The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s conflict history dates back to the late 19th‑century Congo Free State, when brutal exploitation under King Leopold II and later Belgian colonial rule entrenched violent extraction and weak institutions. Since independence in 1960, the country has experienced repeated crises, including the Congo Crisis of the 1960s, Mobutu’s authoritarian rule, and the First and Second Congo Wars and their aftermath, marked by ongoing armed groups, regional interference, and conflict over its vast natural resources.
Throughout 2025, eastern DR Congo saw intense fighting between government forces and the AFC/M23 alliance alongside numerous militias, with large-scale one-sided violence against civilians by groups including the FDLR-FOCA. UCDP recorded 9,172 battle-related deaths, including 4,920 civilians.
The World Map of Conflict uses two complementary datasets from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to visualise conflict per country.
The colour coding of the overview base map is derived from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), which contains fully verified conflict data aggregated at the country level. UCDP publishes the GED annually (typically May–June of the following year) to allow careful validation of every recorded event.
The map on this country page draws from the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset (CED), which includes the most recent reported events and provides a near-real-time overview of conflict developments. Because these events are still under verification, the data should be considered preliminary.
Historical Lenses
To understand DR Congo’s conflict history, it is first important to understand what kind of country it is. Historians often explain the same country in different ways depending on what they believe are the main forces driving history. Each historical lens below offers a different, evidence-based interpretation of the country’s development.
A note on the two Congos. Two African countries carry the name “Congo,” and they are easy to confuse. This page covers the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the larger of the two, whose capital is Kinshasa and which was called Zaire from 1971 to 1997 under the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko. Its smaller western neighbour, the Republic of the Congo (capital Brazzaville), was a separate French colony and has been a separate country since 1960, with its own page on this site. Both take their name from the Congo River and from the precolonial Kingdom of Kongo, but their colonial rulers (Belgium for the DRC, France for the Republic of the Congo) and present-day conflicts are distinct.
The interpretation most widely accepted by historians, based on mainstream historical research and university scholarship. It reflects broad areas of agreement while acknowledging where historians disagree.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo sits at the heart of the African continent, straddling the equator and covering a territory roughly the size of Western Europe — the largest country in sub-Saharan Africa by area. Most of it lies within the vast basin of the Congo River, the world’s second-largest river by volume, which drains a rainforest exceeded in size only by the Amazon. Long before Europeans arrived, this territory held sophisticated, centralized kingdoms — the Kingdom of Kongo on the Atlantic coast, and further inland the Luba and Lunda kingdoms — built on trade in copper, salt, and iron, and on elaborate systems of tribute and chieftaincy. From the 1880s the entire region was claimed as the personal possession of Belgium’s King Leopold II, then in 1908 transferred to Belgian state rule as a colony; independence came abruptly in 1960, followed within days by mutiny, secession, and the assassination of the country’s first elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. A soldier named Mobutu Sese Seko seized power in 1965 and ruled for 32 years, renaming the country Zaire. Since the 1990s the mainstream account centres on a state repeatedly hollowed out from within and preyed upon from without, its enormous mineral wealth a magnet for exploitation rather than a foundation for broad prosperity.
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History (2002); David Van Reybrouck, Congo: The Epic History of a People (2010), for the popular restatement.
Historians identify four thresholds that reshaped the country’s structure. The first was the creation of the Congo Free State in 1885, a territory ruled as King Leopold II’s personal property rather than as a colony of Belgium, in which a forced-labour system built around wild rubber killed an enormous number of Congolese — a death toll historians still debate but which international investigators of the day already judged catastrophic; outrage forced Belgium to annex the territory as an ordinary colony in 1908. The second was independence in 1960, granted with almost no preparation of a Congolese administrative or political class; within days the army mutinied, the mineral-rich province of Katanga seceded, and the following year Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was murdered with Belgian and American complicity. The third was the 1965 coup by army chief Mobutu Sese Seko, who built a highly centralized, one-party, personality-driven state that lasted until 1997. The fourth was the pair of wars that followed Mobutu’s fall — the First and Second Congo Wars, 1996–2003, which drew in troops from at least eight neighbouring countries and killed millions, mostly from disease and hunger rather than combat, in what is sometimes called Africa’s World War.
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (1998); Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila (2002); Jason Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (2011).
In the mainstream account the state came first, and it came from outside: the borders of today’s Congo were fixed not by any Congolese process but by King Leopold II’s private claim, ratified at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, where European powers divided Africa among themselves without African participation. Belgian colonial rule after 1908 then built the administrative shell of a modern state — provinces, railways, mines, a colonial civil service — while deliberately blocking the growth of a Congolese political class, leaving only a handful of university graduates in the entire territory by 1960. Independence therefore handed the new leadership a functioning administrative and economic machine but almost no experience running it, and no real sense, among some 200 to 250 ethnic and linguistic groups spread across a territory the size of Western Europe, of belonging to one nation. Mobutu’s answer, from the 1970s, was to manufacture unity by decree — a single party, a single leader’s image, a renamed country and river. The mainstream reading treats Congolese nationhood as still substantially in formation: the state was imposed early and completely, while a shared national identity, beyond opposition to outside interference, remains one of the country’s unfinished projects.
Crawford Young & Thomas Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State (1985); Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila (2002).
The long-term force the mainstream identifies is a recurring pattern: fabulous natural wealth extracted through a central authority too weak, too predatory, or too compromised to convert that wealth into broad development. Under Leopold, the wealth was wild rubber and ivory, extracted by forced labour for the personal profit of a foreign king. Under Belgian colonial rule it was copper, tin, and industrial diamonds, mined efficiently but for the benefit of Belgium and a small settler and administrative class. Under Mobutu it was the same mines, nationalized in name in the 1970s but managed as instruments of personal patronage, their revenues diverted into the president’s private accounts while public services collapsed. In the wars and insurgencies since the 1990s it has been gold, coltan, cobalt, and other minerals, taxed and smuggled by armed groups, some backed by neighbouring states, to fund their own survival. Each era changes the resource and the cast of beneficiaries, but not the underlying shape: authority over the territory has repeatedly been strong enough to extract, and too weak, too narrow, or too corrupted to build. Historians see this as the single thread running from the 1880s to the present day, and the reason the country’s mineral wealth is so often described as more curse than blessing.
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila (2002); Crawford Young & Thomas Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State (1985); Jason Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (2011).
Alternative interpretations developed by respected historians that challenge or expand the mainstream view. These perspectives highlight debates within historical scholarship rather than presenting a single accepted explanation.
A revisionist reading resists the common shorthand that Congo’s history effectively begins with King Leopold II’s conquest in the 1880s, and insists instead on some five thousand years of prior political development across the equatorial rainforest that now falls within the country’s borders. Historians working in this vein, most influentially the Belgian Africanist Jan Vansina, have reconstructed this deep past from oral tradition, linguistics, and archaeology rather than from written colonial archives, tracing how small farming and fishing communities of Bantu-language speakers gradually built up chieftaincies, trading networks, and eventually substantial kingdoms — the Kongo Kingdom on the Atlantic coast foremost among them, which maintained direct diplomatic relations, including an exchange of ambassadors, with Portugal from the 1480s, centuries before Leopold was born. On this account, the “state” Europeans are usually credited with introducing to Congo was in fact a European conquest and reorganization of political traditions that were already old, complex, and various — not a creation from a blank slate. This is a genuine correction to the standard narrative’s tendency to start the clock in 1885, though it is itself contested: the surviving evidence for the precolonial past is thin and heavily inferential compared with the colonial archive, and specialists disagree sharply over how centralized or fragile these earlier polities actually were.
Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (1990).
The revisionist backbone keeps the same broad sequence used by the mainstream — precolonial kingdoms, Leopold’s Free State, Belgian colonization, independence, Mobutu, the wars — but adds a threshold the standard account often skips and rereads one it treats as simple failure. The added threshold is the Atlantic slave trade, which from the sixteenth century drew hundreds of thousands of captives out of the Kongo and Lunda kingdoms toward coastal ports, destabilizing local political structures long before any European soldier or administrator set foot inland; on this reading, some of the fragmentation later blamed entirely on colonial conquest was already under way. The reread threshold is the disintegration of Mobutu’s formal state through the 1980s and 1990s. Where the mainstream sees decline and eventual collapse, the political scientist William Reno argues Mobutu pursued a deliberate strategy: as foreign aid dried up after the Cold War, he dismantled bureaucratic institutions on purpose, replacing them with personal networks and private deals with foreign mining firms answerable to him alone rather than to any state structure — a rational, if ultimately unsustainable, method of holding on to power. Because this reinterprets accepted events rather than denying them, it counts as serious scholarship, though how much of Congo’s later “state failure” was truly deliberate strategy, as against genuine loss of control, remains disputed.
William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (1998); Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests (1990).
Where the mainstream account holds that a modern state was imposed on Congo from outside and a nation has yet to catch up, revisionist historians push back on the premise itself: precolonial Congo already contained states, some of them, like the Kongo and Lunda kingdoms, quite sophisticated, with courts, provincial governors, and systems of tribute collection that Portuguese and later Belgian observers themselves recorded with admiration. What Leopold’s conquest destroyed or absorbed, on this account, was not an absence of statehood but a set of competing, functioning polities. A related and sharper claim concerns the character of authority itself: from Leopold’s Congo Free State, legally his personal property and not a possession of Belgium at all, through Mobutu’s treatment of the treasury and the mining sector as extensions of his own household, to the way armed factions have run mining zones as private fiefdoms since the 1990s, revisionist scholars trace a continuous pattern of personalized rather than public rule. On this reading, the recurring problem is not that Congo lacks a state but that authority over its territory has rarely functioned as public authority at all — it has instead repeatedly been captured as someone’s private domain. This is a minority argument; most historians still find the loss of precolonial political continuity, and the sheer scale of colonial disruption, decisive.
William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (1998); Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests (1990).
The force this school foregrounds is the recurring privatization of public authority — the pattern by which control over Congo’s territory and resources has again and again been captured as someone’s personal property rather than exercised as public power on behalf of a citizenry. Leopold’s Congo Free State was, uniquely among African colonies, the legal private estate of one man. Mobutu, formally the head of a sovereign republic, ran its treasury, its army postings, and its mining concessions as instruments of personal patronage, in what William Reno terms a “shadow state” built deliberately behind the collapsing shell of the formal one. Since the 1990s, armed groups controlling mines in the east — some with backing from neighbouring governments — have repeated the pattern on a smaller scale, taxing and directing mineral production for their own benefit rather than the state’s. This is a deliberately provocative departure from the mainstream’s emphasis on external extraction and a weak-but-earnest state failing to cope with it: the revisionist claim is that at each stage a small circle of rulers actively chose private capture over public governance, when institution-building was genuinely available as an alternative. Critics respond that this understates how much external interference and outright limits on Congolese sovereignty foreclosed those alternatives to begin with.
William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (1998); Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests (1990).
Explains history through religion, culture, identity, political traditions, ideology and the stories societies tell about themselves. This lens asks how beliefs and shared identities have shaped historical development.
Seen through collective identity and belief, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is defined less by a single culture than by an unusually layered one: more than two hundred ethnic and language groups, most speaking Bantu languages, share the territory alongside four recognized national languages — Lingala, Kikongo, Tshiluba, and Swahili — and French, the language of administration inherited from Belgium. Beneath this diversity runs a set of older, widely shared religious ideas: a cosmology, especially strong among the Kongo peoples of the west, in which the visible world of the living sits alongside an invisible world of ancestors and spiritual forces, and in which illness, misfortune, and political power alike are read as signs of forces at work beneath the surface. Christianity, brought by Portuguese missionaries as early as the fifteenth century and then spread widely under Belgian colonial rule, did not simply replace this cosmology but blended with it: the great majority of Congolese today are Catholic or Protestant, but the country has also produced some of Africa’s largest independent, prophet-led churches, which fuse Christian scripture with these older understandings of spiritual power. Cultural historians read Congolese identity as built from this repeated layering — indigenous cosmology, Christian mission, and homegrown prophetic religion — rather than from any single inherited tradition.
Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire (1986).
Seen through religion and political culture, four moments stand out. The first came in 1491, when the king of Kongo converted to Christianity after contact with Portuguese traders and missionaries, folding the new faith into an existing court religion rather than replacing one with the other. The second was 1921, when a Baptist catechist named Simon Kimbangu began healing the sick and preaching near the lower Congo River; colonial authorities, alarmed at the crowds he drew, sentenced him to death, commuted to life imprisonment, and he died in detention thirty years later — but the movement he started survived underground and became, under his son’s leadership, the Kimbanguist Church, now one of the largest Christian denominations to have originated in Africa. The third was the “authenticité)” campaign Mobutu Sese Seko launched from 1971, renaming the country Zaire, ordering citizens to drop Christian first names for African ones, and presenting himself as guardian of a recovered African identity. The fourth is the Catholic Church’s re-emergence, after Mobutu’s fall, as one of the few institutions trusted across the country’s ethnic and regional lines — mediating political transitions and, through its bishops’ conference, monitoring recent disputed elections. Each moment reshaped who could plausibly claim moral and political authority over Congolese identity.
Marie-Louise Martin, Kimbangu: An African Prophet and His Church (1975); Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz (2000).
On this reading, Congolese nationhood was never going to be built from a shared ethnic or linguistic inheritance — with over two hundred distinct groups, no single culture could plausibly anchor it — so it has instead been built, unevenly, from shared institutions and shared experience. The Catholic Church, established in every province under Belgian rule and staffed increasingly by Congolese clergy after independence, became one of the very few organizations with genuine national reach, its parishes and schools functioning as a rare shared civic space. The Kimbanguist Church, though it began among the Kongo people of the west, spread nationally too, offering a specifically Congolese, rather than imported, religious identity. Mobutu attempted to manufacture a third kind of unity by decree: a single ruling party, a cult of personality, and the authenticité campaign’s insistence on a shared “authentic” African identity defined against colonial culture, even as it demanded absolute loyalty to himself. Cultural historians read modern Congolese identity as an uneasy blend of these three — church-based civic community, homegrown prophetic religion, and state-imposed nationalist ideology — layered onto a population that still identifies strongly, in daily life, with more local ethnic and regional loyalties. State and nation-building here proceeded side by side, neither one securely finishing the job.
Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa (1986); Marie-Louise Martin, Kimbangu: An African Prophet and His Church (1975).
The lasting force in this reading is the repeated emergence of moral and religious authority to fill space that weak or illegitimate secular institutions leave open. When colonial rule denied Congolese people any real political voice, prophetic religion supplied one instead: Kimbangu’s preaching in 1921 was read by colonial officials, correctly, as a challenge to their authority, and prophetic and independent churches continued to function as outlets for grievance and hope throughout the colonial period. When Mobutu’s one-party state hollowed out formal politics after 1965, he tried to capture that same moral space for himself, casting his own image and the authenticité ideology as a kind of civic religion. When his regime, and later the fragile institutions of the wartime and post-war state, again failed to provide security or services, it was again church networks — Catholic parishes above all — that stepped into the gap, running schools and clinics and, more recently, monitoring elections the state itself could not be trusted to referee fairly. What best explains the country’s political culture over time, on this account, is not the strength of its formal institutions but the durability of these alternative sources of legitimacy, repeatedly summoned whenever the state’s own claim to moral authority falters.
Marie-Louise Martin, Kimbangu: An African Prophet and His Church (1975); Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz (2000); Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa (1986).
Explains history through geography, natural resources, trade, demographics, technology and economic structures. This lens explores how the physical environment and material conditions have influenced historical change.
Geography and geology together explain a great deal of Congo’s history. The country straddles the equator and holds most of the vast Congo River basin, whose main channel is the world’s second most powerful river and whose network of tributaries once made river transport the only practical way to move goods across a landscape otherwise blocked by dense rainforest — the second largest continuous rainforest on Earth after the Amazon. The country shares borders with nine neighbours, making it a crossroads, and often a battleground, for the surrounding region. Beneath this terrain lies mineral wealth of a scale matched by few other places on the planet: the copper and cobalt belt of the southern Katanga and Lualaba region, among the richest on Earth and now central to global battery and electronics production; industrial and alluvial diamond fields across the central Kasai provinces; and, in the eastern highlands, gold, tin, tungsten, and coltan, the ore from which the element tantalum, essential to capacitors in mobile phones and computers, is refined. Economic historians treat this combination — a river system built for extraction and export rather than internal integration, and mineral deposits valuable enough to attract sustained outside interest — as the single most important fact about the country, shaping who has sought to control it and how.
Robert Harms, Land of Tears: The Exploration and Exploitation of Equatorial Africa (2019); Michael Nest, Coltan (2011).
The economic and geographic turning points track the movement of resources and the infrastructure built to move them. The first was the ivory and then wild-rubber boom of the Congo Free State era, from the 1880s, which financed the railway and river-steamer network built specifically to carry raw materials to the Atlantic coast rather than to connect Congolese towns to one another — a transport map still visible today. The second was the large-scale development of Katanga’s copper and cobalt deposits from 1906 by the Belgian-chartered company Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, which made the southern province the colony’s industrial heart and gave it, at independence in 1960, both the wealth and the separatist ambition to attempt secession within days, plunging the new country into its first crisis. The third was the late-1990s and early-2000s coltan boom, driven by a sudden global surge in demand for mobile phones and laptops, which gave armed factions fighting the Congo Wars a lucrative new revenue source to tax and fight over. The fourth, still unfolding, is the twenty-first-century cobalt boom, driven by demand for electric-vehicle batteries, which has drawn major new foreign investment into Katanga and Lualaba even as small-scale, often dangerous artisanal mining expands alongside it.
Michael Nest, Coltan (2011); Ben Radley, Disrupted Development in the Congo: The Fragile Foundations of the African Mining Consensus (2023); Robert Harms, Land of Tears (2019).
On this reading the shape of the Congolese state was set by the logic of extraction rather than by any plan for national integration. Colonial administrators built railways and river ports to move ivory, rubber, copper, and diamonds out toward the Atlantic coast and onward to European markets as efficiently as possible; they had little reason to connect one Congolese region directly to another, and when it was faster to route Katanga’s copper through southern African ports than through the rest of the country, that route was built instead. The result, inherited at independence in 1960, was a territory administratively unified on paper but physically and economically fragmented in practice — provinces often better connected to neighbouring countries or to the world market than to the national capital, Kinshasa, more than a thousand miles from the mining heartland of the southeast. Economic historians argue this extraction-oriented geography has made political and physical integration exceptionally difficult ever since, since roads and railways that would knit the country together were never commercially necessary and so were rarely built. State and nation, on this account, are both constrained by an infrastructure map drawn for someone else’s convenience, one the postcolonial state has never had the resources to redraw.
Robert Harms, Land of Tears (2019); Ben Radley, Disrupted Development in the Congo (2023).
The force that best explains Congo’s trajectory, on this reading, is a resource economy oriented outward, toward export, rather than inward, toward domestic development — repeated across four successive commodities without ever fundamentally changing shape. Each boom, from Leopold-era rubber through colonial copper to the coltan and cobalt of recent decades, has drawn substantial foreign capital and expertise into extraction, generated real wealth, and shipped the great bulk of that wealth abroad, while leaving comparatively little behind in local infrastructure, industry, or public services. Each boom has also drawn in armed or coercive power to secure it — forced labour under Leopold, a colonial security apparatus under Belgium, foreign-backed militias and army factions during and after the Congo Wars — because valuable, geographically concentrated resources in a weakly governed territory attract force as reliably as they attract capital. Recent scholarship on the mining sector’s most recent expansion argues that even well-intentioned corporate and government efforts to formalize and industrialize mining have repeated this pattern of externally captured value rather than broken it. What best explains Congo over the long run, in this reading, is neither faith nor colonial-era ideology alone, but a landscape whose wealth sits close enough to the surface, and far enough from effective oversight, to be extracted again and again.
Robert Harms, Land of Tears (2019); Michael Nest, Coltan (2011); Ben Radley, Disrupted Development in the Congo (2023).
Not a fifth lens, but the point the whole engine exists to make: historians describe the same country differently because they weigh its causes differently.
Whether Congo’s troubles form one continuous pattern or a series of distinct ruptures is the sharpest dispute. The mainstream and cultural readings tend to treat the Congo Free State, Mobutu’s kleptocracy, and today’s eastern conflict as separate crises, each with its own causes, loosely connected by a shared inheritance of weak institutions. The revisionist reading treats them instead as recurring instances of the same underlying pattern: rule captured as private property rather than exercised as public authority, running in an unbroken line from Leopold’s personal ownership of the territory through Mobutu’s shadow state to today’s mining fiefdoms. Same history, argued either as episodic misfortune or as one continuous structural choice.
The conflict now underway in eastern Congo, around the Rwanda-backed M23 movement, divides the lenses in a second way. The economic-geographic account traces it to control over gold, tin, and coltan trade routes, arguing armed groups fight chiefly to tax and smuggle valuable minerals. The cultural-political account traces it instead to unresolved, colonial-drawn categories of ethnicity and citizenship — above all the contested status of Congolese communities of Rwandan origin — hardened, not invented, by decades of political manipulation. Both explanations fit the same war; each locates its deepest cause somewhere different.
On one point all four agree: the Congolese state, since 1960, has never achieved secure, effective control over the whole of its own territory. They part sharply on why — external and internal predation on its resources, a colonial state imposed too fast and too incompletely to root, an unbroken habit of privatized rule, or a landscape built for extraction rather than integration.
Reference status: every work cited is verified and correctly attributed — Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History (2002); David Van Reybrouck, Congo: The Epic History of a People (Dutch original 2010, English translation 2014); Crawford Young & Thomas Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State (1985); Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (1998); Jason Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (2011); Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests (1990); William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (1998); Marie-Louise Martin, Kimbangu: An African Prophet and His Church (1975); Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa (1986); Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz (2000); Robert Harms, Land of Tears (2019); Michael Nest, Coltan (2011); Ben Radley, Disrupted Development in the Congo (2023). The precise death toll of the Congo Free State era (1885–1908) is itself a live scholarly dispute — Adam Hochschild’s account, building on earlier archival research, argues for a demographic catastrophe in the millions, a figure some historians (including the Belgian historian Jean Stengers) have called exaggerated, and which Jan Vansina himself later revised downward from his own earlier estimate; the underlying character of the regime as extractive and violent is not disputed. Jan Vansina’s account of deep precolonial political tradition and William Reno’s “shadow state” thesis are both influential but actively debated arguments, and are presented here as such, not as settled fact. No optional note on borders is included: research found no genuine, currently active bilateral territorial or boundary dispute involving the DRC — the colonial-era boundaries fixed at the 1884–85 Berlin Conference are not themselves contested; the current crisis in the east is a matter of foreign-backed rebellion and control within existing borders, not a disputed boundary line.
Eastern Congo remains, as of writing, one of the most violent and unstable regions on Earth. Since early 2025 the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel movement — part of a wider political-military coalition, the Congo River Alliance (AFC), led by Corneille Nangaa, a former head of DRC’s electoral commission — has held the major eastern cities of Goma and Bukavu, despite Rwanda’s continued denial that it backs the group. A succession of internationally brokered agreements has tried, and so far failed, to end the fighting: a Washington-mediated peace agreement between the DRC and Rwandan governments in June 2025; a Doha-mediated framework between Kinshasa and the AFC/M23 finalized in November 2025; and, in December 2025, a further Washington Accords agreement between the two governments alongside a separate DRC–M23 ceasefire. Each has produced partial, reversible steps — including M23’s brief withdrawal from the town of Uvira in December 2025 — followed by renewed violations. In July 2026, United Nations human rights experts described a M23 “reign of terror” in the territory it controls, citing widespread torture, sexual violence (more than 90,000 conflict-related cases recorded across 2025 alone), arbitrary detention, and forced labour, and called for the broken ceasefire to be revived. Over 7.8 million people remain internally displaced by the wider conflict — including some 5.3 million in the east alone — one of the largest displacement crises in the world, with millions more facing acute food insecurity. The UN peacekeeping mission, MONUSCO, deployed for over two decades, has begun drawing down: South Africa announced in February 2026 that it would withdraw its roughly 700 troops by the end of the year, even as the Security Council had already extended the mission’s overall mandate to 20 December 2026. Domestically, President Félix Tshisekedi, in office since 2019, has floated seeking a constitutionally questionable third term and pushed for constitutional changes, prompting opposition anger; he agreed in late July 2026 to open a national dialogue with his political opponents. The country’s oldest problem — a fractured periphery the centre cannot secure, and mineral wealth outside actors keep finding reasons to fight over — remains, at the time of writing, unresolved.
Endpoint facts verified against 2025–2026 reporting (OHCHR, UN News, US Department of State, UN Security Council reporting, African Union, Critical Threats/Africa File, Al Jazeera, AllAfrica, CFR Global Conflict Tracker, JURIST, Africanews) as of 29 July 2026. The displacement figure and the month of South Africa’s MONUSCO withdrawal announcement were corrected during independent fact-checking from the drafting subagent’s initial “roughly seven million” / “January 2026” to the more precise and better-sourced “over 7.8 million” (CFR) and “February 2026” (JURIST, Africanews, IOL — the formal public announcement was 8 February 2026, though Ramaphosa had privately notified the UN Secretary-General by phone on 12 January 2026).
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After independence in 1960, DR Congo faced early secession attempts and repeated rebellions. Under President Mobutu, political control weakened further as Cold War support faded, and communities in the east organized along ethnic lines, contributing to violence such as the 1993 Masisi War. In 1996, a Rwanda- and Uganda-backed rebellion (AFDL) toppled Mobutu, triggering wider wars and leaving many armed groups active.
According to UCDP, fighting in 2024 involved the Congolese government, major rebel coalitions like AFC in Nord Kivu, and other armed groups including IS (formerly ADF). Violence is also tied to conflicts spilling over from neighboring states, such as Rwanda’s disputes involving FDLR-FOCA, and Burundi’s conflict with RED-TABARA. Control of mining areas and local land disputes fuel both rebel rivalries and ethnic clashes.
UCDP reports that 2024 saw high and rising fatalities, especially in Ituri and Nord Kivu, where a “state of siege” (emergency military rule) has been repeatedly renewed since 2021. One-sided violence—attacks on civilians—reached its highest level since 2002, including killings by IS and abuses linked to multiple militias and government forces. Violence also spread west near Kinshasa and into other provinces.
Sources: UCDP; CIA World Factbook.
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Armed conflict in DR Congo (Zaire) is driven by a combination of fragile state authority, ethnic competition, and external interference. Numerous armed groups, including insurgents, separatists, and foreign-backed militants, exploit local grievances and struggle for control over territory and natural resources. Neighboring countries—such as Rwanda, Burundi, and Angola—are directly involved, further complicating the landscape with regional rivalries and alliances. The presence of multiple fronts and interests has made peace elusive.
Civilians in DR Congo face serious risks from the conflict, including deliberate killings, displacement, and exposure to abuse by both state and non-state actors. According to UCDP data, over 3,900 deaths result from one-sided violence, with armed groups and even government forces responsible for widespread civilian harm. Many civilians are caught between shifting conflict lines, targeted for ethnic reasons, or suffer as unintended casualties when fighting breaks out near villages and towns.
Unlike many wars that pit two major sides against each other, DR Congo’s conflict involves dozens of armed groups—local militias, foreign insurgents, and government armies—each pursuing different goals. International interventions by neighboring states further entangle the fighting, while alliances change frequently. The mix of proxy wars, resource rivalries, and community-level violence means insecurity persists even as some rebel groups are defeated or absorbed, leading to prolonged instability.
Sources: UCDP data.
The Government of DR Congo fights multiple insurgent groups and foreign-backed militias across its territory, aiming to maintain state control and suppress rebel activity. Operations by the state have been linked to both collateral civilian harm and deliberate abuses.
Angola's government conducts cross-border operations against separatist groups, working closely with the DRC government and occasionally being linked to civilian casualties during these interventions.
The Government of Burundi carries out operations against Burundian rebel groups operating in eastern DRC, contributing to cross-border instability and episodes of civilian harm.
Rwanda opposes Hutu rebel groups like FDLR-FOCA in eastern DRC, sometimes intervening militarily, and has been connected to cross-border violence affecting both fighters and civilians.
AFC conducts armed insurgency against the Congolese state and community defense groups, frequently accused of attacking civilians as part of its campaign.
CNPSC is a rebel coalition fighting the Congolese government, contributing to insecurity and regional instability, with recorded violence impacting both combatants and civilians.
FABB is another rebel group involved in clashes with government forces, associated with mixed reports of civilian and combatant casualties.
Kata Katanga pursues regional separatism in Katanga province, fighting the state and sometimes targeting civilians during its operations.
Islamic State-affiliated fighters operate in eastern DRC, launching attacks against state forces and civilians with documented deliberate killings and abductions.
RNL fights government forces and is involved in ongoing violence that includes harm to civilians as well as enemy combatants.
FLEC-FAC-TN is a separatist group fighting for independence in Cabinda, with cross-border impacts in DRC and reports of both combat and civilian casualties.
RED-TABARA operates from eastern DRC to attack the Burundian state, and has been linked to deliberate violence against civilians, especially during periods of cross-border escalation.
FDLR-FOCA is a Rwandan Hutu rebel group based in DRC, attacking Rwandan targets and implicated in numerous incidents of violence against Congolese civilians.
VDP is a local self-defense group battling insurgents but sometimes involved in intercommunal violence and mixed civilian harm.
The Basonge militia has fought intercommunal battles with Bakwa Luntu (Luba), with both ethnic and local political motivations, causing casualties among civilians and rival fighters.
Bakwa Luntu (Luba) is an ethnic militia engaged in local conflicts with Basonge, sometimes targeting civilians from rival communities.
Lengola engages in localized armed disputes with Mbole, contributing to inter-ethnic violence and associated civilian casualties.
Mbole is involved in local armed confrontations with Lengola, leading to deaths among both group members and nearby civilians.
URDPC carries out armed attacks against rival militia and civilians, contributing to local violence and significant civilian deaths.
The Zaire self-defense group engages in deadly confrontations with rival militias, being repeatedly named as responsible for deliberate civilian killings and forced displacements.
The conflicts in DR Congo (Zaire) stem from a mix of weak state control, ethnic tensions, competition over land and minerals, and the presence of both local and foreign armed groups. International involvement and cross-border dynamics fuel further violence, making the situation highly complex and persistent.
The Belgian Congo becomes the independent Republic of the Congo under Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and President Joseph Kasavubu. Rapid decolonization, army mutiny, and Katanga’s secession trigger foreign intervention and internal fragmentation, setting early patterns of militarization and external meddling seen in later conflicts.
Army chief Joseph-Désiré Mobutu topples President Kasavubu, establishing an authoritarian regime backed by Western powers during the Cold War. Centralized rule, patronage, and repression weaken institutions while entrenching elite competition, laying groundwork for future state collapse and warlordism in eastern Congo.
Mobutu rebrands the country as the Republic of Zaire and promotes an “authenticity” campaign while deepening kleptocracy. Economic decline, neglect of peripheries, and politicization of ethnicity fuel local grievances in Kivu and Ituri that later drive militia formation and contemporary armed violence.
After the Rwandan genocide, over a million refugees and genocidal militias flee into eastern Zaire. Armed groups use camps as rear bases, drawing in Rwanda and neighbors, militarizing Kivu and Ituri, and forging cross-border dynamics that underpin today’s regionalized conflict and Rwanda-linked tensions.
The AFDL, backed mainly by Rwanda and Uganda, invades eastern Zaire to dismantle Hutu militias and remove Mobutu. Laurent-Désiré Kabila takes power and renames the country DR Congo, but reliance on foreign allies entrenches regional competition and militarized control of resource-rich areas.
Kabila’s break with former allies sparks a new war involving Rwanda, Uganda, and several African states. Eastern Congo fragments under rebel and foreign control, with armed groups exploiting minerals. This “African World War” embeds lasting militia networks and cross-border rivalries central to ongoing instability.
A peace deal forms a power-sharing transitional government and integrates major rebel factions. International forces intervene in Ituri to curb ethnic violence. While large-scale war subsides, incomplete demobilization and impunity leave numerous militias intact, especially in Ituri and Kivu, sustaining chronic localized conflicts.
Nationwide elections bring Joseph Kabila to the presidency and establish new institutions supported by UN peacekeepers. Limited state reach in the east, abusive security forces, and politicized control over mining licenses fuel continued rebel activity, laying conditions for recurring insurgencies and civilian targeting.
Mutinous officers form the M23 movement, seizing Goma and large parts of North Kivu amid accusations of Rwandan backing. Regional pressure and UN intervention brigades later weaken M23, but unresolved grievances and cross-border networks pave the way for successor coalitions like the current AFC rebellion.
The Allied Democratic Forces, a long-standing Ugandan-rooted insurgency in eastern DR Congo, gradually aligns with the Islamic State, later branded ISIS-DRC. This shift internationalizes parts of the conflict and drives brutal attacks on civilians, shaping today’s jihadist-linked violence around Beni and Ituri.
Felix Tshisekedi is declared winner of disputed elections, succeeding Joseph Kabila amid allegations of an elite pact. Political uncertainty and limited security reform constrain state authority in the east, allowing armed groups, including future AFC components, to consolidate control over communities and mines.
Government declares a military-led state of siege in Ituri and North Kivu to combat ADF and other militias, repeatedly renewing it after April 2021. Militarization brings mixed results, with persistent abuses and insecurity that feed resentment, armed mobilization, and rising civilian victimization in these provinces.
A reconstituted M23 advances in North Kivu, seizing territory and strategic routes amid renewed accusations of Rwandan support. Regional and East African Community forces deploy with limited effect, deepening regional competition over minerals and borders, and shaping the context for the emergence of the AFC coalition.
The Alliance Fleuve Congo (AFC) expands control over major areas and mining zones in eastern DR Congo, battling government forces under the ongoing state of siege. While ISIS-linked violence shifts northward, attacks on civilians reach post-2002 highs, underscoring entrenched fragmentation and regionalized conflict dynamics.
