For those of us old enough to remember the somber years of the Mobutist dictatorship, it is hard to imagine, in retrospect, that its demise would usher in a far more devastating sequence of events. The estimated 80,000 deaths caused by the insurrection in eastern Congo (1964–5) seem almost puny compared to the scale of the carnage recorded in the decade following the outbreak of the Second Congo War (1998–2008) – a death toll estimated at nearly 5.4 million by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), with battlefield casualties accounting for only a fraction of the overall losses. This is a commentary not just on the brutality of the Congo civil wars, but on their appalling side-effects on civilian populations. Behind this succession of scourges lies a concatenation of events of enormous complexity. Not the least of the merits of this wide-ranging inquest is to remind us of the historicity of such conflicts, of their changing contexts, and to offer a coherent analytic frame for understanding their murderous dynamic.

Starting from the premise that ‘the politics of exclusion is a major trigger of most civil wars in Congo’, the author introduces the reader to a ‘process-tracing model of civil wars’ which hinges around two major variables: critical antecedents and critical junctures, the first referring to patterns of change and continuity over time, the other to the impact of exclusionary politics on the circumstances and goals of civil strife. Whatever intrinsic merits can be attributed to his model, the quality of his analysis owes a great deal to his excellent grasp of the history of the Congo, and his ability to pin down the parallels and divergences between the Mobutist state and its successors.

Connecting the dots between past and present is no easy task when we consider the time frame (half a century), the diversity of domestic and international actors, and the radically different contexts separating the first thirty years of Congo's independence from the period that followed, marked by seemingly never-ending wars causing an ever-increasing number of humanitarian disasters. As the author makes clear, the centrality of Cold War issues is of course the critical reference point for distinguishing one epoch from the other. Every single one of the crises that have accompanied the first twenty years of independence – from the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 to the end of the Katanga secession in 1963, from the Mulelist uprising in 1963 to the Soumialist rebellion in 1964–5, from the first to the second Shaba wars in 1977 and 1978 – were in one way or another related to the Cold War, with the bogeyman of Soviet penetration invariably seen as a convenient pretext for bolstering Mobutu's rule. As the Soviet threat faded away, a tectonic shift occurred in the context of Congo politics. Not only did it drastically lower the stakes involved in supporting Mobutu's rule, it released a host of fissiparous forces that quickly gained momentum under the impact of Mobutu's brand of decentralized géopolitique.

This is where important connections come into focus between the Mobutist legacy and Rwanda's success in spearheading the 1996 invasion: as Kisangani convincingly shows, while the support of the ethnic Tutsi (Banyamulenge) proved crucial to the conduct of the first Congo war and ultimately to the overthrow of the Mobutist state, their support is directly traceable to Mobutu's erratic and thoroughly counterproductive handling of the nationality issue – in short their exclusion from the realm of citizenship. Ironically, while there can be no question about the penalties suffered by the Banyamulenge, they evidently showed few scruples in applying similar exclusionary sanctions, and worse, against their enemies: ‘The Banyamulenge, former victims, now became victimizers and began their own process of excluding former victimizers’ (p. 133).

Drawing heavily from the 1960s annual compilations of the classic Brussels-based CRISP series (Centre de Recherche et d'Information Socio-Politiques), Kisangani offers a remarkably rich lode of data for further comparative analysis. Just to mention one or two examples: no one even remotely familiar with the politics of the Congo since independence can miss the parallels inscribed in the mutiny of the Baka regiments in 1966 and the Nkunda rebellion in 2006, or indeed the more recent M23 mutiny, between the externally supported invasion of the Katanga by the Front pour la libération nationale du Congo (FNLC) during the first and second Shaba wars (1977–8) and the Rwandan-engineered rebellion of the Alliance des Forces démocratiques pour la libération du Congo (AFDL) in 1996. By combining succinct historical narratives with analytic commentaries, the author provides the threads needed to make sense of what otherwise would remain a somewhat obscure recitation of ‘one damned thing after another’. This is where his book makes an important contribution. Despite some minor points over which I am tempted to quibble, Civil Wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 1960–2010 stands as a major achievement. No other source provides a better point of entry to grasp the historical roots of the Congo's agonies.