This paper takes an in-depth look at peacekeeping camp space through the lens of everyday life and interrogate the ways in which peacekeepers make their camp dwellings into spaces for leisure and security. Overlooked by understandings of camp spaces, the anthropology of aid, and political critiques of liberal internationalism in the Congolese context, the urban camp spaces that house UN peacekeepers largely remain a mystery to citizens, outsiders, and academics alike. While much is written about peacekeeping operations and the politics that underpin them, much less is known about the mental, physical, and social spaces that “blue helmets” themselves inhabit. Furthermore, the paper will explore the interstices of camp and city space to better understand how camp space relates to encounters and distanciations between peacekeeping battalions and their Congolese neighbors in everyday (rather than operational) ways and how those practices create and transform social and physical space in the provincial capital of Goma.
This unconventional angle towards peacekeeping as a lifeworld and the city as an object to be made and re-made by the presence of camps conceptualizes peacekeepers themselves as social actors, rather than traditional readings that analyze them almost exclusively as combattants. While everyday life in the urban DR Congo, rather than of the urban Congolese is prioritized in such a reading, an analysis of foreign soldiers’ imaginations, expectations, and impressions of their new “home” environment reveal insights into how certain Congolese everydays become visible and legible to foreign contingents living in the urban Congo.
It is through these exchanges that I argue that a very specific type of “worlding” is occurring in Eastern Congolese cities such as Goma. Social spaces created by the urban everyday encounters and distanciations between members of peacekeeping contingents and Goma residents therefore challenges traditional readings of the African city, of city space versus camp space, and of sociality in precarious cities. The paper is based on nine months of field research in camp and urban spaces in Goma and draws from participant-observation of everydays among members of six different peacekeeping forces and among Gomatracien-ne-s.