Author: Jason K. Stearns Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 069122451X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
Why violence in the Congo has continued despite decades of international intervention Well into its third decade, the military conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been dubbed a “forever war”—a perpetual cycle of war, civil unrest, and local feuds over power and identity. Millions have died in one of the worst humanitarian calamities of our time. The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name investigates the most recent phase of this conflict, asking why the peace deal of 2003—accompanied by the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world and tens of billions in international aid—has failed to stop the violence. Jason Stearns argues that the fighting has become an end in itself, carried forward in substantial part through the apathy and complicity of local and international actors. Stearns shows that regardless of the suffering, there has emerged a narrow military bourgeoisie of commanders and politicians for whom the conflict is a source of survival, dignity, and profit. Foreign donors provide food and urgent health care for millions, preventing the Congolese state from collapsing, but this involvement has not yielded transformational change. Stearns gives a detailed historical account of this period, focusing on the main players—Congolese and Rwandan states and the main armed groups. He extrapolates from these dynamics to other conflicts across Africa and presents a theory of conflict that highlights the interests of the belligerents and the social structures from which they arise. Exploring how violence in the Congo has become preoccupied with its own reproduction, The War That Doesn't Say Its Name sheds light on why certain military feuds persist without resolution.
Author: Justin Podur Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030446999 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 400
Book Description
This book examines US interventions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda -- two countries whose post-independence histories are inseparable. It analyzes the US campaigns to prevent Patrice Lumumba from turning the DR Congo into a sovereign, democratic, prosperous republic on a continent where America’s ally apartheid South Africa was hegemonic; America’s installation of and support for Mobutu to keep the region under neo-colonial control; and America’s pre-emption of the Africa-wide movement for multiparty democracy in Rwanda and Zaire in the 1990s by supporting Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). In addition, the book discusses the concepts of African development, democracy, genocide, foreign policy, and international politics.
Author: Gerard Prunier Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199743991 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 570
Book Description
The Rwandan genocide sparked a horrific bloodbath that swept across sub-Saharan Africa, ultimately leading to the deaths of some four million people. In this extraordinary history of the recent wars in Central Africa, Gerard Prunier offers a gripping account of how one grisly episode laid the groundwork for a sweeping and disastrous upheaval. Prunier vividly describes the grisly aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, when some two million refugees--a third of Rwanda's population--fled to exile in Zaire in 1996. The new Rwandan regime then crossed into Zaire and attacked the refugees, slaughtering upwards of 400,000 people. The Rwandan forces then turned on Zaire's despotic President Mobutu and, with the help of a number of allied African countries, overthrew him. But as Prunier shows, the collapse of the Mobutu regime and the ascension of the corrupt and erratic Laurent-D?sir? Kabila created a power vacuum that drew Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and other African nations into an extended and chaotic war. The heart of the book documents how the whole core of the African continent became engulfed in an intractible and bloody conflict after 1998, a devastating war that only wound down following the assassination of Kabila in 2001. Prunier not only captures all this in his riveting narrative, but he also indicts the international community for its utter lack of interest in what was then the largest conflict in the world. Praise for the hardcover: "The most ambitious of several remarkable new books that reexamine the extraordinary tragedy of Congo and Central Africa since the Rwandan genocide of 1994." --New York Review of Books "One of the first books to lay bare the complex dynamic between Rwanda and Congo that has been driving this disaster." --Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times Book Review "Lucid, meticulously researched and incisive, Prunier's will likely become the standard account of this under-reported tragedy." --Publishers Weekly
Author: Jason Stearns Publisher: PublicAffairs ISBN: 1610391594 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 372
Book Description
A "meticulously researched and comprehensive" (Financial Times) history of the devastating war in the heart of Africa's Congo, with first-hand accounts of the continent's worst conflict in modern times. At the heart of Africa is the Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, bordering nine other nations, that since 1996 has been wracked by a brutal war in which millions have died. In Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, renowned political activist and researcher Jason K. Stearns has written a compelling and deeply-reported narrative of how Congo became a failed state that collapsed into a war of retaliatory massacres. Stearns brilliantly describes the key perpetrators, many of whom he met personally, and highlights the nature of the political system that brought these people to power, as well as the moral decisions with which the war confronted them. Now updated with a new introduction, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters tells the full story of Africa's Great War.
Author: Filip Reyntjens Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 0521111285 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 345
Book Description
This book examines a decade-long period of instability, violence and state decay in Central Africa from 1996, when the war started, to 2006, when elections formally ended the political transition in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A unique combination of circumstances explain the unravelling of the conflicts: the collapsed Zairian/Congolese state; the continuation of the Rwandan civil war across borders; the shifting alliances in the region; the politics of identity in Rwanda, Burundi and eastern DRC; the ineptitude of the international community; and the emergence of privatized and criminalized public spaces and economies, linked to the global economy, but largely disconnected from the state - on whose territory the "entrepreneurs of insecurity" function. As a complement to the existing literature, this book seeks to provide an in-depth analysis of concurrent developments in Zaire/DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda in African and international contexts. By adopting a non-chronological approach, it attempts to show the dynamics of the inter-relationships between these realms and offers a toolkit for understanding the past and future of Central Africa.
Author: J. Clark Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1403982449 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 266
Book Description
The African Stakes in the Congo War analyzes the Congo conflict by looking at the roles played by various states and factors in the conflict. Part I introduces the conflict by showing the historical and regional context of the war. Part II examines those states and groups that worked to support the Kaliba regime; Part III examines the rebel groups working to overthrow Kabila and those intervening on their behalf. Part IV looks at the role of supposedly neutral states such as South Africa and looks at the social and economic effects of the war by examining trans-state factors such as rebel groups, arms trading, and economic consequences. The collection includes both African and US/UK scholars, and covers the recent transfer of power from Laurent to Joseph Kabila.
Author: Séverine Autesserre Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 0521191009 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 345
Book Description
The Trouble with the Congo suggests a new explanation for international peacebuilding failures in civil wars. Drawing from more than 330 interviews and a year and a half of field research, it develops a case study of the international intervention during the Democratic Republic of the Congo's unsuccessful transition from war to peace and democracy (2003-2006). Grassroots rivalries over land, resources, and political power motivated widespread violence. However, a dominant peacebuilding culture shaped the intervention strategy in a way that precluded action on local conflicts, ultimately dooming the international efforts to end the deadliest conflict since World War II. Most international actors interpreted continued fighting as the consequence of national and regional tensions alone. UN staff and diplomats viewed intervention at the macro levels as their only legitimate responsibility. The dominant culture constructed local peacebuilding as such an unimportant, unfamiliar, and unmanageable task that neither shocking events nor resistance from select individuals could convince international actors to reevaluate their understanding of violence and intervention.
Author: Tom Cooper Publisher: Helion and Company ISBN: 1909384658 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 80
Book Description
Great Lakes Holocaust' is the first in two volumes covering military operations in Zaire - as the Congo was named from 1971 until 1997 - and the Democratic Republic of Congo at the turn of the 21st century. This volume explores the events of the 1980s and 1990s in Rwanda and Uganda, which eventually spilled over the borders into Zaire, resulting in one of the worst tragedies ever to befall an African region. The narrative traces the ascent of crucial Rwandan, Congolese and Ugandan military and political figures, and their connections within influential business and political circles in and outside Africa. It examines the build-up of the Zairian military under the government of Dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in the 1960s and 1970s, and provides an in-depth study into reasons for its near-collapse in the early 1990s. The military build-up of Rwanda and Uganda is discussed in detail as is their planning for operations inside Zaire, and the global logistic tail that provided the Rwandan military, particularly, but also most of its opponents, with a capability of not only waging war beyond their borders, but - in the case of Rwanda - of invading and practically conquering a country the size of Western Europe or the USA east of the Mississippi. The book further traces the covert Rwandan military actions inside Zaire, initially run under the guise of an insurgency by one of Zaire's ethnic minorities; how ever-deepening Rwandan operations inside Zaire were practically dictated by concentrations of Hutu refugees; and how the insurgency - led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila who was installed by key Rwandan and Ugandan military and political figures - developed into an organization that sought autonomy from the military and political dictates of Rwanda, in turn delivering a direct reason for the Second Congo War which was fought from 1998-2003.
Author: Philip G. Roessler Publisher: ISBN: 0190864559 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 519
Book Description
An account of the AFDL's rise in 1996, crushing the dictatorship within Zaire/Congo and their subsequent collapse only months later as the Pan-Africanist alliance fell apart
Author: Jason K. Stearns
Author: Justin Podur
Author: Gerard Prunier
Author: Jason Stearns
Author: Thomas Turner
Author: Filip Reyntjens
Author: J. Clark
Author: Séverine Autesserre
Author: Tom Cooper
Author: Philip G. Roessler