Congo Wars

Abstract

Following the global upsurge in conflict in the late 1980s and early 1990s, no confrontation turned out to be more devastating than the Great African War, which led to mass excess mortality with estimates ranging between 2.7 million and 5.4 million people dead in the 1998–2007 period. Unlike the First World War, with which it is often compared because of the multitude of states which battled each other on Congolese territory, Africa’s Great War cannot be defined by unambiguous start and end dates. The violence since the 1990s is perhaps more usefully thought of in analogy with Europe’s Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century or, as some historians argue, the cataclysmic conflict centered on Eurasia that encompassed both World Wars, separated only by a failing truce between 1919 and 1937. With not only alliances changing regularly in the Great African War but also a whole cast of participants joining and leaving the battlefield and the frontlines gradually blurring to the point of becoming virtually indefinable, many scholars prefer using “Congo Wars” to refer to a series of regularly interlinked but sometimes also clearly distinct conflicts—local, national, regional—waged on the territory of what was formerly known as Zaire and now as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Thus, while a narrow definition separates out a “First Congo War” (beginning in September or October 1996 [once again, depending on one’s definition!] and ending on 17 May 1997) from the “Second Congo War” (the Great African War “proper,” from 2 August 1998 to 17 December 2002), other perspectives date the start of the conflict(s) back to the Rwandan genocide and argue that the Congo Wars, in parts of the territory like North and South Kivu and Ituri, are still ongoing. This bibliography takes a relatively expansive view of the conflagration, focusing publications analyzing the central events between 1996 and 2002, but acknowledging the impressive body of scholarship that not only scrutinizes the consequences of six years of catastrophic violence but also traces ongoing localized and/or transnational conflict in the DRC. At the time of writing (summer 2019), some optimism is taking hold after the peaceful (if controversial) handover of presidential power by Joseph Kabila to Felix Tshisekedi in January 2019 following elections in December 2018; violent confrontations among militias and between rebel groups, the MONUC/MONUSCO UN force, and the state still occur regularly, but not since 2013 have insurgents (i.e., the M23 rebellion) credibly threatened to take over an entire province, let alone seek to oust the president in Kinshasa: progress by Congolese standards. Although foreign actors still meddle in Congo’s politics, they do not do so as overtly and probably also not as profusely and effectively in the 2000s. The task will fall to historians a generation from now to assess whether the Congo Wars really have been coming to an end, twenty-five years after they began raging, or whether the current moment merely turned out to be a relatively peaceful interlude separating one set of violent outbursts from another.