SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The trade of mineral resources contributed to the mechanisms of mass killing in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the war that started in 1998. The peace agreed in 2002 moved to reverse the economic logic of the violence by incentivizing belligerents to contest politically. Investigating the shift in the economic configuration, this chapter argues that the focus on high profile actors and high value goods, alongside the oversight of violence, excluded much of the population and their economic activities from the peace. The chapter concludes that the peace impeded the deaths by invading armies, but has contributed to other forms of mass killing by rendering the population irrelevant to the country’s economic and political development. This is of broader significance for the analysis of other post-war contexts in which sections of the population are excluded from bargains that prioritize the economic appeasement of elite belligerents.