The Broken Promise of Peace: Why International Mediation Fails in Eastern Congo

Introduction

Officials from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and the United States met in Washington in March 2026 to declare another significant diplomatic step towards addressing the crisis in eastern Congo. This deal aimed to ease tensions between Kinshasa and Kigali and to set the terms for regional stabilisation. However, this news quickly brought their dreams to an end. Indeed, soon after this meeting, different ceasefire violations have been reported with both parts accusing the other of violations.

This trend is very familiar to observers of the region. For the past two decades, Eastern Congo has seen multiple peacekeeping missions, ceasefire pacts, mediation bodies and international stabilisation missions. Since the Nairobi Process through the Luanda Roadmap, with the East African regional forces’ deployments and the frequent bilateral talks between Rwanda and the DRC, there has been an increase in diplomatic efforts. Though the conflicts between the two nations have continued. Armed groups are still active in the Kivus and Ituri, the relations between regional powers are unstable, and the human cost of the conflict, which seems to be hard to resolve, is still experienced by millions of civilians.

This situation marked by recurrent failure poses a question :  why is peace still not succeeding in eastern Congo despite the various international mediation attempts.

The response requires to understand complex dynamics that are not purely diplomatic or due to a unique conflict-prone region. Instead, peace is recurrently unsuccessful since the war in eastern Congo is systematically treated as a one-off crisis that should be dealt with via negotiation when, in reality, it is the expression of a much more fundamental and established political order. The conflict itself is not maintained by a dispute or indeed any sort of military force but rather by a symbiotic chain of antagonisms between regions, divided state power, domestic security issues and the economic policies of war. Peace settlements fail to work since they seek to diplomatically resolve a structural political and institutional crisis.

Therefore, to understand why peace is failing in this region, we need to move beyond a diplomatic prism to look at the bigger picture of the different reasons why instability in eastern Congo persists.

The Diplomatic Limitations of a Complex War:

From the very beginning, the conflict in eastern Congo has been read by international mediators as a failure to have dialogue. The theory behind this is that violence is likely to persist until there is a negotiated satisfactory compromise, and the design of virtually every recent peace process has followed this understanding. Therefore, the process is always the same convene interested parties, ensure that they agree that they will not attack one another, establish a monitoring system, and provide de-escalation plans.

However, this is the wrong way to think. It presupposes that the lack of consensus is the major barrier to peace. The reality is that  the east of the Congo does not need more agreements but it lacks the condition upon which agreements could be enforced. 

While peace process as they exist today can be relevant in terms of diplomacy, they remain irrelevant in practice since they cannot be applied as they do not take into consideration the on-ground situation. 

Agreements are negotiated by representatives of states, diplomats and occasionally even by representatives of armed movements, but the war is fought by a much wider group of parties whose interests are not altered by these different agreements. Local militias, military leaders, transnational networks, traditional authorities, business elites, and fragmented security players all influence the conflict terrain in such a manner that formal diplomacy is often unable to represent and fully understand.

Therefore, these agreements create a superficial peace that often, does not impact the reality and the structural conditions that fuel the conflict.

A Mutually Distrusted Regional Security Order:

Firstly, it is important to take into consideration the regional dynamics when we analyse this conflict. Eastern Congo is not just a geographical zone with many conflicts; it is a component of a larger Great Lakes security system that is influenced by interstate rivalry, historical struggles and trauma, and important long lasting regional power struggles.

The United Nations, Kinshasa, and various international forces have on numerous occasions accused Kigali of backing the M23 rebels, and Rwanda still denies this claim. Other recent UN expert reports and international press coverage have been more damaging, accusing not just of support but of direct Rwandan operational command of M23 military operations, including the addition of thousands of Rwandan soldiers within the borders of the Congolese state. 

Rwanda continues to insist that it is acting in the name of legitimate security interests, especially the ongoing existence of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu militant group that is involved in the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi. Kigali asserts that the Congolese state has failed to counter this menace on several occasions, and Rwanda cannot afford to count on diplomatic assurances that it is secure on its borders.

To some extent, this justification is accepted by international actors, but it also illustrates an important fact: the centrality of the security aspect in the conflict. Instability in eastern Congo is a strategic issue directly perceived by Rwanda; intervention by Rwanda is seen by Kinshasa as a breach of sovereignty and territorial aggression. This situation results in the failure of peace accords since they fail to remove the strategic incentive for further intervention and proxy warfare.

Diplomatic structures create temporary commitments, but the lack of trust and the presence of threat perception undermine them. As long as Rwanda thinks that the existence of hostile armed actors has been condoned or integrated within the eastern Congo, and as long as Kinshasa thinks that Rwanda wants to dominate its eastern provinces strategically, there will be no peace.

The Crisis of Territorial Authority of the Congolese State

Tensions between regions are not enough to understand the persistence of violence, which is highly rooted in local deep issues. The second cause to analyse to understand the current situation is the weaknesses of the Congolese state itself.

The state is virtually absent in East Congo. There is a lack of coordination or integration of governance resulting in important state fragmentation. The current governance configuration is not able to provide security and administrative capacity for the population. As consequence, local armed groups supplanted the state and traditional institutions, reinforcing informal systems of governance.  This situation cannot be attributed to a lack of capacity. It is indicative of a bigger problem of territorial statehood. The Congolese state remains unable to monopolize violence to enforce the law in most of the east, nor to provide plausible protection for communities.

The situation of the Congolese army is also marked by intense fragmentation. The state army « Forces armées de la République Démocratique du Congo », FARDC are undermined by the failure to establish strong institutions and marked by important corruption. This situation is made worse by the recurrent incorporation of ex-rebels into the military. It also means that for all the goodwill that exists behind peace pacts, the state does not always possess the capacity to enforce these actions at the local level due to the lack of coercive and administrative power. An internationally declared ceasefire will bring positive impact only if there is effective territorial control by at least one party. Without the capacity of the Congolese state to monopolize violence to implement peace policies and a control over its territory, the peace deals will remain ineffective 

Peace in this sense cannot be negotiated between capitals since there is no centralization of violence. It is fragmented, localised and decentralised.

War as Political Economy

Another reason explaining the persistence of the different conflicts in eastern Congo is that this situation remains economically beneficial for different actors involved. 

An extraction/tax/smuggling/territorial rent-seeking system has emerged as part of the local and regional political economies due to the war. Armed groups illegally collect taxes from civilians; hold mining areas; rob at road blocks; occupy trade routes to pay for their operations. The benefits of a prolonged state of instability are significant for cross-border networks, military leaders and local elites alike.

Recent reports indicate M23 have increasingly become adept at managing territories they control  and collecting resources, such as taxing people on land and minerals on shady trade routes. UN experts have also accused the M23 rebel group of the trafficking of the minerals in M23-controlled areas into Rwanda, highlighting the increase of this activity in  the region. 

Peace may be a threat and not an opportunity to actors who have a material or political interest in instability. The cessation of conflict can involve the abandonment of revenues, dominance of territory, patronage, or bargaining power. 

Most peace processes make the assumption that everyone wants peace, not war. On the ground there are clear evidences that some actors might want war to continue rather than peace to be negotiated  as such a process could have a negative impact on their revenues and influence.

Therefore, the incentives to peace are not evenly shared in the region. Peace process ignoring these aspects are, once again, revealing themselves to be irrelevant for real change on the ground. 

The International Peacebuilding Problem

International policy toward eastern Congo has generally focused on short-term stabilization and often overlooked the need for  structural change. These policies often minimized violence, extractives, fragmentation issues and the economic gains of different actors in this conflict. Therefore, they often treat the symptoms of the war, but not its deep causes and structured maintaining it overtime. 

Indeed, peace agreements often focus on  ceasefires, troop withdrawal, disengagement and confidence building while ignoring the question of the absence of state to implement these policies and how war economies benefiting for the conflict will be apprehend. 

As a result, we have a situation of cyclical and temporal impression of stabilization without deeper change. This allows to reduce violence on the short term, but on the long-term, the underlying mechanisms causing violence remain unchanged. 

in most situations, cyclical stabilisation without change is the result. In the short run, we can decrease violence but not remove the causes of violence. As time passes, tensions grow and troops rearm and the cycle begins once more.

Conclusion 

Peace has never worked in eastern Congo, despite extensive diplomacy and effort, because diplomacy has been continually requested to fix a conflict whose causes extend far beyond the negotiating table.

A local culture of suspicion, a broken state of Congo, the proliferation of local armed forces, and deep-rooted economies of war continue to fuel the violence in eastern Congo, providing many actors with material or political incentives to oppose complete stabilization. The conflict has been approached as a negotiable dispute by international mediation efforts instead of a political crisis that needs institutional change.

It does not imply that diplomacy is irrelevant. To avoid escalation and deal with immediate crises, negotiation remains necessary. Diplomacy in itself will never bring peace where the underlying architecture of conflict still exists.

Unless peacebuilding goes beyond de-escalation in the short term and addresses the more endemic causes of violence: regional rivalry, fragmented sovereignty, weak governance, and conflict-driven political economy, the eastern Congo will probably continue to rely on the same tragic cycle of negotiations, optimism, collapse, and new war.

The enduring lesson of eastern Congo is therefore that peace is possible. It is that peace cannot simply be signed into existence when the structures of war remain politically and economically embedded beneath the surface.

Questions for the readers :

1. If peace agreements keep failing, is the problem really a lack of diplomacy, or a misunderstanding of what the conflict actually is?

2. What would it take to build peace in a context where violence is not just political, but also embedded in local economies and systems of power?

3. Can lasting peace truly emerge without first addressing the deeper structures, regional mistrust, the weakness of state authority, and the competing interests that continue to fuel the conflict?

Please Read the Following For More Information :

« DRC: Peace deals fail to end human rights abuses », Amnesty International, 4 décembre 2025.
« Will the Rwanda-DRC Peace deal end decades of Conflict? », Geneva International Centre for Justice (GICJ), Mildred Asiimwe, 13 janvier 2026.
« Rwanda and DRC leaders sign Trump-brokered peace deal despite new violence », Le Monde, 4 décembre 2025.“DR Congo and Rwanda agree to ease tensions after talks in US”, BBC, Basillioh Rukanga, 2026