Kinshasa

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is widely considered the archetypical ‘predatory state’. At the national level, political elites rely on the state to enrich themselves. On a local level, civil servants ‘fend for themselves’ in the absence of a state salary. Corruption, though, is about much more than this – it is part of a broader structure of informal revenue extraction, with multiple layers of accountability, negotiation and invention. In this unique book, Titeca and Nkuku analyse these processes in detail, revealing how corruption is organised and contested in the DRC’s capital Kinshasa. Exploring a variety of ‘spaces’ within the city – from transportation- and police-services (street spaces) to businessmen and markets (market spaces) to football and bars (spaces of pleasure) – the authors shows how the various actors navigate, contest and circumvent this predatory environment. In doing so, the book not only sheds light on corruption and contestation, but also on the myriad ways in which a key African capital city itself is organised.