In Civil Wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Emizet F. Kisangani develops a comparative historical perspective to analyse the Democratic Republic of Congo's long and complex history of civil wars. He contends that the dominant theories of civil wars – namely the greed, grievance and identity approaches – fall short of fully explaining the causes and duration of the 17 civil wars that the DRC has experienced between its independence in 1960 and the end of the Hema–Lendu conflict in 2005. His central argument is that these civil wars were caused by similar processes, during which political and military elites were deliberately excluded from positions of power and subsequently tried to reclaim these positions through war and violence. These ‘politics of exclusion’ constitute the critical junctures that decisively set otherwise undetermined situations on the path to civil war. Using a process-tracing approach, Kisangani systematically reconstitutes the processes of exclusion that led to each one of the 17 civil wars, such as the gradual exclusion of the Nationalist Bloc from national and provincial legislatures after Lumumba's assassination that led to the Kwilu and Eastern rebellions of the 1960s, and the strategies used by Mobutu in the 1960s and 1970s to isolate the Katangan military elites which led to the mutiny of the Baka regiment in 1966 and the two Shaba wars of 1977 and 1978.

Although the broad arguments he uses to reject the greed, grievance and identity approaches as central causative factors are not entirely convincing, Kisangani's close analysis of the processes that lead from the politics of exclusion to civil war carefully weighs the relative importance of these factors as well as several other context-specific and structural factors in explaining how the politics of exclusion become paramount in each of the 17 cases. He shows that the great variation of these wars in terms of duration, destructiveness and popular support cannot be understood without considering these critical antecedents to the wars, which comprise long term elements of continuity – the institutional legacy of the colonialism in the state, the land tenure system and the economy – and elements of change brought about by the post-colonial setting, such as the rise of patronage systems or the dislocation of the army.

Through his intervention Kisangani shows how grievances and ethnicity were not in and of themselves causes of the wars, but acted as critical amplifiers of the politics of exclusion. Grievances, fostered by widespread feelings of social and economic exclusion, played an important role in the mobilisation of socially marginalised youth in insurgencies such as the North Katanga and Northwestern South Kasai insurgencies of the 1960s, and the Mai Mai insurgency in 1997–1998. Furthermore, ‘horizontal’ inequalities between certain ethnic groups with privileged access to state institutions and ethnic groups without such access – a result of the persistent use of ethnicity as a basis for discriminations since the colonial period, and the development of ethnically structured patronage systems in the post-independence era – often polarised grievances along ethnic lines. As a result, the exclusion of elites from positions of power, even when not directed clearly towards entire ethnic groups (as when the Banyamulenge were ordered by the governor of South Kivu to clear the high plateaux in 1996, which led to an Anti-Mobutu insurgency), often translated into a feeling of exclusion for entire ethno-political constituencies, helping to mobilise those constituencies during civil wars.

The author's insistence on the pivotal role of exclusion as a political tool deliberately used by Congolese elites to secure access to spoils restores a much-needed sense of agency in the understanding of the Congolese wars, which are often depicted in fatalistic terms as driven by unending ethnic strife or greed motivated foreign manipulation, and provides a valuable analytic tool to understand the current rebellion of the M23 in Eastern Congo that seems to have its sources in the same type of politics of exclusion.