This book explores the instability of the African postcolonial state and demonstrates that such a fundamental crisis can be solved only through discourses and practices that are designed beyond the Westphalian model of the modern state and out of the neo-patrimonialistic system of African governance. The challenge of instability will not be overcome by rebuilding the African nation-state undermined by social contradictions and complex emergencies; rather stability will be achieved by opening a public space of agonistic democracy that is supported mainly by an overlapping consensus on justice. The author argues that by reading critically, the African philosophy of solidarity is contradicted by structural violence and inequality. The political instrumentalization of kinship provokes the exclusion of minorities, the marginalization of masses, and the instability of the entire society. Governance is reduced to mere conflict management. The solution of legitimate violence becomes another version of the problem of institutional incapacity. The author's contention is people are the ultimate and permanent agents of stability, and the ground of stability must not be a strong state, but the politics of reciprocity and union among people that implies a sense of justice in the power sharing and in the decision making process.

Can religion help promote human security in war-torn country (like the Democratic Republic of the Congo)? Religion, I suggest, as a set of symbolic forms, can empower a people's action by giving them the tools to overcome oppression. I attempt to demonstrate it at three different levels. First, I analyze the current situation of the Congolese People entangled in the web of foreign domination, regional invasion and local oppression. Second, through an interpretative reflection on resistance, I show how religion can be a process of conversion from impoverishment to freedom and self- reliance. And third, at the anthropological level, I argue that the imbedded poor sense of the self and the social imagination of the Congolese can be renewed and reformed by an updated reflection on religion. It is my hope that this reflection can contribute to rejuvenate the transformative hope of a people for whom I have so much love.