War Machines in Eastern Congo
I am of the land now called Congo. On my mother’s side, my ancestry is “Congolese,” descended from the Twa—foragers of the Great Lakes region who were absorbed into Bantu agricultural societies as hunters, oracles, and rhapsodes. In the nineteenth century, my Bantu ancestors, living along the shores of Lake Tanganyika in Kivu, eastern Congo, found themselves caught in a prime zone for Afro-Arab slave raiding at the Islamic frontiers of Central Africa. They adopted Islam as a protective strategy, initially concealing their indigenous beliefs beneath conversion but eventually becoming adherents to the faith. Caught in the crossfire of the colonial war between Leopold’s Congo Free State and Arab-Swahili warlords, they endured the brutalities of Leopold’s regime and the devastation wrought by the East African campaigns during World Wars I and II.
Faced with this relentless upheaval, my mother’s immediate branch of the family gradually left Congo, resettling in hesitant waves in what was first German East Africa, later Tanganyika, and now Tanzania—the land my mother would call home. Other close branches relocated to Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi, though more distant branches remain in Congo to this day. Yet even those who left never fully escaped Congo’s fate—a fate shaped by cycles of imperial exploitation and organized abandonment that continue to haunt the region.
This history has shaped my understanding that eastern Congo is not merely a regional crisis; it is a microcosm of the struggles that will define the 21st century. What is unfolding in Congo today offers a grim preview of the future: a world where escalating planetary crises, resource wars, and rival hegemonies converge to create new forms of competitive control and infrastructural violence. On January 27, 2015, the day I crossed the Rwandan border into Goma, I set foot in this crucible of global exploitation for the first time. Exactly ten years later, on January 27, 2025, M23—a militia backed by Rwanda—invaded Goma, reigniting a conflict that entangles all the countries where my mother’s family eventually resettled. Tomorrow, leaders from across southern and eastern Africa, along with regional stakeholders, will gather in Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam, to discuss potential solutions to the crisis.
But without addressing the root causes of this turmoil—the entrenched legacies of extraction, violence, and imperial control—these talks are destined to fail. Empire has repeatedly transformed Congo into a theater for war machines and competitive control. Its future is tied not only to the fate of Africa but to the fate of the world itself. Congo’s ongoing struggles reveal the template for a necropolitical order that threatens to become the global norm in a world driven by escalating crises. What happens in Congo will not stay in Congo. Congo is the future.
The author at Virunga National Park, North Kivu province, eastern Congo, January 29, 2015.
The Three Scrambles
I begin by revisiting the history of the Three Scrambles for Africa, emphasizing Congo’s central place within each.
The First Scramble for Africa, “The Slave Trade,” was a proto-colonial competition to transform the continent into “a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins.” During this period, tens of millions of Africans were kidnapped, deported, and subjected to slavery and social death across the New World and the Arab Old World. Goods like cotton, ivory, and spun merikani cloth linked the labor of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans within a system dominated by European capital. When factoring in those killed during slave raids, in holding camps, on death marches to coastal ports, and throughout the Middle Passage, the total number of lives stolen from Africa may surpass one hundred million. It is estimated that a third of these lives were stolen from West Central Africa, with the Congo basin at its heart. This genocidal enterprise underpinned the settler empires of the Americas but was ultimately destabilized by the resistance of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Landmark events such as the Haitian Revolution and the General Strike of enslaved laborers that helped decide the U.S. Civil War demonstrated how African rebellion rendered slavery a Trojan horse, turning a once-profitable system into a force of internal collapse for New World settler empires.
The Second Scramble for Africa, “The Land Grabs,” began after the “non-event of emancipation” and the closing of New World frontiers. It marked the full-blown colonial conquest of Africa through extreme violence, as Europeans overturned the authority of local rulers they had previously empowered as intermediaries and declared themselves the continent’s new “enlightened” governors. Despite their claims to have abolished slavery, they reconstituted its horrors deep within Africa’s interior. The Congo Free State stands as the most infamous example: a vast plantation-state where forced labor and terror claimed an estimated ten million Congolese lives in less than 25 years. Yet again, Africans resisted this second Scramble, turning once-profitable colonies into costly liabilities and disrupting the colonial project from within.
The Third Scramble for Africa, “The Debt Trap & Resource Curse,” is the ongoing neo-colonial campaign to underdevelop and overburden postcolonial African states. Extractive mechanisms—including debt repayments, natural resource exploitation, skilled labor migration, and subservience to global economic blocs—maintain the continent’s systemic subjugation. This Scramble mirrors the dynamics of the First: rather than imposing direct rule, neo-colonizers bribe, coerce, and terrorize postcolonial elites into sabotaging their own nations’ futures. These elites, functioning as warlords or technocrats, echo early modern African rulers who were coerced into selling their neighbors and subjects into chattel slavery. Today, Africa—home to 34 of the world’s 50 poorest nations—loses more through capital flight, unequal trade, and brain drain than it gains through aid, foreign investment, or remittances. If not for the global economy’s rigged material and symbolic infrastructures, Africa would be a “net creditor” to the world.
The imperial powers orchestrating events in Congo played a central role in this Third Scramble. They backed a coup d’état that installed Mobutu Sese Seko, who presided over decades of exploitative extraction of the country’s mineral wealth. After Mobutu was deposed during the upheaval that followed the Rwandan genocide and civil war, these same imperialist powers continued to profit from resource extraction through warlords, while millions were killed in the two catastrophic Congo Wars between 1996 and 2003—the deadliest global conflicts since World War II.
A paramilitary park ranger guides the author into a mosaic of tropical and bamboo rainforest in Virunga National Park, North Kivu, eastern Congo, January 30, 2015. Between the city of Goma and Virunga National Park lies a competitive control zone where a fragile peace was maintained by UN soldiers, the Congolese army, paramilitary park rangers, private mercenaries, and militias.
The War Machines
As Achille Mbembe observes, Empire in neocolonial Africa, and in Congo in particular, exerts its will through what Deleuze and Guattari term “war machines.” He writes:
“A war machine combines a plurality of functions. It has the features of a political organization and a mercantile company. It operates through capture and depredations and can even coin its own money. In order to fuel the extraction and export of natural resources located in the territory they control, war machines forge direct connections with transnational networks. War machines emerged in Africa during the last quarter of the twentieth century in direct relation to the erosion of the postcolonial state’s capacity to build the economic underpinnings of political authority and order. This capacity involves raising revenue and commanding and regulating access to natural resources within a well-defined territory. In the mid-1970s, as the state’s ability to maintain this capacity began to erode, there emerged a clear-cut link between monetary instability and spatial fragmentation. In the 1980s, the brutal experience of money suddenly losing its value became more commonplace, with various countries undergoing cycles of hyperinflation (which included such stunts as the sudden replacement of a currency).”
Mbembe continues:
“War machines are implicated in the constitution of highly transnational local or regional economies. In most places, the collapse of formal political institutions under the strain of violence tends to lead to the formation of militia economies. War machines (in this case militias or rebel movements) rapidly become highly organized mechanisms of predation, taxing the territories and the population they occupy and drawing on a range of transnational networks and diasporas that provide both material and financial support.
“Correlated to the new geography of resource extraction is the emergence of an unprecedented form of governmentality that consists in the management of the multitudes. The extraction and looting of natural resources by war machines goes hand in hand with brutal attempts to immobilize and spatially fix whole categories of people or, paradoxically, to unleash them, to force them to scatter over broad areas no longer contained by the boundaries of a territorial state. As a political category, populations are then disaggregated into rebels, child soldiers, victims or refugees, or civilians incapacitated by mutilation or simply massacred on the model of ancient sacrifices, while the ‘survivors,’ after a horrific exodus, are confined in camps and zones of exception.”
Through these violent assemblages, Empire sustains its hold on Africa’s resources while perpetuating social death on a massive scale.
Photo by the author of the caldera of Mount Virunga, North Kivu province, eastern Congo, January 31, 2015.
Competitive Control in Eastern Congo
Sitting atop the Congo craton—one of the oldest and most mineral-rich geological formations on Earth—and sheltering the vast Congo rainforest, the planet’s second lung alongside the Amazon, Congo is critical to regulating Earth’s climate. Its rainforest absorbs carbon dioxide, produces oxygen, and sustains global ecological balance. Yet this life-sustaining land is also the African nation most ravaged by Empire’s war machines. It is a vital source of minerals that underpin the information technologies driving Empire’s transition into surveillance capitalism. In this emerging paradigm, control over global logistics, digital infrastructure, data flows, and artificial intelligence (AI) is paramount to maintaining hegemony. Nearly half of the world’s cobalt reserves are found in Congo—a mineral indispensable to the batteries that power smart devices and electric vehicles—placing the region at the heart of Empire’s technological dominance.
As the current hegemon, the United States faces mounting challenges in maintaining its supremacy over global technological infrastructure. Some suggest that a multi-polar world may emerge, with multiple regional powers sharing influence. However, this redistribution of power—among a Han-supremacist China, a Hindu-supremacist and caste-stratified India, a white-supremacist Europe and North America, the Arab-supremacist petrostates of the Persian Gulf, and others—does not dismantle Empire’s underlying logic. Instead, such multi-polarity risks creating a meta-stable Empire, where rival powers, despite their competition, collaborate to sustain systems of racialized domination and ecological exploitation under new configurations.
In eastern Congo, this contest materializes through a struggle for competitive control among global rivals, including the U.S. and China, alongside regional and local actors. Derived from counterinsurgency theory, competitive control refers to the battle between state and non-state forces to impose authority through violence and conditional governance. In this context, governance no longer guarantees stability or care; instead, power is measured by the capacity to impose order—or withhold life. State actors, corporate powers, militias, and insurgent networks vie for control over essential infrastructures, resources, and populations, relying on a volatile blend of coercion and the selective provision of basic needs. Competitive control manifests through practices in which both state and non-state actors offer limited governance—such as access to security or resources—contingent on loyalty and compliance. For example, militias may permit access to food or water in exchange for forced labor, surveillance, or military conscription, deepening cycles of violence and dependency.
Amid this contest, Rwanda has launched a new war, seizing cobalt-rich territories in eastern Congo to renegotiate the terms of competitive control in its favor. The Trump administration’s escalatory rhetoric on great power rivalry exacerbated global instability, creating conditions that emboldened Rwanda’s ambitions. The fragile Tshisekedi regime in Kinshasa—more than 2,000 kilometers from the captured city of Goma in Kivu—is struggling to maintain its grip on power. In a bid to regain control, it seeks to stoke Congolese nationalism in the east and leverage the language of national sovereignty within the halls of the United Nations and among the so-called international community to create the conditions for ousting Rwanda’s forces.
Other regional (mis)leaders, initially caught off guard, are now recalibrating their strategies, seeking to exploit Rwanda’s belligerence to reposition themselves within the regional balance of power. South Africa, in particular, as a member of the BRICS counterfoil to NATO, holds the geopolitical influence and economic infrastructure to assert a major role. This has led to a brewing rivalry between South Africa and Rwanda, with both nations set to meet in Tanzania to address their escalating tensions.
Like many former anti-colonial strongholds, Tanzania has seen its political leadership drift from revolutionary aspirations toward integration within global neoliberal structures. Historically a bastion of southern African resistance to neocolonialism and Empire, Tanzania played a central role in supporting liberation movements across the continent. It hosted freedom fighters from the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan African Congress (PAC) of South Africa, the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), and the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) of Namibia. However, Tanzania no longer holds that role, as its political elites have distanced themselves from the country’s anti-colonial internationalist history and its aspirations for a New International Economic Order. Instead, these elites seek to benefit from renegotiations, as minerals from eastern Congo are poised to flow through the country to the port of Dar es Salaam via Chinese-built rail lines.
Amid this contested terrain, various players—including state-backed forces, insurgent militias, and grassroots collectives—struggle for survival and self-determination. The ongoing cycles of conflict reflect the cumulative trauma of centuries of imperial violence. In eastern Congo, life is shaped by organized abandonment, as entire communities are left to languish under systemic neglect. Generations endure hunger, displacement, and violence, their trust in institutions eroded by both internal and external betrayals. The trauma inflicted by Empire over centuries resurfaces in recurring patterns of exploitation and mistrust.
What is needed today is a movement that seeks peace in eastern Congo by disrupting Empire’s regime of war machines and its logic of competitive control across Africa. Unless this is placed at the forefront of the talks in Dar es Salaam, these negotiations will fail to end the region’s cycles of trauma. The absence of such an agenda bodes ill—not only for Africa but for the planet as a whole. Eastern Congo is not merely a regional conflict zone; it is the blueprint for Empire’s necropolitical future. The dynamics of competitive control, infrastructural wars, and resource extraction that define the region are poised to become the global norm in a multi-polar world shaped by escalating planetary crises. Congo’s fate offers a grim preview of how power will be contested in other regions without a clear hegemon, where rival blocs vie for dominance by fostering instability and enabling war machines to advance their strategic interests. What happens in Congo will not stay in Congo. Congo is the future.
Photo taken by the author of a blackback gorilla in Virunga National Park, North Kivu province, eastern Congo, January 30, 2015.
