The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name (book review)

I submitted my slightly revised short review of Jason Stearns' The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name – The Unending Conflict in the Congo to Global Responsibility to Protect (GR2P) at the end of 2024.

Since the review has not been published yet and the situation in Congo deteriorating as I write this, I find it important to highlight the book.
Although published in 2021, it provides an important background to the complexities of the conflict and to the challenges of (liberal) peacebuilding and thereby is a very timely book to pick up!

The humanitarian situation in North Kivu is dire with close to three million displaced people in the province,” the truce statement said.
“The recent expansion of fighting in North Kivu has prevented humanitarian workers from reaching hundreds of thousands of IDPs in the area around Kanyabayonga and displaced more than 100,000 people from their homes," the statement added.
The M23 have almost completely encircled Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, killing scores of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more.
Last week the rebels seized more territory on the northern front, causing further displacement.
There are already 2.8 million displaced people in North Kivu, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
(M23 rebels, DRC begin two-week 'humanitarian truce', AFP News, 5 July 2024)

Whenever we read a news bulletin like the one above the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) emerges with familiar-sounding places (“Kivu”), rebel groups (“M23”) and military tactics (“killing scores”, “rebels seized more territory”)-and a reminder of the hundreds of thousands of people who suffer and add to the millions of already displaced people. With this canvas of intractable conflicts as backdrop, Jason Stearns attempts – mostly very successful – a difficult task: Authoring a concise book about the “unending conflict in the Congo” without reducing citizens, politicians or international donors and their actions to numbers and statistics.
He builds his argument based on years of research, hundreds of interviews and many pages of documents that have been written about the capillary system of war.
Stearns places his book in a “third place” between qualitative, ethnographic writing and more traditional, quantitative political science peace and conflict research.
Right from the beginning I felt intrigued by the project as an excellent example of how to transform long-term academic research into an accessible monograph with a clear focus on key arguments and a stringent narrative considering more than thirty years of conflict.

Armed group fragmentation and the political economy of the military bourgeoisie
The book opens with an exemplary first chapter that weaves together the broader scope of the book and its importance for peace research, criticizing the liberal model of peacemaking for placing “too much emphasis on the formal trappings of the peace process” (p.8). At the same time, he also urges “youth movements, political parties and civil society leaders setting examples of a different kind of politics” (p.15), questioning the conventional wisdom of liberal peacebuilding.
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 provide concise overviews over the historical background, conflict dynamics and Rwanda’s involvement in the conflict respectively.
I found chapter 5, the theoretical chapter, quite intriguing and while I appreciate that theory often must take a backseat in monographs that appeal to a broader audience, I need to point out that this is not the strongest contribution of the book.
The three pillars, involution, fragmentation and the role of military bourgeoisie cover important dynamics of the war.
The reference to Clifford Geertz’ notion of involution, cultural practices that have reached their definitive form and continue to develop by becoming internally more complicated and fragmentation which “rendered the conflict less threatening to the central government but also more intractable and devastating for the local population” (p.92) are important to outline. The rise of the military bourgeoisie completes his framework on how the conflict has almost become part of the DNA of Congolese politics.
While it is never fair to point out a missing reference in a monograph, I waited patiently for Carolyn Nordstrom’s Shadows of War, her seminal ethnography published twenty years ago that profoundly changed my view of actors and activities in violent conflict. The absence of her work indicates a road not taken-more towards anthropology and ethnography, but also more traditional development research including analyzing power.
In the end, the two theoretical contributions Stearns proposes at the end of his theoretical chapter (p.119) while clearly guiding his empirical analysis are never fully accomplished.
Belligerents’ interests “are not entirely determined by considerations of material gain and loss, or even physical survival” which does not appear to be entirely surprising for a conflict that has spread so wide and deep into every fabric of society. And his second shift in thinking about conflict is more “sociological and relational, arguing for a greater appreciation for the internal structure and the social foundations of armed groups”, which again is not new for analyzing failed states in the 21st century.

The three case studies of armed group in chapters 6, 7 and 8 are meticulously researched, historically rich and strike a good balance between strategic developments and broader questions about the limbo between war and peace.

“The conflict developed into one in which neither the rebels nor the state have much interest in striking a bargain or in fighting, making low-grade conflict the sad status quo for the population” (p.193).

This is such a sobering statement that fundamentally questions our role as researchers, communicators and members of a perceived “international community” and the global responsibility to protect civilians.

The limitations of liberal peacebuilding (again...)
The final chapter which focuses on peacemaking and the international community is a real gem. Stearns opens up the discussion around the broader political economy of “no war, no peace”. Rapid privatization of state assets that allowed “the ruling elite to illegally accumulate massive resources” (p.227) form the basis of a complicated political economy where global investments did not yield peace dividends and the well-known story of diplomatic ineptitude or simple lack of interest rather than a powerful conspiracy to keep the Congo unstable. Penetrating these elite networks, especially in transnational spaces that are increasingly difficult to uncover and understand, would easily be another research project. Most elites are quite happy with a status quo, relatively comfortable located between ineffective bottom-up accountability and modest pressure top-down to maintain a fragile equilibrium that keeps the country out of global news and donor concerns.

The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name is an important contribution to contemporary academic peace research. Not despite, but because of theoretical imperfections, field work that often seems to sit a bit uncomfortable between qualitative and quantitative, analytical and sociological observations and a broader political economy that is overshadowing local dynamics the book is a product of contemporary conflict and our instruments to “make sense” of it. “Congolese politics over the past nineteen years”, Stearns concludes, “tend to confirm this: it is noisy, messy and vibrant. This provides hope.” (p.258).
Today this hope is reduced to a short humanitarian truce, a mere moment to catch breath for millions of ordinary Congolese that continue to live in an ever-failing state.

Stearns, Jason K.: The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name–The Unending Conflict in the Congo. ISBN 978-0-691-19408-0, 328pp, USD 22.95, Princeton University Press, 2021.