A student of Congolese politics for more than twenty years, Emizet Kisangani offers in this book a detailed analysis of the country's political history through the lens of its many conflicts. The book reviews no fewer than 17 episodes of political violence—“civil wars” for Kisangani—from the secession of Katanga in 1960 to the Hema-Lendu conflict in Ituri, which ended in 2005. If nothing else, the book provides a stunning reminder of the centrality of violence in Congo's independent history and serves as an apt sequel to previous accounts of the violence of the colonial period (e.g., see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost, 1998). Far from the result of foreign aggressions alone, as the Congolese sometimes seem fond of imagining, violence has been an intrinsic component of Congolese politics from the very first days of independence, costing some four million lives over conflicts that cumulatively have lasted 9,147 days or 25 years, half of the country's existence (p. 2).

Kisangani carefully recounts each of these conflicts, in mostly chronological fashion. After a broad overview in chapter one, he analyses the secessions and counter-secessions of the early 1960s (Chapter 2); the Kwilu and Simba rebellions which followed in the footsteps of these earlier wars (Chapter 3); military mutinies of the late 1960s and the two Shaba invasions of 1977 and 1978 (Chapter 4); the war that deposed President Mobutu in 1997 and the following one against his successors, Kabila father and son, that pestered from 1998 to 2003 (Chapter 5); and finally the “ethnic” wars that raged in the Kivu and Oriental provinces starting in 1993, some of which later largely blended with the anti-regime insurrections (Chapter 6). A concluding chapter brings the cases back together in an analytical wrap-up and briefly discusses some policy implications of the analysis.

The chapters are broadly structured along the same blueprint. They begin with a detailed and well-researched (generally from secondary sources) account of the episodes in question. Then Kisangani discusses the causes of the conflict (what he calls the “critical antecedents and junctures” of continuity and change), reasons for its specific duration, its consequences and the nature of post-conflict rebuilding. His avowed goal is to use the rich empirical material of Congo's history to undermine the “greed and grievances” theories of civil wars, which he sees as the still dominant explanations in the scholarly literature. In their stead, he proposes a theory of political violence (which he makes no attempt, however, to generalize beyond Congo) as a response to the “politics of exclusion” of diverse regimes.

While the book's empirical contribution is far from negligible, offering as it does a convenient location to find detailed information on a series of otherwise unrelated conflicts, its theoretical value is more problematic. To begin with, it suffers from a couple of methodological flaws. For one, testing theories of civil wars in the context of a single country is rather limiting. All events will indeed contain variables that are at least partly correlated with each other, and their analysis will lack sufficient controls. Moreover, it is hard to infer anything from one country to the rest of the world. Thus, although he finds instances which do not conform to some of the claims of the broader literature on conflict, such findings hardly invalidate these theories, which are based on average patterns. Second, Kisangani unnecessarily ties his own hands by using a rigid definition of civil war as a conflict killing at least 1,000 and displacing 2,000. As a result, he ends up including a 1960s mercenary mutiny (with only limited relevance to internal Congolese politics) but not the 1992 violence between the Lunda-dominated administration of Katanga and Luba migrants from Kasai, which resulted in the death of 215 of the latter and illustrated a significant and enduring fault-line in Congolese politics. For Kisangani, “Because this conflict does not meet the 1,000-death threshold, and does not qualify as a civil war, it will not be discussed here” (p. 27). Such definitional requirements might make sense as selection method in large-N studies, but their use here might well bias the cases under consideration and could affect the inferences drawn from them.

The book also suffers from an excessively literal and mechanical understanding or presentation of the theories Kisangani wishes to refute. For example, while statistical analyses have used primary commodity exports, GDP growth rates and male school enrollments as indicators of the “greed” or opportunity-cost hypothesis of conflict, Kisangani literally reviews the status of these indicators for each of his cases rather than more broadly inquiring into the nature of economic opportunity for local actors. His subsequent inference is impoverished by such a mechanical understanding of the literature. For example, citing Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler, and Nicholas Sambanis's Collier-Hoeffler Model (Understanding Civil War, 2005) and its finding that “the risk of civil war rises by about 22 percent when exports of primary commodities as a percentage of GDP constitute about 32 percent” (p. 56), Kisangani contends that “Katanga's share of primary commodities and mineral exports in GDP hardly support[ed] these numbers [in the 1960s] and that, “Therefore, … there is little indication that the mineral sector played much role” (p. 57) in the Katanga secession. Such analysis misunderstands both the nature of a statistical trend and of the Katanga secession, which was undoubtedly in part about minerals. The frequency with which similar inferences are casually presented, or stated rather than demonstrated, can be frustrating to the reader who expects more leverage from the book's rich empirical material.

Finally, while there is much to support Kisangani's claim that political violence in Congo is often the work of the excluded seeking re-inclusion, this is not a particular original claim, nor is it incompatible with a “grievance” understanding of war. Other more or less recent works (e.g., see Andreas Mehler and Denis Tull, “The Hidden Costs of Power-Sharing: Reproducing Insurgent Violence in Africa,” African Affairs 104 [July 2005]: 375–398; Severine Autesserre, The Trouble with the Congo, 2010) have singled out the inclusion-seeking logic of political violence in Congo. Moreover, it is dubious whether exclusion can be treated as an exogenous explanatory variable to conflict while it is deeply embedded in it and in the outcome of previous instances of violence. In addition, Kisangani presents his argument as a new perspective on conflict but how is exclusion not a cause for grievance? To this reader, much of the material in the book appeared to support a commodity-augmented grievance understanding of war. Finally, his explanation of (the largely hypothetical) popular support for insurgents relies on the people's allegedly mistaken perception of the conflict as legitimate, “only to discover later that their leaders are seeking nothing more than state spoils” (p. 2). The implicit assumption in this approach that the Congolese never learn from their mistakes is problematic.

Altogether, despite some worthwhile contributions, this book falls short of the expectations it sets for itself and will be of limited value to most readers.