"To successfully monitor and counter hate speech, we must first identify specific terms and define the social and political context that makes them offensive, inflammatory, and potentially dangerous. To that end, PeaceTech Lab has pioneered a process to identify and contextualize inflammatory language that can lead to violence, and has a growing portfolio of hate speech lexicons that can be used by civil society organizations, social media and technology companies, and other interested individuals and organizations to better identify, track, combat, and remove hate speech. The Lab is partnering with a growing network of local organizations that work to address hateful content and that seek to curb the potential for violence. This lexicon investigates the landscape of hate speech and narratives in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since 2018 there has been an uptick in violence in the country, with over 140 armed groups and militias (based in the DRC as well as in neighbouring countries) currently active in the DRC. There are more than 5 million people living in the country who are either internally displaced or who are refugees from neighbouring countries. Most recently, in the wake of the long-delayed December 2018 presidential election, tensions have increased between contenders and their followers, exacerbating old and new conflicts between ethnic communities and/or political groups. In this complex and multilayered context, hate speech in the DRC, as in other contexts, is used as a tool to achieve political and material ends (e.g., polarizing opinions, dehumanizing opponents in local or regional conflicts, exacerbating feelings of frustration and grievance, and calling for violent action). A steady increase in internet penetration as well as growth in the number of social media users are expected to increase the frequency of hate speech across all online platforms. This lexicon aims to serve as an initial guide to specific words and phrases identified during a finite period of time in the DRC." (Introduction)