Resource bartering doesn’t deliver stability – it perpetuates institutional fragility and rarely builds public trust and legitimacy in African governments.
In March 2026, the United States (US) imposed sanctions on Rwandan army officials and the Rwanda Defence Force, following Rwanda’s continued support for M23 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This included a December 2025 offensive on Uvira that violated the US-mediated Washington Accords.
These accords reaffirmed an earlier agreement and introduced a Regional Economic Integration Framework between DRC and Rwanda, intended to promote stability through shared development. Its implementation, however, depends on improvements in several areas, including security.
At the same time, Washington has deepened its alignment with Kinshasa under its America First foreign policy. Beyond recent bilateral agreements on deportation and health, the two governments have begun implementing a Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA). This grants US companies preferential access to critical minerals while expanding security and defence cooperation.
Together, these initiatives amount to a minerals-for-security bargain: access to the DRC’s vast mineral wealth in exchange for America’s support in stabilising the country’s volatile east. The idea originated in a February 2025 proposal by President Félix Tshisekedi offering resource access for US security, with the additional aim of curbing illicit mineral flows to neighbouring countries.
Kinshasa has pursued similar arrangements. When relations with Rwanda deteriorated over the M23 rebellion, the government pivoted to a partnership with Primera Gold in 2023, a joint venture with the United Arab Emirates granting exclusive export rights over artisanal gold in South Kivu. This was later accompanied by expanded Emirati military support.
The US-DRC deal trades mineral access for security support – but offers few explicit guarantees
However, the deal faced criticism for its lack of transparency, and the UAE withdrew over disappointing export volumes.
The UAE experience reflects a broader pattern: resource bargains struck in context of armed conflict rarely deliver lasting benefits for the countries that sign them.
The problem lies in their underlying imbalance. Driven by short-term security or stability imperatives, they tend to bind fragile states into asymmetric dependencies that erode sovereignty over natural resources and undermine autonomy. The SPA imposes concrete obligations on the DRC, like long-term preferential fiscal terms, regulatory reforms, and privileged access for US firms, while offering few explicit security guarantees.
Nor will greater investment alone resolve instability in the east. Kinshasa expects that deepening US economic stakes in the DRC will help to deter foreign aggression.
This view draws partly on 2025 events, when rebels withdrew from Walikale following US outreach, enabling operations at the Bisie Tin Project to resume. Kinshasa has since designated the rebel-held Rubaya coltan mine – one of the world’s richest tantalum deposits – as a strategic US investment site.
This assumption rests on fragile grounds. Long-term mining investments, including in eastern DRC, aren’t guaranteed by rebel withdrawal alone, and could face local resistance and legal challenges.
Meanwhile, the Congo River Alliance (AFC)/M23 rebellion has signalled its intention to remain in control, while Rwanda ties any withdrawal to neutralising the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda. These conditions are part of the US-mediated peace deal, but probably wouldn’t be met soon.
Resource bargains struck under conflict conditions entrench the fragility they claim to resolve
As most targeted investment sites lie in other provinces, much of the US-DRC SPA could proceed even if the conflict remains frozen. Moreover, given the scale of mineral smuggling to neighbouring countries, US firms could opt to seek access to Congolese minerals indirectly through partnerships with Rwandan companies in eastern DRC.
Even if the deal and American pressure strengthened deterrence against AFC/M23 and Rwanda, how the resource bargain would help address structural drivers of conflict in the DRC is unclear. Rooted partly in fragile institutions, such arrangements are unlikely to mitigate these drivers and may instead be reinforced by the political context in which they occur.
Such resource bartering arrangements reflect deeper extraversion strategies, where elites construct and leverage external dependencies to secure domestic survival. Such dependencies can be politically advantageous; they help compensate for internal weaknesses, such as limited legitimacy or resources, while insulating them from domestic accountability. But this strategy is costly; it risks undermining internally generated democratic legitimacy by privileging external rents.
In the DRC, such dynamics have deep historic roots. Coercive integration into colonial structures produced an economy largely reliant on external markets and exporting raw materials. This outward-oriented political economy generated the patronage resources that allowed Mobutu Sese Seko (1971–1997) to transform Zaire into a rentier state, deriving much of its revenues from economic rents paid by foreign companies.
During the Cold War, Mobutu leveraged Western demand for Congolese minerals, converting the wealth it generated into domestic political resources that bartered loyalty for cash. Yet under global economic stress in the 1970s, this transactional politics increasingly turned inward.
Pressured by structural adjustment and liberalisation policies, government withdrew from economic regulation while political loyalty became increasingly bartered through self-financing opportunities outside of the political centre.
Sovereignty grounded in internal legitimacy, not external backing, is the prerequisite for lasting peace
The state’s unravelling saw the unregulated economy expand and alternative sources of authority emerge. In eastern Zaire, extensive smuggling networks fostered a form of de facto regional integration, with local elites who were only loosely tied to the political centre and who prospered from cross-border trade.
These dynamics, combined with the regional fallout from the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, gave rise to the 1990s and early 2000s extraverted war economy that reoriented mineral rents eastward towards and through Ugandan and Rwandan rebel backers. What drove this political economy, besides looting, were localised protection rackets tying armed forces to trading networks.
Formal peace agreements ended large-scale conflict, but left the political economy intact. Under Joseph Kabila, government continued relying on external resources, as donor funding and mining concessions, to finance patronage and maintain political control. Armed groups banked on external backing as leverage for political bargaining. Decades of international partner-funded state-building efforts often reinforced, rather than transformed, these dynamics.
This political legacy brought Tshisekedi into office through a backdoor power-sharing deal. Allegations of corruption and elite capture of mining revenues remain widespread, while parallel power networks have expanded, political repression has intensified and concerns about a constitutional amendment to allow a third presidential term are growing.
The new US-DRC partnership risks reinforcing these trends by providing new external rents and backing for these political ambitions, particularly as Washington has abandoned any pretence of democratic or state reforms in its transactional and extractive foreign policy.
A strengthened DRC and power rebalance regarding the AFC/M23 rebellion and Rwanda may be a necessary condition for peace. But breaking cycles of violence and aggression will require sovereignty grounded in internal legitimacy rather than external backing, enabling reform and dialogue on structural drivers of conflict.