For those of us old enough to remember what in the 1960s was known as ‘the Congo crisis’ ‐ soon to become the ‘endless crisis'‐ the tragic singularity of the present conjuncture is perhaps less apparent than some of the contributions to this special issue on the Congo might suggest. No one who lived through the agonies of the Congo's improvised leap into independence ‐ followed by the swift collapse of the successor state and the break‐up of the country into warring fragments ‐ can fail to note the analogy with the dismemberment of the Mobutist state in the wake of the 1998 civil war. Then as now the former Belgian colony was faced with a crisis of statelessness of huge proportions. The challenges confronting the international community today are in a sense remarkably similar to what they were in the early 1960s. How to reconstruct a broken‐backed polity, how to rebuild an army reduced to a rabble by the emergence of armed factions, how to revitalise basic human services, ensure a minimum of security and economic self‐sustenance; in short, how to restore the legitimacy, territorial integrity and internal sovereignty of the state, such are the daunting challenges facing the international community. This is not meant to suggest that history repeats itself, only that historical perspectives can offer important clues to an understanding of the present.
