Youth Resistance and Hybrid Governance in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Comparative Insights from Kamuena Nsapu, Mobondo, and the Force du Progrès

Since 2016, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has witnessed the rise of youth-led mobilizations that reveal profound transformations in political authority, security, and legitimacy. Drawing on comparative field research conducted between 2019 and 2024, this article examines three distinct yet emblematic cases — the Kamuena Nsapu insurgency in Kasaï, the Mobondo militias in Mai-Ndombe and adjacent provinces, and the Force du Progrès in Kinshasa — to understand how Congolese youth reinterpret order and citizenship in a context of state fragility. Using the conceptual lenses of hybrid governance, twilight institutions, and resistant citizenship, the article explores how these movements operate as mechanisms of contestation and, in some cases, of localized order production. The article does not flatten the substantive differences between an armed insurgency, an ethnically-mobilized militia, and a politically-affiliated urban youth structure: the analytical grid reveals not a single logic of youth resistance but a heterogeneous spectrum, ranging from insurrectional violence to controversial partisan mobilization, with very different normative implications. Drawing on the historical and ethnographic monograph of Mai-Ndombe coordinated by Jean Omasombo Tshonda for the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren), the article also shows that the Mobondo conflict cannot be understood without reference to longstanding structural tensions between customary and statutory authority over land and revenue, tensions whose violent expression in Yumbi in 2018 and in Kwamouth from 2022 onward was anticipated by Congolese scholarship. By taking these heterogeneities seriously, the article contributes to debates on African political orders beyond the dichotomy of state and society, while resisting any romanticization of violence or partisan instrumentalization.