The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding (review)

The Congo remains plagued by the deadliest violence since World War II despite intense efforts by the international community to end the bloodshed. In what became the first truly African war with the involvement of fourteen nations, the brutality of the violence in the Congo has threatened to destabilize the entire region. In The Trouble with the Congo, Séverine Auteserre looks at why, in so many cases, third party interventions fail to bring about a secure and sustainable peace. Using the Congo as a case study, Auteserre brings a keen analytic eye to the reasons for the failure of international intervention to bring about a lasting and durable peace in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This absorbing and well-researched study examines the factors that influenced major international actors like the United Nations Mission to the Congo, nongovernmental agencies, philanthropists, and diplomats to normalize the continued local violence during the three-year period that was supposed to see a transition from war to peace and democracy (2003-2006). Auteserre explores the pervasive organizational culture and mechanisms of knowledge that placed democratic elections as a primary marker of success to the detriment of conflict reconciliation at the local level.

This in-depth analysis of the failure to secure peace in the Congo is based on eighteen months of field research and over 330 interviews with diplomats, United Nations representatives, government officials, and ordinary Congolese. The Trouble with the Congo is not a condemnation of any of the international agencies. Rather, it is a critique of an organizational culture that saw macro-level or "top-down" intervention as the only legitimate sphere of influence. Focusing on the Congo, Auteserre suggests innovative ways that the international community can address war and violence to bring about a sustainable peace in Africa and beyond.

The book is comprised of six chapters. The first serves as an introduction and in it Auteserre identifies two recurrent themes: the primacy of land and other micro-level issues in causing violence and the unspeakable horrors perpetrated on the Congolese population. Chapter two gives what Auteserre considers the dominant narrative about the reasons for the violence in the Congo. The violence was understood as the result of regional and national rather than local tensions. Local violence was considered simply private and criminal activity, and, the accepted narrative claimed violence was somehow "endemic" in the Congo. These interpretations then set the stage for the international peacekeeping agenda. Chapter three then looks at the "top-down" solutions that were devised and based on the dominant narrative. Auteserre also explores the attitudes of international actors who saw the Congo as an impossible mission and then claimed that the only legitimate approach international agencies could employ had to center on interactions with regional and national leaders. Chapter four provides an alternate view of the violence from a "bottom-up" perspective. Auteserre argues that access to land and minerals together with arguments over local power interacted with national and regional tensions leading to the militarization of pre-existing antagonisms. By focusing on national and regional issues, the international community missed the opportunity to address local issues and work for locally secured peace. Chapter five looks at the reasons policy makers refused to support local conflict resolutions. Auteserre maintains that the primary mission of the UN and other international agencies became the establishment and support for institutions of government that were deemed necessary for Western-style democracy. Interviewees from the UN repeatedly objected to local conflict resolution, claiming that local conflicts were too complex and widespread and that it was impossible to devise a coherent and comprehensive strategy to address them. Despite the efforts of some agencies working at the local level, the major international actors failed to change their approach and missed the opportunity to support a "bottom-up" approach to removing the local causes of violence in the Congo and...