Mao Zedong?s On Guerrilla Warfare and Joseph Kabila?s Lost Opportunity

By most metrics, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a failed state, with ongoing risk to regional security and stability rooted in the conflicts that wracked the country for decades. However, this needn’t have been the outcome. There were numerous contextual similarities between the guerrilla movement in DRC under Laurent-Désiré Kabila, and China under Mao Tse-Tung during the Japanese occupation when he wrote On Guerrilla Warfare. Given this, it seems possible that if Kabila had implemented Mao’s advice during the First Congo Civil War, a revolution by any definition and, therefore, an arena for implementation of On Guerrilla Warfare, he could have proven to be far more successful in generating real political change via a far less brutal conflict in Zaire. However, despite probable exposure to the tenets put forth by Mao, Kabila did not employ them during the conflict. This paper will argue that as a result, his victory in the First Congo Civil War was far less politically meaningful in the aftermath, and far more brutal, with more negative implications on regional security today, and than if he had followed a Maoist approach to insurgency.