Endowed with natural resources, majestic bodies of fresh water, and a relatively mild climate, the Great Lakes region of Central Africa has also been the site of some of the world's bloodiest ...atrocities. In Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo-Kinshasa, decades of colonial subjugation-most infamously under Belgium's Leopold II-were followed by decades of civil warfare that spilled into neighboring countries. When these conflicts lead to horrors such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide, ethnic difference and postcolonial legacies are commonly blamed, but, with so much at stake, such simple explanations cannot take the place of detailed, dispassionate analysis.The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africaprovides a thorough exploration of the contemporary crises in the region. By focusing on the historical and social forces behind the cycles of bloodshed in Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo-Kinshasa, René Lemarchand challenges much of the conventional wisdom about the roots of civil strife in former Belgian Africa. He offers telling insights into the appalling cycle of genocidal violence, ethnic strife, and civil war that has made the Great Lakes region of Central Africa the most violent on the continent, and he sheds new light on the dynamics of conflict in the region. Building on a full career of scholarship and fieldwork, Lemarchand's analysis breaks new ground in our understanding of the complex historical forces that continue to shape the destinies of one of Africa's most important regions.
Forgotten Genocides Rene Lemarchand, René Lemarchand / René Lemarchand
06/2011
eBook
Unlike the Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia, or Armenia, scant attention has been paid to the human tragedies analyzed in this book. From German Southwest Africa (now Namibia), Burundi, and eastern Congo ...to Tasmania, Tibet, and Kurdistan, from the mass killings of the Roms by the Nazis to the extermination of the Assyrians in Ottoman Turkey, the mind reels when confronted with the inhuman acts that have been consigned to oblivion.
Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memorygathers eight essays about genocidal conflicts that are unremembered and, as a consequence, understudied. The contributors, scholars in political science, anthropology, history, and other fields, seek to restore these mass killings to the place they deserve in the public consciousness. Remembrance of long forgotten crimes is not the volume's only purpose-equally significant are the rich quarry of empirical data offered in each chapter, the theoretical insights provided, and the comparative perspectives suggested for the analysis of genocidal phenomena. While each genocide is unique in its circumstances and motives, the essays in this volume explain that deliberate concealment and manipulation of the facts by the perpetrators are more often the rule than the exception, and that memory often tends to distort the past and blame the victims while exonerating the killers.
Although the cases discussed here are but a sample of a litany going back to biblical times,Forgotten Genocidesoffers an important examination of the diversity of contexts out of which repeatedly emerge the same hideous realities.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and ...impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.
Considering the scale of violence that has accompanied the crisis in eastern Congo, the avalanche of academic writings on the subject is hardly surprising. Whether it helps us better understand the ...region's tortured history is a matter of opinion. This critical article grapples with the contributions of the recent literature on what has been described as the deadliest conflict since the Second World War. The aim, in brief, is to reflect on the historical context of the crisis, examine its relation to the politics of neighboring states, identify and assess the theoretical vantage points from which it has been approached, and, in conclusion, sketch out promising new directions for further research by social scientists. A unifying question that runs throughout the recent literature on the eastern Congo is how might a functioning state be restored or how might civil society organizations serve as alternatives to such a state – but there is little unanimity in the answers.
Although there are obvious merits to the consociational argument, including the need to recognize the claims of minorities through power-sharing arrangements, translating theory into practice has ...generally failed in much of Africa. The reasons for this are many and are by no means reducible to single-factor explanations. Looking at the recent experiments in power sharing in former Belgian Africa, this article offers a comparative assessment of the radically different trajectories followed by Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in their efforts to regulate conflict through consociational formulas. Although Rwanda stands as a textbook example of failed power sharing, and the DRC as a less than successful experiment, Burundi, which comes nearest to institutionalizing the Lijphart model, offers grounds for cautious optimism about the merits of a consociational polity. On the strength of the evidence from Burundi, one might conceivably argue that the key to success lies in the extent to which the technicalities of power sharing tend to approximate the conditions spelled out by Lijphart, notably group autonomy, proportionality, and the minority veto. Closer scrutiny of the cases at hand suggests a somewhat different conclusion. Perhaps even more importantly than the mechanics of power sharing, the socio-political context is what spells the difference between success and failure.
CONGO (LEOPOLDVILLE) René Lemarchand
Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa,
04/2023
Book Chapter
The sudden proliferation of political movements and associations which attended the Congo’s accession to independence is undoubtedly one of the most striking and perplexing features of its recent ...evolution. Although many of these so-called “parties” had only an ephemeral existence, and did not develop much beyond the embryonic stage, their sheer number and permutations provide a measure of the difficulties involved in the creation of a national consensus out of a multiplicity of ethnic and sectional particularisms.
Behind the fragmented pattern of modern associational development in the Congo lies the precolonial past. It has shaped and continues to influence the
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and ...impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.
THE BLOODY POLITICS OF EXCLUSION LEMARCHAND, RENÉ
Journal of African history,
03/2013, Letnik:
54, Številka:
1
Journal Article, Book Review
Recenzirano
The estimated , deaths caused by the insurrection in eastern Congo () seem almost puny compared to the scale of the carnage recorded in the decade following the outbreak of the Second Congo War () a ...death toll estimated at nearly . million by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), with battleeld casualties accounting for only a fraction of the overall losses. Starting from the premise that the politics of exclusion is a major trigger of most civil wars in Congo, the author introduces the reader to a process-tracing model of civil wars which hinges around two major variables: critical antecedents and critical junctures, the rst referring to patterns of change and continuity over time, the other to the impact of exclusionary politics on the circumstances and goals of civil strife. Connecting the dots between past and present is no easy task when we consider the time frame (half a century), the diversity of domestic and international actors, and the radically different contexts separating the rst thirty years of Congos independence from the period that followed, marked by seemingly never-ending wars causing an ever-increasing number of humanitarian disasters.
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