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

Séverine Autesserre is one of the most promising contemporary scholars focusing on the topic of international interventions in civil war. In her internationally acclaimed monograph (winner of the 2011 ISA Chadwick Alger Prize), Autesserre seeks to explain why international peacebuilding measures, including the largest U.N. peacekeeping mission to date (MONUC), failed to end large-scale violence during the alleged transition from war to peace and democracy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2003-6). Her investigation is guided by a clear and bold causal argument: international peacebuilders failed to establish sustainable peace in the Congo because they failed to acknowledge and address phenomena of local conflict and the manifestations of local violence.

Drawing from a great variety of qualitative sources, and most notably, years of ethnographic work and more than 330 interviews, Autesserre links the collective international neglect of local conflict dynamics to the presence of a dominant international peacebuilding culture, which she defines broadly as the shared set of "ideologies, rules, rituals, assumptions, definitions, paradigms, and standard operating procedures" that shape international actors' "parameters of acceptable action" in the field (11). Autesserre argues that this culture generated a widespread understanding among international actors and U.N. staff that intervention at the local level was "an ineffective, illegitimate, and unmanageable task" (220). Thus, she argues that the presence of a dominant international peacebuilding culture blocked peacebuilders from acknowledging the central role that localized conflict played in the persistence of large-scale local violence in "postconflict" Congolese society, namely the iterative and mutually reinforcing relationship between local, national, and regional conflict dynamics. Consequently, this blind spot endorsed exclusively top-down international policies that erroneously identified regional and national levels to be the only necessary and legitimate realms for international action.

The backbone of Autesserre's scholarly piece is an ambitious analytical framework that spans macro-micro levels of analysis by connecting features of the world polity to the behavior of different peacebuilding actors and organizations at the intermediate level of "the field" (26). Operating at these different levels of analysis, she identifies four central building-blocks of the dominant culture: the idea that peacebuilders work on national and regional processes, the conviction that certain strategies were conducive to "postconflict" societies, the widespread obsession with organizing democratic elections, and the view that local problems are most suitably handled by the humanitarian and development assistance community. For this reviewer, Autesserre's most remarkable contribution to the literature is her clear operationalization of the traditionally fuzzy concept of culture, which allows her meticulously to trace how a dominant international peacebuilding culture operated on the ground. Autesserre's rich ethnographic analysis successfully substantiates—with exhaustive empirical evidence—her original, and highly critical, theoretical explanations for international failures of peacebuilding. In so doing, she eloquently and illustratively bridges the gap between theory and empirics, a gap that is commonly pointed out as problematic in the contemporary "liberal peace" debate.

In the concluding chapter, Autesserre puts forward a set of policy recommendations, which aims to encourage international peacebuilding actors to develop contextually sensitive approaches that recognize the importance of local, bottom-up conflict resolution. Her focus on the international empowerment of local actors and local forms of conflict resolution mechanisms is convincing. It does, however, raise a few concerns that remain unaddressed. One such concern is the conditional nature of all international assistance: if the actions deemed appropriate by local actors clash with the intervening actors' preconceived notions of a peaceful society, would the peacebuilding community grant resources to support local ideas on how to solve local conflicts? To illustrate, Autesserre suggests that peacebuilders "should enable the population to decide how to handle war criminals" (265), yet she fails to discuss what the international community should do if local processes are deemed unethical according to the intervening party's own framework. The possibility...