Digging Deeper: the Politics of ‘Conflict Minerals’ in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo
| Date | 01 November 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12079 |
| Author | Koen Vlassenroot,Jose Diemel,Jeroen Cuvelier |
| Published date | 01 November 2013 |
Digging Deeper: the Politics of ‘Conflict
Minerals’in the Eastern Democratic Republic
of the Congo
Jeroen Cuvelier
University of Ghent, Belgium, University of Wageningen, the Netherlands
Jose Diemel
University of Wageningen, the Netherlands
Koen Vlassenroot
University of Ghent, Belgium
Consuming the Congo: War and Conflict Minerals in
the World’s Deadliest Place by Peter Eichstaedt. Chi-
cago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 2011f. 232 pp., £16.38,
hardcover, 978 1569763100
Coltan by Michael Nest. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.
200 pp., £12.99, paperback, 978 0745649320
Since the second half of the 1990s, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (DRC), a country the size of wes-
tern Europe, has been the scene of one of the biggest
and most complicated conflicts in modern African his-
tory. Due to the involvement of foreign armed forces
from all over Central Africa, the presence of a staggering
number of rebel movements and militias, and the enor-
mous death toll, the Congolese war has often been
dubbed ‘the Great African War’.Yet, despite this com-
plexity, the conflict is commonly understood from a nar-
row-minded perspective. Many international NGOs,
activists and journalists claim that the main reason for
the continuation of armed violence in the DRC is the
competition for the country’s mineral wealth. The domi-
nant narrative on the war is that Congo is ‘cursed’by its
riches, that greed is the main conflict motive, and that
armed groups are using revenues from the exploitation
and trade of natural resources to finance their war efforts
and to enrich themselves. So, they argue, the easiest and
most effective way to end the conflict is to prevent
armed groups from making money through the sale of
minerals from the areas under their control. Pressured by
negative reporting from NGOs and UN expert panels and
influential US-based advocacy groups about the involve-
ment of armed groups in Eastern DRC’s mining business,
policy makers and representatives of the international
mining and electronics industry were forced to develop
initiatives to ban Congolese ‘conflict minerals’from the
international market. A US legislation targeting conflict
minerals from the DRC was adopted, and an amalgam of
certification and traceability mechanisms is being
implemented.
But this dominant understanding of the reasons
behind Congo’s war is not without critique. Various
experts have raised concerns about the narrow focus on
conflict dynamics in the DRC. In 2002, Erik Kennes
remarked that ‘thoughtful political science analysis of the
plunder of Africa’s natural resources is increasingly being
taken hostage by journalistic interpretations and NGO
reporting and “expert commissions”’ (Kennes, 2002,
p. 601). More recently, S
everine Autesserre argued that:
The international actors’concentration on traf-
ficking of mineral resources as a source of vio-
lence has led them to overlook the myriad
other causes, such as land conflict, poverty, cor-
ruption, local political and social antagonisms,
and hostile relationships between state officials,
including security forces, and the general popu-
lation (Autesserre, 2012, p. 205).
James Smith deplored the fact that policy papers of inter-
national NGOs such as Global Witness, Human Rights
Watch and the Enough Project are usually written ‘in a
highly normative, legalistic language’(Smith, 2011, p. 19).
Peter Eichstaedt and Michael Nest, the authors of two
recently published books on the role of the exploitation
and trade of minerals in Congo, share some of these cri-
tiques, albeit not with the same level of sophistication
and precision. Eichstaedt’sConsuming the Congo is far
less convincing and inspiring than the works of other
Congo experts. His book overflows with clich
es, stereo-
Global Policy (2013) 4:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12079 ©2013 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 4 . Issue 4 . November 2013 449
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