In this ambitious and wide-ranging account, John F. Clark seeks to understand why the “democratic experiment” in the Congo failed. By deliberately framing his question as the search for an explanation of a specific failure that ended on a precise date, he bravely sets out to solve a puzzle for which political science has developed several conjectures but few solutions. The Congo had begun its flirtation with democracy with a national conference, as did many other Francophone African states, and gave it up when the first elected president, Pascal Lissouba, or someone in his inner circle, sent government troops to arrest allies of the former military head of state and seize their weapons. After that, the militias of competing politicians turned earlier violent incidents into full-fledged civil war, resulting, with the help of Angolan troops, in the return to power of Denis Sassou-Nguesso, the military dictator who had reluctantly acquiesced in that national conference. Why did this outcome occur?

If the failure of democracy can be dated to the outcome of an order to use force, then the conceptual problem becomes one of explaining the causes of the order (Clark also notes earlier contributing decisions by Lissouba). That creates a problem. To his credit, Clark recognizes the epistemological challenge he has constructed for himself, though perhaps letting himself off the hook by formulating it as “what kind of an answer can we reasonably give” (p. 233). However, he also assumes a large burden by refusing in advance to advantage any causal source of explanation, and to look at them all and decide which one has the most chips at the end of the game. Open inquiry should always be applauded, but complete agnosticism leaves the analyst without a framework from which to choose among contending hypotheses.

By the end of the book, Clark finds few solutions to his question, concluding that no single cause he explored was sufficient and that both agency and structure mattered. Both of these observations appear inevitable when the inquiry is framed to explain the result of a singular event. Putting it this way makes it hard to get beyond the premise behind Marx's famous truism—that social forces and institutions can only shape outcomes through the actions of individuals.

Clark's account has much to recommend it for students of Third World democratization, particularly those focusing on African cases, despite his difficulty in answering his own question. He spends a chapter exploring each of six different explanations for the Congo's democratic failure. They include political culture, political economy, ethnic and regional identities, the army and militias, political institutions, and French policy. He selected them because they are common themes in the literature and also clearly appropriate to an analysis of politics in the Congo. In most of these chapters, he spends a few pages summarizing recent theoretical findings, followed by their application to the experience of the Congo, and then a brief comparison to similar African countries with contrasting experience. In the process, he provides readers with considerable background information on the Congo's cultures, history, and politics. In a final chapter, he provides an excellent account of what happened after Sassou returned to power. Throughout the book he asks first-rate counterfactual questions of each explanation and provides an impressive amount of relevant data in an effort to follow them through.

Clark would probably agree with readers who think that the failure of democracy in the Congo was overdetermined. A largely authoritarian political culture, a state-directed economy with sizable oil revenues, a history of violence and military intervention in politics, the lack of constraint in novel political structures, and the history of French government and business involvement in Congolese affairs all made democratic success hugely improbable. But, Clark asks, what shall we then make of Benin's continued success following its national conference, despite many factors similar to those in the Congo? An excellent question, and one that Clark takes up in each chapter. But if one were to attempt to explain the Congo's failure by looking at Benin's success up to now, a fuller, more careful comparison than Clark has room to undertake here would be required.

The chapter on the army and the militias has the least amount of preliminary theorizing and the most description. Nevertheless, it seems to me the most persuasive—partly because Clark is good at showing why the other explanations are unable to handle many discordant facts of Congolese politics. Recasting this chapter as an internal security dilemma might have successfully privileged this explanation over the others. Clark's account makes clear that the groups armed in sequence and, thus, perhaps in fear of one another. He unequivocally blames the politicians for forming them. The motive to organize them appears to be ethnic, although political party competition may have also played a role. Following the predictable resort to violence, it took the intervention of an outside army, Angola's, to decide the issue. In other words, the anarchy that defines a security dilemma seems to have been present. It would remain an important issue to determine whether the dilemma resulted from communal fear or from the predatory motives of the leading politicians who formed the militias.

Accepting this explanation does not rule out most of the others that Clark puts forward. Rather, it reorganizes them. Culture, ethnic identity, the state as the prize, even France as a potential intervener would all have to be incorporated before the explanation could become persuasive. It is certainly possible that Clark, with his masterful knowledge of Congolese politics, might unearth the facts that demonstrate the weakness in this argument. We would learn something valuable if he would consider reviewing this notion in a future article.

Nevertheless, in this volume, Clark has provided us with a sure-footed account of Congolese politics, a carefully considered discussion of the most important factors determining the failure of Congolese democratization efforts, a perceptive critique of the ways that the complexities of such processes elude current scholarship on democratization, and a useful guidepost to promising directions of future research.