Séverine Autesserre has written a brilliant book on peacebuilding in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It has already won a major academic prize, and easily deserves the further accolades it is sure to garner. The book will be of enormous interest to students of the multiple conflicts in the DRC and to practitioners of peacemaking throughout the world. It also serves as a model for excellence in qualitative research design. The study has the potential to change substantially the culture and practice of peacemaking for the better if policymakers are willing to hear the heartfelt and constructive criticism embodied in this analysis.

As an academic study of a major, ongoing problem in the world, Autesserre's work has all of the elements of a classic. Many will be interested in the study because it takes up the efforts of the international community to resolve the deadliest sets of armed conflicts that have been witnessed since World War II, those in the DRC. At the outset, the author poses a clear, trenchant question to which she regularly returns: “Why [have] all of the intense international peacebuilding efforts, including the largest peacekeeping mission in the world … failed to build a sustainable peace in the Congo?” (p. 5). She then sharpens this question by asking, “Why do interveners neglect the micro-level [emphasis added] causes of peace process failure, particularly when they threaten the macro-level settlements?” (p. 10). Given that the international community made a massive commitment to peacemaking in the DRC, and given that hundreds of thousands of Congolese have died in the fighting and the associated social violence of localized conflicts since the end of the DRC's transition in 2006, these are indeed the relevant questions to pose.

This work deserves high praise for its careful research design and analytical presentation. Autesserre begins by surveying several of the “conventional explanations” for the failure of peacebuilding in Congo, including the inadequacy of international resources, the sheer complexity and persistence of local conflicts, the lack of a clear international mandate, and the lack of institutional interests in resolving local conflicts. She ably rebuts each of these explanations in turn. Her approach to understanding the failure of peacebuilding in Congo was to conduct more than 300 interviews with diplomats, United Nations officials, aid workers, local Congolese authorities, soldiers, and ordinary Congolese citizens. Her interviews covered the period of the Congolese “transition,” from the adoption of the Global and All-Inclusive Agreement in late 2002 through the inauguration of President Joseph Kabila in December 2006, following the elections of the same year. Her method amounts to an anthropology of those who were most directly implicated in Congo's peacebuilding efforts at this critical juncture.

The author's main finding was that a coherent and persistence culture that neglects, and even abjures, the potential of local peacebuilding prevailed in the main organizations charged with restoring peace to the DRC. This culture has emerged over many years of practice and is constantly reinforced by the discourse of the peacebuilding community. Elements of this culture include the notion that the UN's main role in conflict situations is to resolve national and interstate (“regional”) problems; the idea that outwardly free and fair elections are the key to the way forward in situations of national conflict; the norm that periods following a transition are by definition “postconflict” situations, no longer requiring major peacebuilding efforts but only humanitarian assistance; and the idea that only national states can settle the myriad local conflicts that flare up in the wake of transition. Moreover, outsiders typically viewed Congo as an “inherently violent” society (p. 74), in which local conflicts were perpetual and inevitable. This culture prevented those charged with restoring peace to Congo from ever seriously considering local peacebuilding efforts. The voices of those who dissented against the dominant approach of the UN mission in Congo (MONUC) and foreign diplomats were systematically silenced. The culture that Autesserre describes is perfectly evident in the numerous documents produced by the UN and leading peacebuilding nongovernmental organizations, as well as in their practices. The author is at her most engaging, however, in drawing out elements of the culture revealed in vivid anecdotes taken from her (mostly confidential) interviews.

Despite Autesserre's critical approach, a strength of her work is her acknowledgement that peacebuilding needs to be top-down—the MONUC approach—as well as bottom-up. She meticulously describes the interactions between levels of conflict in Congo. She readily acknowledges that national or international actors (usually Rwanda) stimulated many conflicts at the local level; but she also amply demonstrates how many local conflicts over land, access to other resources, the ability to tax, citizenship, and ethnic community leadership fueled most of the fighting after the transition. Such conflicts often stimulated conflict at the national or international level, threatening to unravel the settlement achieved in 2006. These local sources of conflict are generally well known to Congo specialists, and even many members of the peacebuilding establishment. Yet the strength of the dominant culture among peacemakers caused them to ignore the local side of Congolese conflicts, and the crises that these conflicts provoked did not lead to significant cultural change.

After presenting these main arguments and the evidence that backs them, Autesserre attempts to reinforce her position by showing how “bottom-up” solutions were “defeated” (Chapter 5). This chapter demonstrates well how the advocates of various bottom-up solutions were thwarted in their efforts. Yet she subtly tries to make a more profound argument, namely, that bottom-up approaches had a realistic chance of actually succeeding in Congo. It is here that her interviews with local citizens and NGO workers are brought to bear. Although making this case would certainly have made the study even more compelling, this effort goes somewhat beyond the scope of her original question. Surely, only minor efforts at local conflict resolution were ever tried, and Autesserre shows us why, but it is far less clear how effective such efforts might have been. Adding to our doubts in this regard, she has little to tell us about the actual mechanisms that might have altered the identities of local people, assured them of access to land, healed the wounds of recurrent conflicts, or assured a just and agreed-upon allocation of resources. These are deeply vexing issues.

Autesserre's recurring insistence that the 2006 elections in Congo were hopelessly premature suffers from a similar shortcoming, that is, her failure to describe an alternative course. She makes a strong case that Congo was not ready for the elections because the population did not understand the stakes and because local order did not yet exist. Yet it is far less clear that waiting several more years would have improved the climate for elections, or provided a better environment for the resolution of local conflicts.

In understanding the multiple conflicts that have racked Congo for some 15 years, one has to be aware of both the “permissive conditions” and the “efficient causes” of conflict (see Kenneth Waltz's Man, the State and War, 1959). The international community has worked seriously to improve the structural conditions in Congo that would reduce the possibilities for violent local conflict, including the relegitimization of the Congolese state through elections. Alas, the top-down culture that dominates the peacebuilding establishment prevented it from working on the proximate causes of Congo's many conflicts in the interim. More serious local peacebuilding might have borne fruit, preventing thousands of deaths. One can only hope that the world's peacemaking principals will take to heart the compelling message of Autesserre's impressive work.