Aid and armed actors: Collaboration and aid delivery in the DRC

In conflict-affected contexts, the presence of armed actors—including state security forces, international peacekeeping missions, and non-state armed groups—means that aid organisations may need to cooperate with these actors to deliver foreign aid. Yet the conditions under which this cooperation happens remain underspecified. In this article, we use novel mixed methods data from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to study these conditions. Building on qualitative interviews with Kinshasa-based aid practitioners, as well as a survey and survey experiment with Congolese provincial-level aid workers, we provide systematic evidence of the conditions under which humanitarian and development aid workers are more or less likely to collaborate with different types of armed actors across different regions of the country. We test three hypotheses: the type of armed actor, the visibility of cooperation, and the proximity to conflict. Our findings suggest that the type of armed actor and the proximity of the aid workers to conflict matter most. The public visibility of their collaboration is less important than anticipated. For those at the forefront of aid delivery, it is primarily the concrete realities and day-to-day interactions that appear to shape decision-making and behavior.