Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan genocide, and the making of a continental catastrophe, by Gérard Prunier, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, 576 pp., US$29.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780195374209
Fifteen years after it began, the Congo crisis remains under the fog of war. Its mechanisms still largely unknown, the conflict has sparked recent scholarly fixation that seeks to describe the regional dynamics of the Great Lakes. Here, rebels, rulers and refugees alike traverse leaky borders. Elites a continent apart ally, while neighbours fight over ownership of a state largely foreign to everyone involved. Among the many contributions to decoding this tumult, Gérard Prunier's Africa's World War stands out as a towering achievement.
Meticulously researched, Prunier's account catalogues the incremental machinations that saw actors enter, engage with, and eventually abandon this conflict. Prunier breaks the conflagration into four levels based on the centrality of actors' interests in the Congo, which span two wars across the decade from 1996 to 2006. At the core is the joint Rwandan and Ugandan invasion of Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1996 and reinvasion in 1998, which the author describes as ‘the first known instance of post-colonial imperial conquest in Africa by an African country’ (p. 333). The second level brings the 1998 Angolan and Zimbabwean intervention to aid DRC President Laurent Désiré Kabila against his Rwando–Ugandan sponsors-turned-enemies. Prunier argues that whereas the fighting in the Congo was never much more than peripheral to Eduardo dos Santos's campaign to eliminate the long-time challenger to the Angolan state, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA); Robert Mugabe primarily sought to advance Zimbabwean economic interests. On the third level is a nexus of diplomatic wrangling in North Africa, with Libyan logistics transporting Chadian troops paid for by the Sudanese regime, all to bolster Kabila's incipient government. Prunier's fourth level consists of those states that (somewhat unsuccessfully) struggled to avoid involvement altogether, including Burundi and the Central African Republic. Finally, standing outside this schema is South Africa and its quest to use diplomatic and economic clout to remain above the mêlée. Filling out this structure is a wealth of historical context and enough detail to satisfy all but the most particular of analysts. Prunier thereby deftly cuts through the knotted strands of Congo's conflict and clarifies its course. Although the sourcing at times relies solely on confidential informants, the reader is left with what is probably the most vivid and comprehensive study possible.
However, where Africa's World War delivers in descriptive wealth, it falters in theoretical depth. Prunier maps the state and the individual at its helm as essentially coterminous (p. 362). From this contentious position he then struggles to coherently integrate agency into the functioning of political power: ‘the state is weak, whereas identities are strong but multiple and overlapping. And behind all these we increasingly find individuals… Individuals did play a tremendous role in the conflicts. But not independently. Individuals belong to a state’ (p. 361). Here the reader is forced to corral Prunier's point into cogency. One interpretation of this ‘attempt at a philosophical conclusion’ (p. 358) is that agency at the level of the individual, the group, and the state is constrained both vertically and horizontally, by actors as well as structures. Understandably for what is intended as primarily an historical study, the author struggles to convey the point.
Such complication also surrounds his treatment of legitimacy. In the introduction Prunier refers to ‘a de facto legitimacy vacuum’ emerging from the end of the Cold War and the failure of democratisation (p. xxxiii). He implies here that such legitimacy was to be commonly found in the Africa of past decades as the necessary product of juridical sovereignty. Yet accepting that heads of state in previous decades were legitimate by dint of enjoying support among Western diplomatic circles, as the author appears to, pushes the concept to its limit by suggesting that long-reigning Omar Bongo or Mobutu Sese Seko were ‘legitimate’ rather than simply ‘useful’ under the anti-communism problematic. The issue resurfaces in the book's final chapter, where Prunier moves the foundations of legitimacy away from international recognition and into the realm of coercive control. This results in confused statements such as the following: ‘states were universally weak because they lacked both legitimacy and money. Legitimacy was the biggest problem because even those states that did or could have money, such as the mining states, were also weak’ (p. 360; emphasis added). Though this second position is much more tenable, it is a hard-sell to suggest leaders such as Nelson Mandela (and later, Thabo Mbeki), Paul Kagame, and Yoweri Museveni were illegitimate as they all enjoyed near-complete domestic control. However, most troubling is not the author's nebulous conception of legitimacy but rather the overwhelmingly negligible attention he gives to it throughout the book, despite plentiful opportunity to investigate the matter. After briefly raising the issue, Prunier only mentions legitimacy again after a 300-page absence. Here it enjoys no further exploration; the book ends three pages later.
Yet these shortcomings should not deter scholars from examining Africa's World War with great interest. Despite its uneven theoretical grounding, Prunier's work grants the literature a swath of microdata that reopens the debate surrounding informal politics and statehood in Africa. This book presents itself as an extended case study in which international relations is personalistic, regional, and entirely shorn from the constraints of state-centricity. Its lessons need be investigated further.