This week on International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey is joined by Jason Stearns, assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University, who discusses how the Congolese government is invested in conflict on its territory. Stearns traces the current conflict back to the Belgian colonial heritage that created an ethnic disbalance in the population that was then exploited by the authoritarian leader, Mobutu Sese Seko, to maintain power. It later triggered the regional invasion of Congo in which the territory was divided between neighboring countries until the country was finally reunified in 2003. When former rebels lost power in a democratic process and tried to regain it through military means, neighboring countries scrambled to profit from extraction and influence. This left little incentive to put an end to the conflict, and forced the incumbent president to side with the military establishing a system of clientelistic networks in order to stay in power. Finally, Stearns comments on how aspects of this system can be seen in other countries, and how Congolese view the international attention on the Russian invasion of Ukraine in light of this ongoing conflict.

Transcript:

John Torpey  00:15

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, with tens of thousands of casualties, has understandably gripped the attention of Europeans and Americans since it began early in 2022. Yet those in Africa may be more fixated on the ongoing deadly conflict in the Congo, where millions have died over the past couple of decades. What is driving the seemingly endless war in the heart of Africa? Is there anything that can stop it?  

John Torpey  00:40

Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. 

John Torpey  00:59

We are fortunate to have with us today Jason Stearns, assistant professor in the School of International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and founder and director of the Congo Research Group at New York University. He is the author of two books, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, and more recently, The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo, which has just been published by Princeton University Press. Thanks for being with us today, Jason Stearns. 

Jason Stearns  01:33

Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure. 

John Torpey  01:34

Great to have you, and congratulations on the book. So having now read two of your books, the titles have a certain dispiriting quality about them, I think you would agree. Your first book, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, has a certain sinister ring. So maybe you can start by giving us a little historical background on the contemporary conflicts in Congo, which I think, understandably, you think is an important part of the story of what’s going on right now? 

Jason Stearns  02:02

Yeah, absolutely. I think the history is very important. So there has been mass violence in the Congo since 1993, but the war properly started in September of 1996. Some people call that the first Congo War, and it really, in order to best describe what happened, it’s useful to break that down into three different factors. 

Jason Stearns  02:26

The first one, and the reason it’s useful to do this is because those same three factors, then in different manifestations and importance, percolate through until the present day. So it’s useful to lay out some of the contributing factors that brought about mass violence in the Congo in 1996. And the first one really is something that dates back to the colonial days, and that’s local struggles over power and identity. And in eastern Congo in particular, what these do is divide the population into people who consider themselves as “indigenous” and people who are considered to be foreigners, or not Congolese, or foreign descent. 

Jason Stearns  03:07

And in particular, people of Rwandan origin, people who are often called Kinyarwanda speakers or Rwandaphones, and this population, which is small in terms of the entire Congo but in some places has the demographic majority, is due to migrations that have happened over centuries. And in particular, a mass migration facilitated by the Belgian colonial power in the colonial days between roughly 1930 and 1950 into the eastern Congo to help Belgians on their plantations in their mines to create a docile labor force for the Belgians to use. And this really brought about a mass migration in some places, created groups that were the demographic majority in the eastern Congo that then prime these parts for conflicts immediately after independence. 

Jason Stearns  04:03

Because the Belgians had set up the system so that only people who were considered to be “indigenous” or of the local customary ruling community, were able to have rights and have access to land. And so those local conflicts were, if you will, one strand on the triple helix that then produced conflict. 

Jason Stearns  04:25

The other strand was the national state or a state that had been hollowed out over 32 years of rule under the authoritarian fist of Mobutu Sese Seko, which started off ruling through strength and ended up ruling through weakness. And so, whereas in 1965 when he first came to power, Mobutu created one of the strongest public services in Africa boosted by copper revenues –it has a huge copper mining potential– ended up pitting leaders against each other, creating proliferation of services, managing a large part of the budget through his own personal office and hollowing out the state. So you had an extremely dysfunctional bureaucracy and security services by the time the war started in 1996.

Jason Stearns  05:23

And in particular, Mobutu, who was on his last legs at that time, started to use that first strand of its triple helix, the local conflicts over power and identity as a way to stay in power. And so increasingly, as his grip slipped on power after 32 years of rule, he started fanning the flames of ethnic divisionism on the periphery of the state. So those are the first two strands. 

Jason Stearns  05:48

And the third one and the final one and the trigger for the conflict in 1996, or regional conflicts. And so by the time –and this, again, was part of Mobutu’s playbook– by the time the war started in 1996, there were rebel groups from a handful of neighboring countries, from Angola, from Sudan, from Burundi, and especially from Rwanda that had their rear bases in the Congo. This was not an accident, obviously, it was easy for them to mobilize out of the Congo’s vast, vast territory, the size of the United States east of the Mississippi. But also Mobutu was using these regional rebel groups to get leverage on his neighboring countries. 

Jason Stearns  06:35

And in particular, the most important one and the one that triggered the entire affair were Rwandan rebel groups who included people who have participated and organized the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that killed up to 800,000 people. Those people had then sought refuge in refugee camps in the eastern Congo, were running those refugee camps in eastern Congo and continuing to launch attacks into Rwanda, with the complicity of the Zairian, or Congolese government of Mobutu. And that was what triggered an invasion in the fall of 1996 led by a coalition of regional countries. It really was a regional invasion more than a Congolese rebellion, called the AFDL, backed in particular by the Rwandan and Ugandan governments and then later by the Angolan government to overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko. Well, initially to break up these camps and then eventually to overthrow Mobutu; they overthrew Mobutu in May of 1997, put Laurent Kabila in to power. 

Jason Stearns  07:43

And then set this very tenuous rule in Kinshasa, where you had a figurehead Congolese President Laurent Kabila but the backbone of his army of his administration was actually foreign. The head of his army at a certain point, James Kabarebe, is now the Rwandan Minister of Defense. His own inner circle was run by Rwandans, the security services was run by Rwandans in particular. And that set up an untenable situation for him, a rather paranoid figure to begin with. And eventually he figured out that his days were counted if he wasn’t able to seize a situation, control the situation himself. 

Jason Stearns  08:25

And he made a move, a fateful move in June of 1998 to kick out the Rwandans and Ugandans to ask for these foreign troops to go home. That then triggered the second Congo War, on the 4th of August of 1998. That saw the Rwandans reinvade the eastern Congo, afraid that they were going to lose influence and control at this time. The Rwandan rebellion that was launching attacks into  Rwanda was very much still vigorous and alive and launching those attacks into Rwanda from the eastern Congo. They partnered with Ugandans once again. 

Jason Stearns  09:01

But this time, instead of the continent being against the Congolese ruler, as it was in the case of Mobutu, this new war, the second Congo War, split the continent down the middle. And so Uganda and Rwanda and almost took the capital of Kinshasa, but the Angolan government in particular, and then later the Zimbabwean government, propped up Laurent Kabila and saved him, and then eventually split the country into three main parts: the parts controlled by Rwandan government and its proxy, the part controlled by the Ugandan government and its proxies, and then the part controlled by what was called the government of the Congo, that was partnering with Angola and Zimbabwe. 

John Torpey  09:43

Can I interrupt for just a second? I mean, it makes it sound like there’s a kind of new version of colonialism that’s happening within the heart of Africa. Is that a misunderstanding? Or is that what you mean? 

Jason Stearns  09:57

Well, this war was definitely a continental war. This was not at all a civil war, this was a war that was prompted, was fueled by regional intervention. So I think calling it colonialism is creating a parallel that I’m not sure it’s terribly helpful, though there were elements, I guess that you could call that could have been helpful. I mean, elements of that could have been similar to colonialism. And certainly in terms of the extraction, exploitation of natural resources, that is true. And it happened in complicity, one could say, with Western powers, including the United States. Not so much the resource extraction, the US didn’t benefit that much from the resource extraction. But the US government in particular, was –and this is something again, that continues into the present day– the US government in particular was looking the other way when it came to, especially Rwanda and Uganda and intervention in the eastern Congo at that point, the Rwandans and Ugandans did have a strong security imperative that made sense. And this was the days of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, they saw that as a reasonable excuse. And so to what extent it was colonialism, I think, would be a longer debate, but certainly, external foreign intervention to extract and to benefit from the resources of the Congo that certainly is one of the drivers.

John Torpey  11:25

Right. So I mean, I don’t want to spend all our time on the past, but I recently interviewed a guy named Kal Raustiala from UCLA, who’s written a book about Ralph Bunche, the namesake of our institute. And so he’s written this long biography, and one of the cases of Ralph Bunche’s activities on the international scene was, indeed, the independence of Congo in the early 60s. And there was this discussion, I guess, Eleanor Roosevelt was sort of skeptical of the idea that Congo was ready for independence. And this was a broader kind of discussion among colonial powers, really, about whether some of these countries were ready for independence. And I think Ralph Bunche looked at that stance a bit askance and thought decolonization was a moral imperative and something that just simply had to happen. And who were these other parties to say that these countries aren’t ready. But eventually, I think later on in his life, he did come to believe that things had not really been in a good place for Congo to go its own way, and largely due to Belgian malfeasance. But, I mean, as I say, I don’t want to spend the whole time talking about the past, but I’m curious, that seems to have been a kind of seminal moment even in your own narrative of the history of Congolese violence. 

Jason Stearns  11:25

Well, I certainly think that, you know, for us, you say, we don’t want to spend all the time on the past. The past seems like it’s a long way away, especially Belgian colonialism seems to us like it’s a long way away. But, you know, imagine trying to talk about racism in the United States today without talking about Jim Crow or slavery. I mean, we’re still grappling in the United States with the legacies of these extremely intrusive, brutal institutions. You know, the same goes for the Congo, which was ruled through one of the most extractive and brutal forms of colonialism since 1885 under Leopold II, who didn’t even rule it as a colony but ruled it as a personal fiefdom, the Congo Free State, and only later transferred it to the Belgium’s government. 

Jason Stearns  13:46

And so I do think that the legacy of colonialism is extremely important to understanding the conflict of today. And the attitude, Ralph Bunche’s attitude, I think, was the right one to take. Unfortunately, Belgium really set the Congo up to fail by not giving it any of the institutions, the resources, or the talents necessary for preparing the country for independence. And so a lot of the tragedy post-independence: first, the assassination of its first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, after three months in office; and then the chaos of a civil war that engulfed the country with the complicity, especially of the Belgian and other foreign countries; and then authoritarianism under Mobutu Sese Seko. So all of that had strong, strong influence from foreign countries: Belgium, but the United States and France as well. 

John Torpey  14:44

So, I mean, given that the past and I think that’s an interesting analogy or comparison with our understanding of race in the United States and the weight of the past and that history, similarly there’s a issue about the weight of the past in regard to the colonial past, but let’s move up a bit more to the present to your latest book. And, you know, maybe you could tell us a little bit more about what exactly is going on now, why is this “the war that doesn’t say its name”? 

Jason Stearns  15:19

Yeah. So I’ll –and again, apologies for trying to summarize things very quickly here. But — I’ll pick up sort of where I left off previously, because that’s sort of where my book starts, in the sense that as I said, you had the first Congo War 1996-1997, Second Congo War in 1998, with the splitting up of the country in different parts, with foreign intervention. That came to an end in June of 2003, when the country was reunited, a new constitution was written, and the Congo entered what is called the Third Republic with the new national government, a reunited country, but also new, and for the first time, strong, decentralized democratic institutions, national parliament, provincial parliaments. You had a Electoral Commission, the Human Rights Commission, a Media Commission, regular elections at all levels and so on paper, it had a very strong very democratic constitution that was grappling itself with all of these different abusive legacies of the past in terms of authoritarianism, etc, etc. 

Jason Stearns  16:28

So it launched itself into this new age and held elections that confirmed Joseph Kabila, the son of Laurent Kabila, as president. (Laurent Kabila had been killed in office and succeeded by his son.) And so Joseph Kabila became the first president in 2006 of this reunited country. And, you know, that should have been the end of the story. And the Congo would have been in a post-conflict period, rebuilding institutions and so on and so forth. 

Jason Stearns.  16:55

The problem was that one of the main signatories of the peace deal, the Rwandan-backed proxies, they control a third of the country, called the RCD, the Congolese Rally for Democracy. They, and this is the magic of all peace processes: how can you get people to sign on to a peace process and sign on to something and bind their hands only to lose power? And that’s what failed in the peace process. 

Jason Stearns  17:18

And so the Rwandan-backed rebels, the RCD, were extremely unpopular. And so when they went to elections in 2006, they were decimated, they won almost nothing in these elections. And they knew this and in order to prepare for that, they created a rebellion in the eastern Congo, as plan B, if you will. If they weren’t able to gain power through elections, they will try to hold on to power through military means. And so thus was born the CNDP that then had as its successor movement, the M23 that is, again in a phase of resurgence in the eastern Congo. They have, once again, taken territory with Rwandan backing in recent weeks. And so that’s one part of the story of why war continued in eastern Congo: a failed peace deal and the persistence of armed groups. But that wasn’t the only reason. 

Jason Stearns  17:18

Another factor –and today you have 120 different armed groups in the eastern Congo so blaming everything on one group doesn’t make sense –is a Congolese government that became invested in conflict. And what I mean by that is a Congolese government that instead of trying to build up a strong national security service (army, police, etc.), to rule through strength, what it did is fall back on the habits of Mobutu Sese Seko and created a proliferation of armed groups that often were backed by or complicit with different levels of the army, but also security service that was used more by the government to proof it against coups, and to make sure the army was deployed far in the east, allowed to benefit from racketeering and the extraction of resources in eastern Congo, and far away from Kinshasa, where the army was a threat to the political elite. 

Jason Stearns  19:19

And so thus, through a series of relatively complex historical sequences, you created a Congolese state that was really invested in conflicts, as well as a Rwandan government, the neighboring government, that became invested in conflict and so you have this complex negative equilibrium established that saw many of the actors on all sides of the conflict invested in the state of conflict, and did not have an interest in creating a stable Congo. 

John Torpey  19:51

Right. So I mean, the main explanatory burden of the book is to explain why you have this war that just seems to be interminable. And I mean, you say that it’s not the case that, you know, it can’t be stopped, but that there are certain actors who have emerged who have an investment or have desire to keep the conflict going. And so you talk about the emergence of what you call a military bourgeoisie that has an interest in the continuation of conflict. So maybe you could talk a little bit more about what you mean by that. 

Jason Stearns.  20:27

Yes, absolutely. I don’t want to make it seem too Machiavellian. I don’t think the Congolese conflict is one where one could imagine a bunch of puppet masters pulling the strings and extracting resources, cackling away in smoke-filled rooms as they benefit from the suffering of the Congolese people. It’s a system, it’s not simply extractive as I just described it, that caricature. It’s a system of violence in which many different actors produce this negative equilibrium. And many of those actors actually, in interviewing them for my book, they know exactly well what’s going on. They don’t like the system, but they play a role in it even though they don’t like the system. They can’t do otherwise. And so it really is a tragedy. But to answer your question, I think in order to understand that you need to go back to Joseph Kabila’s rule, and a fateful decision that he made, when these various different belligerents were merged into a national government to prioritize loyalty over discipline and his own or the safety of the political elites over the stability of the country. 

Jason Stearns  21:35

Now, we have to remember that Joseph Kabila’s father, Laurent Kabila, was shot in office and killed by his own bodyguard. The threat now that during this integration of belligerents in 2003, you know, you had Kabila sitting around a table with his former enemies, and in particular that you had the bodyguards, hundreds and thousands of former enemy soldiers deployed in Kinshasa. And so the threat of being overthrown through a coup was very much real. And so when the army integration process took place, Joseph Kabila decided along with others to make sure that integration actually did one thing in particular, which was ensure his own safety and the safety of the political elites.

Jason Stearns  22:23

And to do so what he did was he created, he reinforced these patronage networks that existed, this fragmentation and clientelism that already existed within the Army to reinforce that. And that produced a system that, it created through its own structures an investment in conflict. 

Jason Stearns  22:41

And just to give you an example: in 2014, when I did research into this, up to 90% of officers’ remuneration in the army depended on legal or extralegal payments that were directly linked to military operations. And so what it means is that you, as a military officer in the Congo, it was extremely difficult to prosper without being involved in conflict. And so you earn a salary of about $100 a month, even as a general in the army, your official statutory salary would be about $100 a month, and then you receive a whole raft both legal and illegal, or extra-legal payments that had to do with you being deployed to military operations. There was hazard pay, there was a bonus for conducting military operations, there was all kinds of different bonuses. And then you had, of course, the racketeering and extraction that comes with being deployed. And that’s the bulk of the money. 

Jason Stearns  23:40

And so even the current president, Felix Tshisekedi, who came into office in 2019, he said that, and I quote from him, he says, “there’s a lot of shenanigans undermining our own security forces. This is a mafia. This is the law of omertà, the code of silence. That’s what we have to tackle.” That’s what he said about his own army after being in office for several years. And so the army itself has sort of turned inwards. And what I say in the book, drawing on the theory of, I call it, involution, because it’s turned in on itself and it reproduces the same patterns. It’s stuck in a rut incapable of jumping out of that. And so again, this is not a grand conspiracy of Joseph Kabila or even now Felix Tshisekedi who has inherited the system, but it’s due to the sheer multiplicity of players and the shadowy nature of these networks. Each actor finds it difficult to imagine another logic of being, even though each actor within the system finds its own system reprehensible. 

John Torpey  24:45

So you argue in the book that there are aspects of what you’ve described and found in Congo elsewhere in Africa, and I want to ask you what exactly you mean by that. Because I think you would probably agree that there’s a lot of, you know, sort of offhand characterization of Africa as if it were all kind of one place. And you know, there’s certainly conflict going on in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and other places around the continent. But the whole place is not up in conflict, so to speak. So I wonder if you could talk about what it is about Congo that also seems to be happening in other places, and how maybe some of these other places are different? 

Jason Stearns  24:46

Yeah, I think one of the things — I mean, you’re absolutely right, each conflict and the book is largely a book about the Congo. And my entire approach, my methodological approach in the Congo or with this book is to really to sit in the conflict, to understand it, to absorb it to understand the various actors and their interests, and understand the history that they draw on that has produced this violent equilibrium that I described. And I think that’s important in every conflict, really; that’s the first thing you need to do is understand, deeply understand and empathize, even if you want to condemn, but understand where these people are coming from. The reason there was conflict in the Congo is not because Congolese are inhuman or violent by their very nature, it’s because of the political system and the histories that have produced this particular situation. But as you say, and as I’ve written, there are some things, some aspects of what we see in the Congo that have been reproduced elsewhere, not just in Africa but I would argue elsewhere in the world. 

Jason Stearns  26:35

And that’s this state that has become invested in conflict. That’s this negative equilibrium that actually works fairly well with semi-liberal democracies that sees large parts of the national territory handed over, if you will, to armed groups. And these sort of these perverse symbioses, because I call it a symbiosis because you have various sides of the conflict invested in conflict. These perverse symbioses that are reproduced in other places. And I think that what you can see and this is, I think, a characteristic of conflict in general and African continent today is side by side with bustling metropolises with with strong and growing economies in parts — places like Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal — you see parts of the continent in which you have, violence has become increasingly anchored and entrenched and difficult to uproot. 

Jason Stearns  27:42

So Nigeria, I think is a case in point for this, but also large parts of the Sahel, parts of certainly South Sudan are like this. And in those various countries, there’s a similar phenomenon that’s taking place. If you look at Nigeria, for example, you have a government that is increasingly complicit, and numerous government commissions in Nigeria have documented this, be it Boko Haram or militancy in the northwest of the country, or in the southeastern Delta, a Niger Delta region. And these various parts of the country, the government itself is become complicit in much of this violence. And because it has become, has very hard time uprooting this, in part because its own system is complicit in this violence. 

Jason Stearns  28:32

And I think that’s a similar system that has been reproduced in other parts of the continent. If you, if something becomes reproduced and systemic, you really have to ask yourself: well, what aspect of the international system has made this possible or has reinforced this. And I think that there we need to look to several trends. I certainly think that both the liberalization of Africa’s polity, but also economies since the late 1980s or the 1990s plays a role in this. Both democratization, because in democracy itself or the political systems that have emerged out of these hybrid democracies in various parts of the continent, have become complicit with his violence, but also the neoliberalization of the economies across the continent has facilitated this and you can see this in the Congo very clearly, as much of the economy, the conflict economies of the eastern Congo have been tied into the international system in different shapes and forms. 

Jason Stearns  29:34

Today, just to give an example, the Rwandan government, the Ugandan government, both of whom are still involved in the conflict in eastern Congo, their largest exports are gold and much of that gold, if not all of that gold, but much of that gold comes from the Eastern Congo. And so they stand to benefit from the state of disorder that persists or has persisted in the eastern Congo. They don’t even need to be there physically; they just need to make sure that disorder persists and is maintained in eastern Congo. And so I think, and then of course that gold goes on to international system, is flown mostly to Dubai, into the international market. Same can be said for tin. Same can be said for tantalum in eastern Congo. And so I think that the international system needs to be seen as part of this equation, whether it’s the conflict in the Congo or the conflict on the continent as well. 

John Torpey  30:26

Big issues to address. So I want to maybe end with a question that goes beyond your book, but I sort of hinted at it in the beginning in the introduction, and that has to do with Africans’ perception of what’s going on in the world today. I mean, obviously, Americans and Europeans have been very concerned about what’s been happening in Ukraine. But I gather that maybe the case in Africa, maybe the case in Congo, but not necessarily in the same way, because they feel like they have their own conflicts that maybe aren’t getting the attention that the world should be giving them from their perspective. Could you comment on that, on those perceptions? 

Jason Stearns  31:14

Well, I’m not Congolese. But we did do a poll, part of a research institute, based out of New York University, the partners with a Congolese Research Institute, that they carried out a poll, we do polling regularly in the Congo, and a host of issues. But we asked about conflict in Ukraine and the feelings –and so it was a nationwide face-to-face poll, several thousand people polled, randomly selected, and so it was representative of the Congolese population — most people who answered were people who make around $1, or less than $1 a day, so poor people with poor education, largely rural, and so on and so forth. 

Jason Stearns  31:56

And so it’s striking that their analysis is actually quite similar to my analysis, which is that they found that Russia had a large part to blame in the Ukrainian conflict, that what they were doing was reprehensible and it should stop. But the international community was hypocritical about this, because there was so much conflict everywhere in the world, and the amount of money and attention and sympathy that was being expressed for Ukraine could not be found elsewhere, including for the Congo. So you can see that fairly clearly expressed through the results of that poll, and that reflects my conversations with Congolese as well, which is that United States, other countries are pumping just extraordinary amounts of money, weapons, attention on to this conflict in the Ukraine that cannot be found for many of the other conflicts in the world, for many of the other situations in the world. And I think that is really my conversations with Congolese but also other people in Africa, that hypocrisy that you see is really what animates I think a lot of the skepticism that Congolese have for West’s stance on Ukraine. 

John Torpey  32:02

Right. I mean, I think there’s been a sense more generally that colonial legacies, which you’ve mentioned, the importance of, have kind of persisted in other parts of the world. And they view the current conflict in Ukraine, you know, to a considerable degree through that lens, and are therefore perhaps not quite so, you know, eager to be involved and don’t necessarily see the West as, you know, the unambiguous good guy in this. 

Jason Stearns  33:41

Yes. And I think that I mean, Russia’s greatest asset here is the fact that they were not to the same degree, or they were not in Africa a colonial power, they were colonial power, obviously, elsewhere, and, you know, within the Soviet archipelago, certainly, were extremely brutal and extractive in their own right. But in Africa, they did not, they played a role during the Cold War, obviously, but certainly in the Congo, they don’t have the legacy that the United States or France or Belgium has in terms of their complicity with extractive, abusive rule in the Congo. I think there’s a lot more that you can see now, on the continent, whether it’s in Mali, or in the Central African Republic, or even in the Congo, you can see the beginnings of this: elites turning to Russia, and you have quite a bit of sympathy amongst protesters, not so much because they love Russia. It’s a rejection of the status quo more than falling in love with what Russia stands for. 

John Torpey  34:35

Fascinating. Well, thank you very much. We’re gonna end it there. Thanks for today’s episode, I want to thank Jason Stearns of Simon Fraser University for sharing his insights about the situation in Congo and beyond. 

John Torpey  34:50

Look for us on the New Books Network and remember to subscribe and rate International Horizons on Spotify and Apple podcasts. I want to thank Oswaldo Mena Aguilar for his technical assistance as well as to acknowledge Duncan McKay for sharing his song, “International Horizons”, as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey saying thanks for joining us and we look forward to having you with us for the next episode of International Horizons.