My first exposure to the politics of rebellion came in South Africa in 1995, only months after Nelson Mandela's election. An idealistic college sophomore, I moved into the township of Guguletu outside of Cape Town, seeking a connection to the powerful political changes and social transformations under way in the country. Through countless conversations with friends and acquaintances, I grew to understand the history of South Africa's remarkable transition. I learned about the meaning of resistance from those who had participated in nonviolent protest, joined the African National Congress and its guerrilla army, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and sought to make the townships ungovernable, under the banner of the United Democratic Movement. Seeing Mandela take the reins of power was the culmination of decades of their struggle for human rights, economic opportunity, and political power.

Four years later, then a Ph.D. student at Harvard, I returned to southern Africa, this time on a summer fellowship. I headed to Mwange refugee camp in northern Zambia, which was flooded with tens of thousands of people fleeing the fighting in eastern Congo. My aim was to learn something about the brewing rebellion and to understand why people felt the need to flee the country. The former dictator of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko, had been overthrown only a year earlier by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who, after his victory, acted more like his predecessor than the revolutionary his supporters had expected.