In this important book, Louisa Lombard examines the Central African Republic (CAR) and its marginal place in the world through histories of violence and outsourced politics. With a keen eye for the ways in which ordinary people experience and make sense of their country and those who govern it, State of Rebellion discusses the impact of international responses to violent conflicts in the 21st century. Lombard takes issue with conventional and unhelpful understandings of the state in Africa as one that fails to live up to ideal-type and fictive standards. Instead, Lombard commits herself to ‘understanding politics in all its diversity’. She invites the reader to see ‘CAR for what it is, rather than what it is not or what we think it should someday be …’ (p. 23, emphasis in original).
The book is divided into seven chapters. The first two chapters provide an alternative reading of the role of the state and international relations, building on the nature and structure of the relationships between people who live, govern and intervene in the country. Drawing on work of anthropologists such as Max Gluckman and Paul Richards, Lombard shows how violence constitutes relations in the CAR, and how the relations between national and international elites produce a state that is to a great extent governed in places like Paris, Ndjamena and New York.
Chapters 3 to 5 turn towards the aspects of individual and group agency or the lack of people's ability to influence developments. Chapter 3 discusses the role of mobility as an expression of social, political or economic status – that is, the powers to freely move in and out of spaces such as the national territory, NGO compounds and occult spheres. Mobility is thus a desirable resource that separates national and international elites from ordinary subjects. The fourth and fifth chapter discuss how local armed groups ‘conventionalise’ (e.g. by choosing an acronym that suggests a political agenda) in order to draw on the mechanisms of international recognitions and its perks such as media appearance and peace talks. Lombard is highly critical of the assumed effectiveness of Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes: ‘to say that DDR preceded rebel groups in CAR would be an exaggeration, but not false’ (p. 152). The failure to live up to the promise of DDR only reinforces the desire for its imagined entitlements. It results in similar sentiments of loss that people experience with the ever-shrinking state that gradually stepped away from its distributive role via jobs and services.
In the last two chapters, Lombard discusses the yield of decades of increasing anomie and dispossession: unprecedented levels of violence and popular punishment, and in their wake a diverse ‘good intentions crowd’ (e.g. p. 227), armed with an unfitting set of tools to address the multitude of challenges that emerge from CAR's state of rebellion.
In conclusion, State of Rebellion provides compelling insights into the nature of the relationships among people living and intervening in this little-known country and skilfully situates these relations in histories of ‘violent extraversion’ (p. 24). As such it provides a beautifully written and important introduction into both the Central African Republic and the anthropology of violence and intervention.
