René Lemarchand is one of the most perceptive scholars writing on the Great Lakes region of Central Africa, which here refers to Rwanda, Burundi, and Eastern Congo. Lemarchand published one of the best books on the decolonization politics in Congo in 1964 (Political Awakening in the Belgian Congo). He went on to publish a foundational work of comparative research examining Rwanda and Burundi in 1970 (Rwanda and Burundi). Since then, he has published widely on the region. Few scholars writing on the region in any language match his depth of engagement, and few have the ability to move seamlessly between French and English, as Lemarchand does—a particularly valuable skill in a region whose principal European language is French.

During the past two decades, the Great Lakes region has been a zone of extraordinary violence and suffering. The most famous episode is the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which claimed upward of 500,000 civilian lives. Less well known is the violence and civil war that followed the assassination of Burundi's first Hutu president in 1993. Even more devastating have been the wars and state collapse in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where an estimated four million people have perished since 1998. It is hard to imagine the professional and ethical challenges that witnessing such repeated catastrophes pose to a scholar who has spent the better part of his career studying these areas. However, as readers, we are the beneficiaries. Few can match the knowledge and historical insight that Lemarchand brings to the subject. Anyone who wants to understand the conflicts in this region would do well to read his latest work.

The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa is a collection of Lemarchand's writings about the Great Lakes region during the past 15 years. The main idea for the book is to make available a set of articles, book chapters, and papers that previously appeared in low-visibility venues or were presented at conferences. Dynamics has 16 chapters, 11 of which were previously published and five of which were previously presented as conference papers or as a report for the United States Agency for International Development, where the author worked for a period. Only one chapter was written specifically for the volume. The majority of chapters were published or presented between 2002 and 2006, one piece dates to 1993, and others were published or presented between 1999 and 2001. With this structure, the book reads more like an edited volume than a monograph, and indeed some of its main weaknesses stem from its structure.

In the preface and initial two chapters, Lemarchand presents the volume's two principal thematic claims. The first theme concerns the importance of regional linkages among the Great Lakes conflicts. The author argues that to understand the sources of violence and conflict in Rwanda, Burundi, and the DRC, no country can be treated in isolation; the crises are interlocking. He points to several mechanisms that link the conflicts, including the repeated flow of refugees across borders and what he calls “militarized diasporas.” He also refers to Samuel Huntington's notion of “kin-country syndrome,” in which similar ethnic communities in neighboring countries are mobilized across borders. The second main thematic point in the volume concerns the importance of political exclusion, which, Lemarchand claims, is the key driver of conflict in the region. In each of the three countries under discussion, he demonstrates how political exclusion of different ethnic groups at different periods of time is the source of conflict. In making these two sets of points, he argues against economic theories of armed conflict that focus uniquely on the economic foundations of civil war, as well as identity-based theories of armed conflict that reduce the sources of conflict to identity differences without considering the dynamics of political exclusion.

Beyond these broad thematic points, Lemarchand makes a number of more specific claims in the 14 chapters that focus variously on Rwanda, Burundi, Rwanda and Burundi, or the DRC. In these chapters, he addresses a number of issues, ranging from the politics of memory in Rwanda and Burundi, to comparisons between the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, to what he calls the “forgotten” genocide in Burundi in 1972 (in which an estimated 200,000 Hutu civilians were killed), to the political transition from civil war to settlement in Burundi in the 2000s, to the sources of conflict in Eastern Congo, to the reflections on national political dynamics in the DRC at various points. Lemarchand excels at situating contemporary details in a broader historical setting. He also presents perspectives that are not frequently heard in the Anglophone literature on the region. He is, for example, sharply critical of the current government in Rwanda, which, he argues, practices “unprecedented” ethnic discrimination (p. 12). He was one of the first to document genocide in Burundi in 1972, and in these pages his knowledge of those events powerfully inflect his understanding of current politics.

The volume is not without flaws, however. Several stem from its structure—a collection of essays written at different points in time and for a variety of audiences and venues. For example, there is considerable repetition between chapters; nearly identical sentences and points reappear across chapters. There is also inconsistency across chapters, such as in the acronyms used to describe political movements, in the spellings of names, or in the estimated numbers of dead in a conflict. Chapters written about contemporary politics but well before the volume was published feel dated. These are not fatal flaws, but they detract from the work. More substantively, the volume would have benefited from greater theoretical integration across chapters. While the early ones set forth a set of points about regional dynamics and the importance of exclusion, these claims are rarely the focus of later chapters. The author also does not deeply engage alternative hypotheses or theoretical approaches, nor is he, for the most part, presenting the results of new field research.

These points do not drain The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa of its considerable historical knowledge and insight. However, we are presented with informed, essay-style analysis and commentary, rather than a book that develops a sustained and empirically supported theoretical argument. One hopes that the author will pen a synthetic book of this latter type, as others of his generation have or are doing.