As pointed out in numerous studies, juridical sovereignty is a serious impediment to stateness and political development in the DRC. Consider this from Christoph Vogel and Jason Stearns and African Affairs:

The most important belligerent in the Congo is the government itself: a large part of the FARDC’s roughly 130,000 troops are deployed in the Kivus, controlling key mining areas, towns and roads. Yet, it does not behave like a Hobbesian Leviathan, squashing competitors to impose control over territory. Instead, the relationship between the army and armed groups often resembles symbiosis: many armed groups, even those fighting the FARDC, retain close ties with army officers and politicians, who are intent on bolstering their own power bases and protection rackets. Much as during the late Mobutu period, instead of being a liability, ‘weak sovereignty has become a kind of resource, which continues to reproduce the state as a lame but living Leviathan’. This duality also applies to the security services as ‘involuted mechanisms, mainly preoccupied with their own reproduction’, even as they erode their own legitimacy. Such a conceptualization alters rationalist assumptions of civil war, as well as those of most foreign donors, insofar as they imagine a state that wants to defeat its opponents.The Congolese government, however, has shown little interest in ending peripheral wars that do not threaten its survival. This does not make it less rational: it has privileged maintaining patronage networks—some of which incorporate its opponents—over the security of its citizens, and elite survival over institutional reform. Overall, these logics have emerged incrementally as various peace deals and integration efforts created deeply factionalized security services. Kinshasa then decided to use that as a means to distribute patronage and reward loyalty, instead of instilling discipline and monopolizing violence through reform, which could create a backlash within the senior officer corps.

The paper also has some great background details on the international dimension of the conflicts in eastern DRC.

Here’s the explainer for the title of this post.