States: A Focus on the Democratic Republic of the Congo Hide Full Description and attachments This week we're focusing on states and the concepts of sovereignty, power and governance. There are vast differences between strong states like the US and weak states like the Congo. After reviewing   INTERACTIVE CFR's Crisis Guide on Eastern Congo  explain why it is considered a weak state. Please be sure to support your thoughts with references to the course materials and please be sure to use Turabian style citations. Make sure to define your terms. For nearly two decades, the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have been the epicenter of the deadliest conflict since World War II. Part of a vast country straddling the heart of central Africa, the eastern Congo continues to defy efforts at pacification. As the conflict has morphed from a regional war to a series of tenacious local insurgencies, the civilians caught in the middle have paid the steepest price. In addition to the ongoing humanitarian crisis, continued instability in sub-Saharan Africa’s largest country by area has strategic implications for the entire region. The DRC’s vast natural resources hold great potential but also complicate efforts at peace. The eastern Congo’s minerals power the world’s consumer electronics, and the country’s largely untapped farmlands have the potential to feed the rest of Africa. Yet disputes over these resources also drive the conflict, and rebel groups seek to control them to fund their own campaigns. Subject to foreign interference since the colonial era, the eastern Congo poses difficult questions about the role of international intervention. The UN mission—the largest peacekeeping deployment in the world—has provided crucial support for the DRC’s peace process, but many observers argue that it lacks a clear strategy for sustaining the peace and eradicating the plethora of armed groups that remain. With presidential elections originally scheduled for 2016 likely to be delayed to 2017 or even later, the Congolese government, Western policymakers, and regional leaders all face pivotal decisions that will determine whether the country can consolidate its democratic progress. Death, Displacement, and Deprivation The wars that have raged in and around the eastern Congo since 1994 have heaped by far the greatest suffering on the civilian populations caught in the crosshairs. The death toll in the country has topped 5.4 million, the vast majority of these in the east, while nearly three million people remain displaced and more than one million women and girls have been victims of rape. Soldiers killed in direct combat have, by  many estimates , totaled less than 10 percent of the conflict’s overall deaths. Nor have civilian casualties been simply an unfortunate byproduct of fighting. Rather, civilians have been targeted for supporting opposing rebel groups or for their ethnic identity. They have been robbed, displaced from their .

1. States: A Focus on the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Hide Full Description and attachments
This week we're focusing on states and the concepts of
sovereignty, power and governance. There are vast differences
between strong states like the US and weak states like the
Congo. After reviewing
INTERACTIVE
CFR's Crisis Guide on Eastern Congo
explain why it is considered a weak state. Please be sure to
support your thoughts with references to the course materials
and please be sure to use Turabian style citations. Make sure to
define your terms.
For nearly two decades, the eastern provinces of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (DRC) have been the epicenter of the
deadliest conflict since World War II. Part of a vast
country straddling the heart of central Africa, the eastern Congo
continues to defy efforts at pacification. As the conflict has
morphed from a regional war to a series of tenacious local
insurgencies, the civilians caught in the middle have paid the
steepest price.
In addition to the ongoing humanitarian crisis, continued
instability in sub-Saharan Africa’s largest country by area has
strategic implications for the entire region. The DRC’s vast
natural resources hold great potential but also complicate
efforts at peace. The eastern Congo’s minerals power the
world’s consumer electronics, and the country’s largely
untapped farmlands have the potential to feed the rest of Africa.
Yet disputes over these resources also drive the conflict, and
rebel groups seek to control them to fund their own campaigns.
Subject to foreign interference since the colonial era, the
eastern Congo poses difficult questions about the role of
international intervention. The UN mission—the largest

2. peacekeeping deployment in the world—has provided crucial
support for the DRC’s peace process, but many observers argue
that it lacks a clear strategy for sustaining the peace and
eradicating the plethora of armed groups that remain. With
presidential elections originally scheduled for 2016 likely to be
delayed to 2017 or even later, the Congolese government,
Western policymakers, and regional leaders all face pivotal
decisions that will determine whether the country can
consolidate its democratic progress.
Death, Displacement, and Deprivation
The wars that have raged in and around the eastern Congo since
1994 have heaped by far the greatest suffering on the civilian
populations caught in the crosshairs. The death toll in the
country has topped 5.4 million, the vast majority of these in the
east, while nearly three million people remain displaced and
more than one million women and girls have been victims of
rape. Soldiers killed in direct combat have, by
many estimates
, totaled less than 10 percent of the conflict’s overall deaths.
Nor have civilian casualties been simply an unfortunate
byproduct of fighting. Rather, civilians have been targeted for
supporting opposing rebel groups or for their ethnic identity.
They have been robbed, displaced from their homes and
villages, and pressed into service as slaves. Women have borne
the brunt of sexual violence, wielded as a weapon of war.
Driven from their homes, many have died from hunger and
disease.
The Congo crisis has from the start been defined by mass
displacement, which has strained the resources and
organizational capacity of UN relief agencies, the Congolese
government, and humanitarian NGOs. The conflict began when
nearly two million Rwandans crossed into the eastern Congo in
the wake of the 1994 genocide. The region has since become
home to semipermanent tent cities housing
more than 2.7 million
internally displaced Congolese as well as hundreds of

3. thousands of foreign refugees. For civilians, the choice has
often been between languishing in overcrowded camps, fleeing
into the region’s dense jungles to be exposed to roving militias,
or, for refugees, returning to their country of origin and risking
persecution.
The persistence of more than forty different armed groups in the
eastern Congo means that the death and disruption continue
even as the ranks of the region's major rebel organizations have
shrunk. The largest remaining rebel army, the Rwandan Hutu
Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR,
according to its French spelling), has been reduced to fewer
than two thousand fighters, while most other groups number in
the hundreds. These small and mobile guerrilla forces can
survive by avoiding direct confrontation with UN and
government soldiers, while continuing to terrorize villagers and
exploit local resources.
Geopolitics of a Crisis
The Democratic Republic of the Congo spans a territory nearly
the size of western Europe. Home to more than seventy million
people, making it the world’s most populous French-speaking
country, the DRC’s borders were originally defined by its
Belgian colonizers in 1885. In addition to colonial domination,
regional powers—the DRC is surrounded by nine other
nations—have repeatedly intervened in its internal affairs.
With the national capital, Kinshasa, located nearly one thousand
miles from the major eastern cities of Goma, Bukavu, and
Uvira, the Congo has long defied easy governing. The hundreds
of ethnic groups, myriad tribal languages, and divergent
regional interests have proved fertile ground for recurrent
rebellions against the central government. In eastern Congo,
conflict has centered on the North and South Kivu provinces, as
well as nearby Orientale, Maniema, and northern Katanga—an
area roughly the size of California that counts more than twenty
million residents. The region’s fertile highlands straddle the
borders of Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda, along the shores of

4. Lake Kivu and Lake Tanganyika, and transportation between the
west and east is arduous—most of the eastern cities can’t be
reached by road from Kinshasa.
Conflict in Eastern Congo
Click on the map to learn more.
Armed Groups
Orange: Foreign; Green: National
Population at Risk
Darker shading indicates higher vulnerability
Mines
Displacement
IDPs by province in DRC and Congolese refugees in
neighboring countries
Goma
Kinshasa
North Kivu
South Kivu
Tanganyika
Maniema
Ituri
Sources:
OCHA
,
UNHCR
,
International Peace Information Service
.

5. +
-
Violence in the eastern Congo has its roots in ethnic conflict
dating back to the colonial era, which was then aggravated
under the thirty-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko that
began in 1965. The horrific scale of the recent fighting grew out
of events beginning in 1994. That year, the genocide of nearly
one million Rwandan Tutsis sparked a regional conflagration
that came to be known as the “
African World War
.” After many Hutu
genocidaires
fled to eastern Congo and threatened incursons back into
Rwanda, the Tutsi government of Rwanda led a retaliatory
invasion in 1996 that would eventually entangle nearly all of
the Congo’s neighbors. Sweeping from east to west, Rwandan
forces, together with their regional partners and Congolese
allies, overthrew Mobutu and installed a new government under
Laurent Kabila.
The alliance broke down in 1998 when the new government in
Kinshasa turned against Rwanda, ordering Rwandan and other
foreign forces out of the country. Regional rebellions emerged,
fracturing the country, and local militias sprouted up.
Neighboring countries, divided between those supporting and
those opposed to the Kinshasa government, once again invaded.
After several partial agreements, a 2003 peace deal pacified the
west, but fighting in the eastern Congo continued. Pro-Rwanda
rebels from the Congolese Tutsi, or Banyamulenge, populations
concentrated in the Kivus clashed with the Democratic Forces
for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), the Rwandan Hutu militia
tied to the 1994 genocide, as well as government soldiers.
Other rebel groups, like the Ugandan Allied Democratic Forces
(ADF), have been a target of the UN peacekeeping
mission, MONUSCO, for years. The ADF, a small but potent
force ensconced in the Rwenzori mountains on the border with

6. Uganda, has remained a threat with a spate of deadly attacks in
November and December 2015. Meanwhile, a multitude of
ethnically based local militias, known as the
Mai Mai
, have added to the chaos with their opaque networks of shifting
alliances.
Conflict Economies
While fighting in the eastern Congo flows from many sources—
ethnic conflict, political grievances, and regional geopolitics—
underpinning this volatile mix is the impoverished region’s so-
called resource curse. Lack of economic opportunity boosts
recruiting for armed groups, and competition for land and other
natural resources often leads to violence. Completing the circle,
rebel forces, often with outside collusion, feed off of the
region’s wealth to perpetuate their armed struggles.
Decades of war and mismanagement have ravaged the Congo’s
overall productive capacity. Despite having some of the world’s
most valuable mineral deposits, Africa’s greatest hydropower
potential, and vast expanses of fertile farmland, the country’s
people live on an average of
less than
$200 a year—barely half of what they did in 1970. Even with
impressive growth rates
of over 9 percent in 2014 and 2015, economic progress hasn’t
translated into broader prosperity in the eastern Congo.
Unemployment remains above 50 percent, with levels even
higher among the young and in the eastern Kivu provinces
where much of the conflict is centered.
The Congo’s crumbling infrastructure, too, limits the economic
activity and hobbles the central government’s efforts to defeat
rebel groups. Internal commerce is greatly constrained and
electricity is scarce, with less than 10 percent of citizens able to
reliably access power.

7. Many in the east are thus left to fend for themselves, both
economically and militarily. The resulting proliferation of
militias has become deeply intertwined with local economies.
The so-called conflict mineral trade has received particular
attention due to the many mines that have come under the
control of rebel groups and the importance of several of those
minerals in cell phones and other consumer electronics.
Informal, or “artisanal,” mining
comprises
up to one-fifth of the country’s economic output and employs
millions of people in the eastern Congo. It is a ready source of
income for rebels and corrupt government soldiers alike, as well
as for traders from neighboring countries operating directly or
through local armed allies.
Still, many experts say that mining is only one catalyst for the
ongoing conflict. Some regional analysts
argue
that the eastern Congo is a “fully militarized” economy, with
armed groups participating in every sector and able to leverage
almost any valuable resource. Clashes over access to the eastern
Congo’s fertile land, in particular, stretch back decades, and in
some cases, centuries. Ethnic Tutsis originally from Rwanda
have long fought with other groups over property and
citizenship rights in the region. Even today many of the ongoing
armed conflicts between villages and ethnic clans trace their
origins to these disputes—and the advent of modern weaponry
has led to increasing humanitarian costs.
As the central government attempts to resolve these conflicts
and bring development to the east, it remains weak and highly
dependent on outside support. The progress that has been made
in pacifying some areas has been underwritten by a UN
peacekeeping mission costing more than one billion dollars per
year. Foreign donors supply nearly a fifth of Kinshasa’s
total budget
. It will likely fall to them to fund national general elections,
whose costs are expected to exceed one billion dollars.

8. Outside Forces
The Democratic Republic of the Congo won independence from
decades of Belgian rule in 1960, but that did not mean the end
of outside interference in its affairs. The country almost
immediately became mired in Cold War geopolitics, with the
United States supporting the thirty-year rule of anti-Communist
dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Under Mobutu, a declining
economy, decaying infrastructure, and the deterioration of the
armed forces combined to produce a weak state increasingly
unable to govern and defend its own territory.
By the 1990s, tensions with Rwanda and internal instability
that affected neighboring countries led to two “African World
Wars” in the DRC that involved nine countries. Since Rwanda’s
civil war between Hutus and Tutsis spilled over into the eastern
Congo in 1994, Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government has repeatedly
intervened, sending its own troops into the region and
supporting its Congolese allies with logistical support. Uganda,
too, played a major role, with its troops first supporting and
then falling out with Rwandan forces in eastern Congolese
territory. Other countries in the region, including Angola,
Burundi, and Zimbabwe, have been drawn into the conflict at
different stages.
Outside parties have also stepped in as peacemakers. The peace
process that culminated in a 2003 transitional government was
hosted by then–South African President Thabo Mbeki. The
United Nations
deployed
the UN Organization Mission in the Congo (MONUC—later
renamed MONUSCO), the largest and most expensive
peacekeeping mission in its history, first to facilitate
democratic elections and later to take the offensive against rebel
groups.
After the emergence of yet another Rwanda-backed rebel group,
the M23, in 2013, the United States led a new regional peace

9. process that brought together the African Union, the European
Union, and the UN. Pursued in coordination with the
International Conference of the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR)
, a grouping of central African governments, these talks resulted
in the Nairobi Declaration of December 2013. The declaration
laid out a program for disarming the M23, demobilizing its
fighters, and holding its leaders accountable.
All of these efforts have contributed to the tentative progress
that has taken hold in the eastern Congo. None, however, have
so far proved capable of ending once and for all the cycle of
bloody insurgency.
Decision Points
As the Congolese government continues to pursue the remnants
of rebel forces in the east, the country remains fragile.
Progress—economic, military, and political—is real, but far
from stable. Underlying issues such as land rights, citizenship,
and power sharing remain unresolved as elections loom. The
choices made by politicians, soldiers, and business leaders in
the months and years to come will likely set the trajectory of
the eastern Congo for decades. Hanging over eastern Congo’s
future is the specter of renewed ethnic and communal violence
and another generation of children lost to the ravages of
disease, slavery, and war.
Developments in the following areas will be crucial.
Nic Bothma/epa/Corbis
2016 Elections
President Joseph Kabila, in power since 2001, is
constitutionally barred from running for a third term after his
current mandate ends in November 2016. However, speculation
has swirled that Kabila will seek to remain in power because the
national election commission
has said
it will be impossible to hold new elections before July 2017.

10. Many in the DRC, including some of Kabila’s own
political allies
, have accused him of intentionally delaying elections as a way
of creating
glissement
, or electoral slippage, to extend his stay in office.
Such a play for power would likely have serious repercussions
for the authority of the central government, in particular in the
eastern provinces. The perception of illegitimate rule in
Kinshasa could spur new rebellions by disgruntled factions of
the national army. In turn, the resulting political chaos could
potentially encourage the DRC’s neighbors to once again
attempt to influence events there through proxy forces. A
peaceful, democratic transition, on the other hand, would be a
watershed moment for Congolese institutions.
Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters
Conflict Minerals
The informal mining industry in the eastern Congo is in many
places interwoven with the region’s armed groups. Some experts
have argued that restricting these minerals from international
markets could help smother the conflict. U.S. policymakers
have sought to impose such restrictions through
Section 1502
of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, which
requires publicly traded companies to disclose whether their
products are “conflict free.” Similar European Union
legislation
approved in 2015
requires companies to perform due diligence, including third-
party audits, to confirm that their supply chains do not
contribute to the fighting.
However, some experts believe that such regulations will prove
to be counterproductive to the goal of developing the eastern
Congo,
arguing

11. that the rules have already contributed to putting millions of
miners out of work. Other observers
argue
that armed groups are able to easily exploit other natural
resources, such as timber, charcoal, or drug smuggling, in the
face of pressure.
Luc Gnago/Reuters/Corbis
Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration
A major challenge to peace has been the DRC’s faltering efforts
to demobilize thousands of rebel fighters—whether by
incorporating them into the national army or smoothing their
transition into civilian life. Former rebels have repeatedly
launched rebellions from within the military, including General
Laurent Nkunda’s 2004 mutiny and General Bosco Ntaganda’s
2012 M23 uprising. This cycle has led some experts to decry the
“revolving door” of the Disarmament, Demobilization, and
Reintegration (DDR) process.
With the defeat of M23 and the ongoing campaign against the
FDLR, the most recent DDR effort will require the Congolese
government to
manage more than eleven thousand
ex-combatants. In addition to being disarmed and vetted for
human rights violations, these ex-fighters will require job
training and other economic support, which will likely
cost more
than $100 million. Without progress, fighters like these could
decide it is in their interest to return to the battlefield.
Craig Ruttle/AP Photo
Regional Relations
Since 1994, the fate of the eastern Congo has turned largely on
the actions of neighboring Rwanda. It has repeatedly intervened
in the DRC, directly or through its proxies, in the name of
defending itself from the Hutu genocidaires based there. The
most recent proxy war, in 2013, was only brought to an end
through U.S. pressure on the Rwandan government and a

12. regional peace process aimed at reducing foreign interference in
eastern Congo.
A final resolution of the conflict will hinge in large part on the
ability of Rwanda and the DRC to forge constructive relations.
Rwanda has stepped back from direct intervention, but its
leaders allege that the Congolese government is unwilling to
finally defeat the Hutu FDLR forces that have lingered in the
region since 1994. This could potentially spark another round of
escalation. The creation of more legitimate and transparent
economic ties between the eastern Congo and its neighbors
could bring local trading relationships out of the shadows and
reduce the control of warlords over resources.
Saul Loeb/Pool/Reuters
International Actors
The United States is the country's largest bilateral donor and the
largest financial contributor to MONUSCO, providing a quarter
of the total UN peacekeeping budget. President Barack Obama’s
administration also raised the profile of the DRC in U.S.
diplomacy by appointing former Senator Russell Feingold as
special envoy to the Great Lakes region in 2013. In this role,
Feingold brokered a regional peace agreement. As part of this
endeavor, the United States created a framework for
coordination with the African Union, the European Union, and
the UN, and for the first time welcomed China to multilateral
discussions. Feingold’s replacement, former
Representative Thomas Perriello, was appointed in July 2015
and has
been vocal
about the need for Kabila to step down in 2016.
At the same time, the UN mission has reached a crossroads. The
intervention brigade created in 2013 helped the Congolese army
successfully defeat the M23 rebellion. But a planned joint UN-
Congolese offensive against the remaining Hutu FDLR rebels
fell apart
in early 2015 over UN criticism of human rights abuses within
the Congolese army. Meanwhile, Kabila has been pushing for

13. the UN to begin reducing its twenty-two-thousand-strong force,
exacerbating concerns that Kinshasa is
not committed
to defeating the FDLR.