Effectiveness, Legitimacy and Gender-Based Crime: Statebuilding in DR Congo

• In Event: Gendered Violence

Abstract

States affected by armed conflict often seek to extend their authority by demonstrating effectiveness in resolving local crimes. However, does a state’s demonstrated effectiveness in punishing crime translate into more legitimacy in the eyes of citizens? When? And for what crimes? This paper examines perceptions of state effectiveness and legitimacy for punishing non-intimate partner rape, domestic violence and theft in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The study uses original qualitative data to raise questions about theorized relationships between state effectiveness and state legitimacy, highlighting that legitimacy is domain-specific to each crime. The paper then offers a relational theory about how crime-specific interactions with authorities moderate whether and how states garner legitimacy through justice provision. Attitudes that one should turn to the state for justice are uncorrelated with the amount of taxes given to the state (in a behavioral survey measure) unless crime-specific interactions with authorities are accounted for. The findings serve as a call for greater precision in the measurement and conceptualization of legitimacy as part of the state-building process and a bring a focus to state regulation of gender-based crimes.

Author

• Summer Lindsey, Rutgers University, New Brunswick