Mass violence in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is commonly approached through its visible manifestations—armed conflict, displacement, and humanitarian crisis. I argue that violence is also sustained through a less visible but equally powerful register: bureaucratic and humanitarian language. Drawing on Cultural Studies approaches to representation, mediation, and hegemony, I examine how institutional discourse transforms atrocity into administrative normalcy.

The analysis is based on interpretive discourse analysis of publicly available United Nations materials—including Security Council briefings, Group of Experts reports, MONUSCO documents, and the 2010 UN Mapping Report—alongside reports produced by international NGOs between 1996 and 2025. Rather than conducting original fieldwork or interviews, I read these materials as cultural artefacts that shape how violence is known, managed, and judged.

The repeated circulation of concepts such as stabilisation, neutralisation, incidents, and complex emergencies highlights how institutional language redistributes responsibility, pushing agency out of sight and transforming violence into an object of administration rather than political confrontation.

Conceptually, I develop dehumanisation as governance to show that language and media do not merely conceal violence but actively organise it. Through the related concept of administrative distancing, I analyse how bureaucratic practices—from reports and dashboards to metrics and algorithmic moderation—thin out responsibility and normalise silence, producing what I call a political economy of silence.

By placing Congo in dialogue with Asian and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies debates, the paper adopts a comparative perspective to trace how regimes of mediated silence recur across global conflict zones. It concludes by advancing recognition as reparation, framing visibility as a cultural and political obligation rather than a matter of humanitarian sentiment.

Authors:
Stanislas Lukusa Mufula, National Yaming Chao Tung University, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
Stanislas Lukusa Mufula is a Congolese anthropologist and PhD candidate in Social Research and Cultural Studies at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan.

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