million) of baptized Catholics—humanize involuntary displacement and resettlement of communities? While the “resource curse theory” has revealed the challenges of a country riddled with economic constraints, political instability, and mining-induced conflicts, this research proposes the “protological ethics of land” as one approach to dislocations in the era of extractive industries.