The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding. By Séverine Autesserre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 311 pp., $28.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-52-115601-1).

Abstract

The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding. By Autesserre Severine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 311 pp., $28.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-52-115601-1). The Trouble with the Congo by Severine Autesserre is a timely addition to the peacebuilding literature. Autesserre explores a topic that has been largely neglected by policymakers and international relations theorists: the role of micro-level tensions and local violence in undermining international peacebuilding efforts. The primary aim of the book is to explain why the peacebuilding actors involved in the largest and most expensive peacekeeping mission ever undertaken by the United Nations (MONUC) failed to achieve a transition to sustainable peace and democracy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The book provides a careful analysis of the nature and range of local, national, and regional causes of violence in the deadliest conflict since World War II. The second Congolese war involved numerous militias, three different national rebel movements, 14 foreign armed groups, and led to over three million deaths. Even after the 2003 Luanda peace agreement and the establishment of the Transitional Government of the DRC, which reduced the military presence of regional actors such as of Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe local conflicts proved intractable. An additional two million people died, many of them civilians, after the war had officially ceased. Autesserre's work consists of an elaborate case study of third-party intervention between 2003 and 2006, examining a wide variety of actors participating in international peacebuilding. While much of the literature focuses on evaluating the success of peacekeeping efforts through national level analyses, the unique contribution of this book is that it is multidimensional. It goes beyond the examination of MONUC peacekeepers, national or regional actors and includes local actors, diplomats, other UN actors, and non-governmental organizations into the analysis. The interlocking set of arguments in this book is based on primary data collected over 15 months of ethnographic research carried out between 2001 and 2007 in some of …