Ever since Adam Hochschild wrote in 1998 that the killings and excess deaths in King Leopold II’s Congo Free State (1885-1908), though of genocidal proportions, did not, “strictly speaking,” constitute genocide, the debate his words sparked has not abated. Historians and others have embraced or denounced the proposition that what occurred in the Congo Free State during the 33 years of its legal existence, 1885-1908, was, in fact, genocidal. Officially sanctioned colonial slaughter had many names: military (in the course of war), pacifying, punitive, retaliatory, and even salutary, to teach the colonized a lesson. At times, colonial governments killed subject peoples to eliminate groups that were deemed incorrigible. The question of intent has a strange role in the study of the pace, scale, and nature of the Congo killings, which were simultaneously genocidal, exterminationist, and the unfortunate result of a highly lethal form of economic exploitation. The logic of the system of rule and economic exploitation relentlessly tended toward atrocity and murder. Whether intentional or not, the slaughter did not end until the Congo Free State itself did, and its long-term effects reverberated for many years thereafter.

Ethical quandaries – such as justice and equity for under-represented communities, treatment of animals in laboratory and field research, and editing the genomes of plants, animals, and humans – are becoming ever more insistent in socio-environmental research. Accordingly, socio-environmental research requires that natural and social scientists become conversant with the humanities and that humanists actively engage, in accessible terms, the conceptual and ethical concerns arising in the sciences. Research methods in the humanities differ – where scholars begin with a thesis instead of a hypothesis – from those in the natural and social sciences. While the methodological differences between research in the humanities and the sciences render interdisciplinary cooperation and even communication between these two broad types of inquiry difficult, this section draws attention to the important contributions that ethical, religous, and historical approaches have made to understanding the reciprocal relationships between society and environment. These contributions range from scholars such as Aldo Leopold, Lynn White, and William Cronon to Vandana Shiva, Leonardo Boff, and Gregory Cajete.

Whilst the role of the UN and the institutional space it opened for staging the Congo crisis are undoubtedly important for international law, this chapter focuses primarily on the political event of Lumumba’s 1961 assassination. Lumumba became the site of extensive Cold War anxieties and postcolonial aspirations, as an embodiment of the communist threat to some and of a pan-African future to others. His death provoked the ascription of an excess of meaning to a single politician, a victim standing metonymically for the broader violation of Congolese sovereignty. Both larger than life as a postcolonial martyr and overdetermined as a communist, Lumumba was a contested figure in the Cold War political imaginary.