Within the context of the political arena's institutionalization by the nation-state, the management and scholarly construction of ethnicity strip this modern solidarity of its constituent subjectivities. The nation-state, while setting itself the task of merging ethnicities within the nation, institutionalizes and perpetuates ethnicity. This ethnicity becomes a form of unfulfilled nationalism, a nationalism without a state, or even an initial element of the nation, necessary but insufficient in the absence of the state. We intend in this chapter to analyze the use of ethnicity to frame contemporary movements that challenge the state monopoly of sovereignty, movements that, in striving to achieve a right to self-governance in the political arena, eventually help civil society to emerge from this arena and rebuild the state. A few general introductory comments are necessary before presenting the transformation of student organizations, in Lubumbashi of the 1980s, into openly political movements, and the transformation of ethnic associations, in Kivu of the 1990s, into movements for territorial self-defense of the locally absent nation-state.

On State and Ethnicity

Our account stresses three characteristics of the nation-state that are particularly important in the post-colonial context:

1. (i) Even if the nation, in the historical and Western sense of the term, does not necessarily constitute the operational requirements of the contemporary state, the internal criteria of the global inter-state system introduce an equation of the state and the nation as a foundational criterion of legitimacy. A state able to demonstrate this equation enjoys greater legitimacy both with international organizations that make the system function, and with international public opinion. The modern nation is a realm of memory (Nora, 1997), European first, Western later. The memory of modern politics cannot escape the nation represented as people, as race, as language, the uniqueness of which gives the state its singularity in its universality.

2. (ii) The standards of the inter-state political system make (or at least made until a few years ago) stability and the precise definition of borders a condition of the full enjoyment of sovereignty. A state exercises its prerogative within a territory delimited by internationally recognized borders and populated predominantly by a single nation. The primacy of the nation over ethnic groups thus constitutes the condition of state sovereignty.