Narrowed focus: reading The trouble with the Congo by Séverine Autesserre

Abstract

Autesserre's work makes a powerful argument that a myopic institutional culture of ‘United Nations peacekeeping’ led to ignoring the critical task of local peacemaking in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). However, the logic that drove successive international attempts at peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding, from the Lusaka and Sun City processes to the more recent mediation by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, was that you could not sustainably resolve local-level conflicts in the Kivus unless you resolved the underlying disputes at the national and regional levels, which the DRC's ‘Second War’ of 1998 both symbolised and deepened. That local conflicts were not addressed earlier and more systematically may, in hindsight, have been a mistake: but it stemmed from strategic choices, not bureaucratic blindness. This notwithstanding, Autesserre's book usefully obliges us to focus on the missing local piece/peace in the complex puzzle that is peacemaking/peacekeeping/peacebuilding.