Armed Conflict, Insecurity, and Mining in Eastern DRC: Reflections on the Nexus Between Natural Resources and Armed Conflict
Publisher: IPIS
Author(s): Erik Gobbers and Ken Matthysen
Date: 2022
Topics: Conflict Causes, Extractive Resources, Land
Countries: Congo (DRC)
This report offers a new framework for looking at the eastern Congo conflict, one within which new evolutions of the past twenty years find a place. Indeed, violent conflict in eastern Congo has changed dramatically in all its aspects over the past two decades. Yet too often policymakers and observers appear to assume that we are dealing with a proxy war orchestrated from the DRC’s eastern neighboring countries. The over-simplified and incorrect narrative is then that large rebel movements are directed by neighboring countries to satisfy their insatiable hunger for ‘conflict minerals’. Still according to this simplified version of the facts, we find the civilian population and the weak, Congolese government on the side of the victims.