These continuities form a field of tension between precolonial governance, fluid patterns of customary rule, regional competition and border-making, and the political manipulation and fixation of identity and belonging often used to boil down complexity into frames legible to invaders with scant contextual knowledge.5Close This setting has continuously emboldened imperialist as much as domestic ambitions to divide, rule and extract, even if the colonial and postcolonial state always remained imperfect and ‘impotent’ in this quest.6

By the time one traces the chain from the child slogging in the cobalt mine to the rechargeable gadgets and cars sold to consumers around the world, the links have been misdirected beyond recognition, like a con man running a shell game.

The Congolese government has historically gone to great lengths to obscure conditions in the mining provinces.

somehow they all happened to be in Katanga

Chapter 1 offers a history of the violent changes and continuities in eastern Congo’s modern history. Chapter 2 traces the genesis of the ‘conflict minerals’ paradigm, discusses its intellectual foundations, and juxtaposes them with a brief historical and sociological analysis of mining in Congo. Based on that, Chapter 3 takes transnational advocacy on ‘conflict minerals’ as a starting grid to illustrate the evolution of the paradigm into laws, guidelines and practical policy. The following three chapters form the empirical and ethnographical backbone. Using qualitative research and survey data, Chapter 4 traces how the establishment of ‘ethical monopolies’ contributed to impoverishing Congolese mining communities. It demonstrates how reforms driven by good intentions fell prey to a mixture of detached analysis and profit-oriented policy. Chapter 5 takes a deep ethnographic dive to describe two key types of actors in eastern Congo’s mining sector: the intermediary traders called négociants and the masterminds of political and economic life known as the incontournables. Looking at eastern Congo’s supply chains from their perspective, the chapter assesses the evolution from ‘conflicted’ to ‘conflict-free’ mining. Chapter 6 uses critical geographical and anthropological theory to comparatively analyse supposedly clean and conflicted supply chains.

t then summarises how the prospects of ethical sourcing turned into a broken promise, closing with a call for better analysis and better policy

Through a dialectic analysis, it illustrates the surprising parallels of mineral governance between ‘white saviours’ and armed groups

How, then, should the problem be addressed? A Europe-based campaigner may suggest boycotts, sanctions and bans alongside initiatives to address fraud and informality and to ‘restore state authority’. They may suggest adding projects that provide assistance to victims of sexual violence and efforts in nature conservation. Whether related to ‘conflict minerals’ or presumed secondary effects, such responses can perpetuate tropes and unearth the cognitive dissonances that prevail despite global digital and logistic connectivity

While human rights rightly feature on the agenda of advocates, they are considered universalist and indisputable. In consequence, the privileged and dominant frames of thought represented by white saviourism become lost in an epistemic misunderstanding, and erasure, of the Other.65

In so doing, international advocacy turned a blind eye to the longue durée of violent extraction that has shaped this part of the world