Critical Review

Critical review
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Critical review
Introduction
Several authors have attempted to give witness accounts of Congo war, its causes and implications. Jason Stearns is one of the authors whose witness accounts standout. He has written acclaimed critical account based on 10 years of reporting from and living in the region: Congo. His book gives witness account of to the non-narrated stories of millions of citizens of Congo. This paper seeks to give a critical review on Jason Stearns’ “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Great Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa”.
In his critical account on the untold stories, Jason Stearns tells a vivid story of a misunderstood conflict via the experiences of people who perpetrated and engineered it. In his book, Stearns displays key architects of the disastrous war, village pastors who were the survivors of massacres, Hutu female activists who relieve the methodological and hunting extermination of refuges, the President Kabila’s child soldier assassin as direct implication of the genocide in Rwanda. (Prentzas, 2013) Jason Stearns tries to make his readers understand the reason why a mass violence such as this made sense, and why regional stability has continually eluded people.
I agree with the angle taken by Jason Stearns in giving his account of the nature and history of war in Congo. He details this war as a war within a war that was solely out of political ideologies and retaliation and self defense. He goes ahead and explains the role of economic plunder of the natural resources of Congo such as cobalt, copper, and diamonds in enriching unscrupulous companies, especially Rwanda and Uganda (Congo Democratic Republic, 2001). This threatened Congo’s only means of paying for its endless wars. Conflicting interests were exacerbated by the regional politics of the neighboring states. The deep hostilities of the ethnic groups could easily be criticized concerning their alleged role in the war. However, Stearns comes up and assert in his book that ethnicity was the strongest and last institutional and personal identity left in the nation after it was nearly eroded. I support his account. In deed ethnicity remained as the only pillar supporting the divided state of Congo. Jason Stearns concluded in his book that that there was no one particular cause of war in Congo, or a clear conceptual quintessence that can be noted as the cause of Congo war (Stearns, 2011 p. 336).
According to me, Jason Stearns wrote a good history of the Congo war up to some extent. However, looking at his work critically, I think his account of the Congo war lacks a careful assessment of fundamental sources of ethno-cultural conflict of René Lemarchand's The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa, and has no historical accounts of Gérard Prunier's Africa's World War. We can clearly see from his book that Jason is mostly concern...