4 ideas
Under Leopold II's Congo Free State, villages had to meet wild rubber quotas, and agents held women and children hostage until the men delivered. Soldiers had to account for every bullet with a severed hand, so the demand for proof of 'discipline' itself produced mutilation. Because extraction was the state's only purpose, violence was not an excess of the system but the thing that made it run.
Belgian paternalism educated many Congolese to the primary level but blocked their advancement into higher education, the officer corps and senior administration, so at independence in 1960 the country had only a handful of university graduates. Combined with the haste of the handover, this left the state in the hands of people who had never been allowed to run it, which heavily burdened the new government as it faced army mutiny, secession and foreign intervention. The book still shows that the choices of individual leaders shaped how that crisis unfolded.
'Article 15' was a mock constitutional clause, 'débrouillez-vous', summing up survival under Mobutu once state salaries went unpaid and public services decayed. Soldiers, teachers and officials turned their posts into private toll booths and extracted small payments from citizens to live. The state kept its outward form, but it worked as a network of licensed predation rather than as a provider of services.
The Congo wars began as struggles over security and regime change, but after the 1999 Lusaka agreement the fighting increasingly looked like a business that paid for itself. Armed groups and neighboring armies funded themselves by controlling mines for coltan, gold and cassiterite, which gave them a reason to keep fighting. Local disputes over land and ethnic belonging supplied recruits, and global demand for electronics supplied the money.