My recent "intellectual" (autistic) fixation has been the war in the eastern DRC. You could easily spend years trying to understand this conflict and still not get to the bottom of it, but here's an incredibly brief summary. Rwanda supports an army of predominantly Tutsi rebels in the eastern Congo. This region also plays host to an extremist Hutu militia which the Congolese Tutsi regard, not without reason, as an existential threat. The Rwandan backed rebels fight against the Hutu militiamen, and also against the Congolese government, who they consider unsympathetic to their plight. The latest incarnation of this rebel force is called the M23 and they have captured two large cities in the Kivu region, which is the part of the Congo bordering Rwanda and their allies Uganda. The morality of all this is, needless to say, very grey. It can be argued that the M23 have the right to defend themselves against proven génocidaires who would exterminate the Congolese Tutsi in a heartbeat if they had the chance. From this point of view their fight against the government is also justifiable, given the continual failure of Kinshasa to eliminate Hutu extremism. The opposing view is that the M23 are nothing more than a Tutsi self-interest group, fighting for control over the vast mineral wealth of the eastern DRC with the objective of enriching themselves and their Rwandan paymasters. From this perspective the Hutu extremists are an irrelevant hangover from the 90s, a phony excuse for an illegal war against a legitimate government. In such a moral quagmire, one would hope that a Western academic would be even-handed and cautious in parsing out right from wrong. Enter Dr. Bojana Coulibaly [1], "Researcher in Critical Discourse and Conflict Analysis", and African Language Program Manager at Harvard University. Now I don't know exactly what Critical Discourse is, but I'm pretty sure it isn't giving softball interviews to leaders of ethnic militias [2]. I also don't think it means running interference for Paul Kagame, a repressive dictator [3]. It isn't surprising when we see this sort of partisanship from academics regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict, because of its immediate relevance to Western geopolitics and because of the ideological prevelance of Zionism. However, it is stark to see such a blatant propagandist hold a seemingly prestigious academic position, when the propaganda in question is for a conflict so far removed from Western political aims. I suppose this is a natural consequence of freedom of expression and of the right of academics to forcefully express their points of view. But it leaves me depressed about the state of scholarship. I do not ask for scholars to be politically neutral, but it seems desirable that they maintain a certain level of remove from the political trenches. After all, isn't that what 'critical thinking' is supposed to mean? [1] https://x.com/CoulibalyBojana [2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/1/we-are-waging-an-existential-war-m23s-bertrand-bisimwa-on-drc-conflict [3] https://x.com/CoulibalyBojana/status/1800879996946248156 (cross posted from rsp: https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/1jb99xf)