Winning the War, Losing the Peace
This chapter lays out the book’s central argument. It first addresses the limitations of existing explanations—war for natural resources, spillover of Rwandan genocide, anti-foreign resistance and personalization of power. It then develops the building blocks of the argument, which attributes Africa’s Great War to the type of revolutionary organization and regional alliance the comrades built to liberate Zaire. In contrast to the strong Leninist political organizations that they built during their own revolutionary struggles, the regional powers, led by the RPF, backed the emergence of a weak, personalized rebel movement heavily dependent on foreign support. This allowed the RPF to maximize its control of the AFDL and pursue its immediate priority of chasing down the génocidaires but at the cost of long-term peace. In the absence of strong domestic or regional institutions, the liberators failed to manage the vacuum of power their annihilation of the Mobutu regime brought about. Consequently, despite alignment on the goals of liberating Zaire, the post-Mobutu system would be defined by high levels of internal and external uncertainty among comrades, ending in catastrophic war.