Written in French, Gauthier de Villers’ book spans a bridge between fine-grained historiography of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire, hereinafter ‘Congo’) and a wealth of conceptual approaches that aim at making sense of post-colonial statehood and politics at large.
The book is organised in two main parts: in the first, more chronologically organised half, de Villers outlines the country's room for manoeuvre across changing international policy and power relations since 1960. It is followed by a second half in which the author works through a more cyclical timeline that describes the different epochs and trends from the very beginning of the Congolese (and then soon Zairian) state, all the way through its eventual decay into an ambiguous period of ‘reconstruction’ and ‘transition’ throughout the past two decades.
De Villers aims neither at proposing an overarching history of the Congo (such as Ndaywel è Nziem or van Reybrouck) nor a thick analysis of a particular period and region (such as Verhaegen, Schatzberg, Stearns, or Vlassenroot & Raeymaekers). In contrary, the main intention of Histoire du Politique au Congo-Kinshasa seems to be a dialectic engagement with post-colonial historical events and concomitant theoretical trends to explain larger governance and power dynamics that shaped and continue to shape Congolese politics and the state.
In doing so, the book successfully proves how politics in and political analysis of the Congo have developed parallelisms – e.g. the heydays of dependency theory in the 1970s and the Mobutist state's concomitant engagement with Western allies during this era but also more recently, e.g. when it comes to dogmas of state-building. Drawing from a few decades of studying the Congo, de Villers displays an impressive memory and command of sources, which – even if the past years receive comparatively less scrutiny – is of great help to any scholar of the region.
Without specifically explaining his choice of conceptual approaches, de Villers offers a dense garland of liberal, critical, and institutional theory to investigate the social, economic and political realities of post-colonial statehood and power struggles in a case as contested as the Congo. Perhaps though, the chronological-cyclical structure of the book makes for some of the used concepts standing slightly isolated while in fact they may intimately speak to each other (or criticise one another, such as with Olivier de Sardan's critique of Bayart or Chabal/Daloz).
In sum, de Villers offers a thorough and rich account of the Congo's post-colonial political history. The book's particular strength lies in its comparative assessment – identifying continuities and ruptures – of the country's first four to five decades of independence as well as its unique combination of historical-descriptive and theoretical-analytical techniques to shed light on the Congo's intricate and complex politics and society. An important read for Congo researchers and a timely reminder of how much we can, despite a rapidly changing world, learn from history.
