The politics of everyday policing in Goma: the case of the Anti-gang

This article takes an ethnographic look at the phenomenon of the Anti-gang, a rather ambiguous everyday policing actor in the city of Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu, which finds itself at the very heart of the over two decades old protracted armed conflict in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Like other everyday policing actors in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, the Anti-gang of Goma defy simple categorization. They are rather situated in-between categories: state/citizen, public/private, formal/informal and crime fighters/criminals. They are thus liminal subjects who embody the blurriness of these supposedly binary categories’ boundaries. Sometimes they can be framed as a vigilante organization; at other times, or indeed at the same time, they can be depicted as a criminal youth gang, a delegated municipal policing – or even a paramilitary – unit. The aim of this article is, then, not to pin them down in one of these categories, but to examine what kind of politics their everyday practices produce. The main argument is that their in-between position is what makes them politically significant, and at the same time stuck in a liminal political space.