Everyday boundary making: Autochthony, land, and local citizenship debates in Eastern DR Congo

Belonging in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is negotiated through everyday practices that link land, ancestry, displacement, and local authority. This article examines how ethnicized categories are produced in routine encounters and dispute arenas rather than only through elite politics or episodes of violence. Drawing on comparative ethnography in a periurban setting near Bukavu and a rural setting in Kalehe, based on 72 interviews, observation of 18 dispute and community forums, and a bounded discourse corpus of radio, public speech, and WhatsApp materials, it analyses how people assemble and contest claims to local membership. The study shows that local citizenship is produced through practical regimes of proof in which people must demonstrate credibility via relational anchors, witnesses, documents, and moral narratives about stewardship and suffering. Belonging emerges as graded and situational rather than binary: the same person may be recognized as a church member, tenant, in-law, displaced person, or stranger depending on the arena and resource at stake. Dispute resolution forums institutionalize these claims, while rumor and media infrastructures accelerate boundary hardening or enable restraint. The article contributes to scholarship on boundary making, autochthony, and everyday bordering by showing how local citizenship is assembled through ordinary evidentiary demands and partial forms of recognition.