Since its independence from Belgium in 1960, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) – previously Zaire – has been in the throes of bloody armed conflicts. Fueled by ethnic tensions, political rivalries, corruption, and competition for natural resources, the crisis has been most intense in the east, where over a hundred armed groups operate.
In the past few weeks, more than 773 people have been killed in and around Goma, eastern DR Congo’s largest city, amid intensified clashes with Rwanda-backed M23 rebels. The group, which recently seized the city in a major escalation of the decade-long conflict, is the most powerful among over 100 armed factions fighting for control of DRC’s resource-rich east. According to UN experts, M23 is supported by approximately 4,000 Rwandan troops.
As the world seeks to understand such decades-long conflicts, the West has been quick to link the conflicts to the exploitation of critical minerals in this vast Central African nation.

But Christoph N. Vogel, in his meticulously researched ethnography, Conflict Minerals Inc.: War, Profit and White Saviourism in Eastern Congo, trashes this widely popular narrative linking armed conflicts in the eastern DRC to the exploitation of the country’s mineral resources.
Based on years of on-the-ground research in the region, Vogel, who is an award-winning investigator of conflicts in Central Africa and a Research Director of the Insecure Livelihoods project at Ghent University, concludes that there is only a tenuous link between the two. He accuses the West’s misguided intervention of actually worsening the situation, instead of bringing relief to the Congolese.
“Good intentions and savvy marketing notwithstanding, the struggle against ‘conflict minerals’ has been tragically imbricated in eastern Congo’s longer continuities of war, profit and white saviourism,” Vogel writes.
“Wrapped in ethical and humanitarian pitches, campaigners and policymakers relied on colonial and Orientalist frameworks, painting a picture of a dark war zone where Africans kill other Africans, requiring foreign goodwill to end the carnage and build peace. This allowed international interveners to develop an apolitical and ahistorical approach to tackle a deeply political problem and justify a neoliberal and profit-oriented fix for a problem situated in the remote outskirts of global supply chain capitalism.”

The ‘Conflict Minerals’ Narrative
From the onset of the twenty-first century, the relationship between violent conflict and natural resources has become the subject of public and academic debates, prompting fervent activism and international campaigning around the DRC’s case of ‘conflict minerals’ that has captured global attention.
The exploitation and trade in artisanal tin, tantalum (coltan), tungsten, and gold (3TG minerals) have been blamed in countless media and United Nations reports as key drivers of violence in Central Africa, hence the term ‘conflict minerals’. Also known as ‘digital minerals’ because of their use in high-end technology, stories around these minerals have provoked a global outcry, prompting transnational efforts to promote ‘conflict-free’, ethical mining. Focusing on the eastern DRC, Conflict Minerals, Inc. – published in 2022 – is regarded as the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon.
Vogel’s book is based on meticulous investigation and long-term fieldwork and analyses why the campaign against ‘unethical’ mining went wrong, drastically affecting eastern Congo’s political economy. It traces the evolution of the conflict minerals paradigm, the wrong policy responses it triggered, and their impact on artisanal miners.
“The story of ‘conflict minerals’ serves both as a cautionary tale and a powerful call to decolonize transnational governance and peacebuilding practice,” Vogel says. “It highlights the lack of ‘situated knowledge’ and critically interrogates the white saviourism that emanates from an unholy alliance that brings together (neo-)colonial frames, digital capitalism, neoliberal interventionism and humanitarianism.”
He argues that minerals did not initially trigger Congo’s wars. However, some of the 120-plus armed groups now operating in eastern DRC later took advantage of the availability of these minerals to finance their activities. Armed mobilization in east Congo, he says, predates any link between conflict and resources.
“The complexity of conflict notwithstanding, policymakers and advocates took ‘coltan peak’ as a confirmation that ‘conflicts are more likely to be caused by economic opportunities than by grievance’ and—in Congo and elsewhere—that minerals rents financed belligerents. This narrow reading of a bundle of nested wars added to a set of insular strategies for conflict resolution in the early 2000s: politically, there was a flat, teleological push for power-sharing, while the military strategy consisted of supporting hasty military integration.”
The book casts doubts on the idea that greed leads to war economies uniquely geared towards destroying order and creating insecurity for the sake of plunder.
It challenges theorization and policymaking on so-called resource wars. It introduces the evolution of ‘conflict minerals’ as a paradigm case in which violence, ethics, and capitalism have led to an unprecedented policy change, yet without addressing the core drivers of violence and war.
“Most of these conflicts are not linked to minerals writ small; they have social, political, and economic undertones in an environment of ‘no war, no peace’ that frames populations’ struggles for subsistence and efforts at peacebuilding,” he says.
Beginning with local NGO-driven advocacy, moving on to the Dodd-Frank Act and OECD guidelines on conflict minerals, then to the emergence of regional certification mechanisms, followed by the imposition of conflict-free validation schemes such as the iTSCi certification system of the International Tin’s Research Institute, Vogel points how the ‘solutions’ to the ‘Conflict Minerals’ problem becomes a problem in itself.
“In many ways, iTSCi became the centerpiece of a new transnational governance complex that, like the World Bank’s structural adjustment, aimed at ‘substituting upward for downward accountability,’” Vogel argues.
“This questions the claims that the establishment of iTSCi would lead to a reduction in violence and corruption. Most research indeed suggests the opposite is the case, particularly regarding violence. An unpublished UN report noted in 2013 that even before the reforms, only 8% of the conflicts in eastern Congo were linked to resources. This is echoed in research by IPIS from 2019, suggesting that most armed conflicts appear geographically and causally unrelated to mining. The Kivu Security Tracker, a project monitoring violence in eastern Congo, regularly backs up these findings.”
‘White Saviourism Perpetuating Structural Violence’
Vogel demonstrates how Western advocacy and policy have relied on colonial frames to drive change and how White Saviourism perpetuates structural violence and inequality across global supply and value chains.
“This book has demonstrated that the story of ‘conflict minerals’ is not straightforward enough to rely on flat and simplistic fixes. It is a constant contradiction and ambiguity story that can emerge in contexts where contestation is legion. As a pioneer case of regulatory intervention into the political economy of conflict zones, transnational ‘clean sourcing’ efforts prioritized satisfying the conscience of Western consumers rather than bettering Congolese livelihoods. Justifying a white savior-style operation that enabled transnational capital to consolidate the control of supply chains, the conflict minerals campaign did not shy away from invoking mutually contradictory colonial tropes of a space that is empty of rule but full of savage politics and conflict.”
The book says that a cartel of major transnational industries in the shape of iTSCi then seized the opportunity to impose a closed pipeline to ensure consumer-oriented due diligence.
“In eastern Congo, the flipside of this lucrative PR stunt has been a monopolization of resource access, permitting some Fortune 500 companies to secure extractable mineral reservoirs at the expense of expendable bodies. Given these global intersections, the case of ‘conflict minerals’ is crucial to rethink not only conflict and intervention but also postcolonial orders, structural violence, and power relations at large.”
Vogel says the struggle against ‘conflict minerals’ is not only paternalistic, trading the erasure of subaltern epistemic against the white saviourism of knowing best what is good for others; it also has tangible impacts on the lives of Congolese: while local revenue has come under strain, armed groups have multiplied, some of which increasingly recruit former miners who lost access to mineral markets.
“Through the prism of ‘conflict minerals,’ this book has investigated the nexus of transnational politics and fragmented authority, questioning binaries such as ‘global’ and ‘local’, ‘legal’ and ‘illegal,’ or ‘formal’ and ‘informal,’ as well as their use by Orientalist and mercantilist strategies that weaponize the struggle against ‘conflict minerals’,” Vogel says. “Refuting such flat readings, this book looked to more complicated entanglements of authority, networks, and white saviourism in conflict zones. This exercise highlighted the extent to which the narrative detachment of Western advocacy is at odds with a much more convoluted interplay of ‘ethical sourcing’, marginalization, and the concomitant routinization of insecurity and violence in eastern Congo that defies ‘ethics’ in itself.”
He says, as other political anthropologists have argued, the twenty-first-century generation of transnational corporate actors ‘may play a role in destabilizing processes of hybridity by supporting compliant non-state actors over state officials without adequate attention to the effects on institutional coherence and regulatory contestation.’
“The struggle against ‘conflict minerals,’ and the ethics that inform it, has not listened to those affected by conflict, whether over minerals or not,” Vogel concludes. “It evolved from Orientalist assumptions and triggered a form of white saviourism that morphed into a neo-colonial déjà vu rooted in a mix of naivety and wet dreams of accumulation.”