Belgian Military Forces in the Congo Volume 1

Though the dynamics of the Congo Crisis have received, and continue to receive, a good deal of literary and scholarly attention, missing from the canon of work on military forces in the Congo is a study of the Force Publique, a paramilitary police force established by King Léopold II to secure the Congo Free State and to protect a vast geographical swath of Central Africa that had become his own personal possession following the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. In many ways, the absence of any study on the origins of the Force Publique to its dissolution in 1960 means that our knowledge surrounding the history of the Belgian Congo and the modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo is incomplete.