Power has long been wielded with blunt force in Democratic Republic of Congo. That proved to be an ever-present challenge when a Belgian photographer, Thomas de Wouters, sought to document a growing youth movement devoted to nonviolence.

When he arrived there a year ago, street clashes had just left more than 50 people dead in the troubled Central African nation after opposition groups protested President Joseph Kabila’s efforts to extend his rule for an unconstitutional third term. Mr. Kabila’s mandate was about to expire, and security forces were deployed to suppress dissent.

“The tension was really high,” said Mr. de Wouters, who had to elude state intelligence services arresting activists. “Everything had to be secure and discreet. For the first five or six days, I just ended up doing clandestine meetings and interviews in different places. I didn’t take any pictures.”

Eventually, he earned the trust of members of the youth group Lutte pour le Changement (Struggle for Change, or LUCHA), a self-declared nonviolent citizens movement formed in 2012 to challenge the existing political disorder in a vast and chaotic nation that has teetered for decades on the brink of collapse.

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Brutal Belgian colonists first plundered Congo’s rubber and used slave labor to build railways that have since fallen into disrepair. Then came the kleptocratic dictator Mobutu Sese Seko who bled state coffers dry during his 32-year rule. Over the past two decades, an equally corrupt and dysfunctional government has been locked in conflict with an assortment of militias that split the country into fiefdoms. They live by the gun while battling for control over natural resources, including gold, diamonds and timber. Since 1994, a staggering five million people have died in Congo’s conflict, many of them violently, but most from deprivation, hunger and disease.

Washington has warned President Kabila that Congo must hold long-delayed elections by the end of 2018, or the vote will lose international support.

But Congo’s population long ago lost trust in any level of government or the international community’s ability to untangle Congo’s constant state of disaster despite the world’s largest and most expensive U.N. peacekeeping mission.

Against this backdrop, Mr. de Wouters set about documenting the efforts of LUCHA, one of several grassroots movements that have emerged in West Africa, including Senegal and Burkina Faso. These groups promote civic engagement and youth mobilization and form strategies on how to peacefully challenge the state’s failure to provide basic services like running water, health care, education and security. Social media is an essential tool for spreading ideas and expanding their reach. LUCHA operates as a non-hierarchical, decentralized network of cells, preventing anyone within the movement from becoming too important.

“Normally when that happens to a movement, the government tries to stop them or corrupt them, but this way they can’t,” Mr. de Wouters, 47, said by phone from Brussels.

The photographer was not interested in making the kind of dramatic images that often dominate news coverage from the republic. Instead, he focused on the daily lives of LUCHA members, using square format black and white film to document their meetings, family lives and day jobs in and around the eastern city of Goma, where a handful of activists founded the group five years ago. LUCHA now says it has some 1,000 members, most in their 20s and 30s, in 18 Congolese cities.

Mr. de Wouters’s images show some protest marches and arrests (Slides 4 and 5), but it’s the quieter, mundane moments that linger: a man speaking into a microphone in a broadcast studio; activists sitting around a low table in a storeroom surrounded by sacks; people on the streets collecting water, or in gardens planting vegetables (Slide 6). The timeless quality of the images reflects a country’s almost hopeless struggle to move forward despite a wealth of natural resources and billions of dollars of foreign investment.

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Congo has spawned countless “movements” since its independence in 1960, but few have brought anything other than more instability. But for Mr. de Wouters, LUCHA’s commitment to peaceful dialogue represents a generational shift. And their bravery in the face of violent repression and frequent detention without trial offers hope. Ultimately, Mr. de Wouters said, it’s up to the Congolese to find solutions to the country’s complex problems.

“My point is that maybe this is the start of some real change,” he said. “When I see them, I start to believe it’s possible.”

Finbarr O’Reilly was based in Congo and neighboring Rwanda from 2001 to 2005 as a newswire correspondent and photographer. He spent 12 years in West Africa covering the continent and is a co-author of “Shooting Ghosts, A U.S. Marine, a Combat Photographer, and Their Journey Back from War” (Viking 2017). Follow him on Instagram and Twitter.

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