In January 2025, Goma fell to the M23 rebel group, marking a brutal turning point in the protracted conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, is a strategic geopolitical and security hub. Its capture by the Rwanda-backed armed group was a stinging setback for the DRC military, its allies and the other international forces deployed in the region, including UN peacekeepers. But it also served to cement an economy of war at the heart of the Great Lakes region, boosting the illicit financial flows that fuel and sustain armed violence in eastern DRC. The rebel-controlled areas facilitate the smuggling of lucrative minerals, including gold and transition metals, across regional borders.

In the months following the seizure of Goma, diplomatic initiatives intensified. The UN Security Council adopted resolutions calling for a ceasefire, condemning the M23, demanding the withdrawal of Rwandan troops, maintaining sanctions against those involved in the conflict and strengthening the mandate of the UN stabilization mission, MONUSCO. The African Union appointed the president of Togo as its high–level mediator for the DRC crisis. Qatar convened the Congolese and Rwandan presidents, and facilitated several rounds of direct talks between the DRC and the M23. The United States, for its part, initiated a negotiation process between Rwanda and the DRC. Since the current crisis began in 2021, rhetoric supporting peace in the Great Lakes region has never been voiced on such an international scale.

The missing link in the interventions: transnational organized crime

Yet these initiatives, as well as those led by the European Union and France, have had little impact. One year later, the M23 still holds Goma and the group’s reach has expanded. In February 2025, it seized Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu, and Uvira in December 2025, before withdrawing a month later. The M23 already controls vast resource-rich territories and, according to sources within the armed group, it also has bold ambitions to take over the strategic mining region of the former province of Katanga. The rebels’ advance – which openly flouts international injunctions – highlights the gap between the international statements peppering the news and the reality on the ground.

As has been evidenced by numerous cases around the world where crime and conflict converge – from Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic to Colombia, Afghanistan and Myanmar – violent competition over mineral resources drives or intensifies conflict. The M23’s persistent defiance lays bare the inherent limitations of current diplomatic approaches to conflicts in which transnational organized crime – while not necessarily the root cause – plays a major structural role. That the rebel group is still in control of Goma and other areas one year on illustrates how any actionable approach to resolving the conflict must strategically confront the illicit economies underpinning the war.

The core limitations of many of the diplomatic initiatives is that they lack enforcement mechanisms, particularly the UN resolutions. Without political will, they remain largely symbolic – mere ‘empty slogans’, as one diplomatic source described them. UN Security Council Resolution 2773, adopted after the fall of Bukavu, provides a striking illustration of this. Although it formally demanded an end to Rwandan support and the withdrawal of the M23 from occupied areas, the UN’s demands were not met. The M23 continued its operations, including by restricting the movement of MONUSCO, which had been using Goma as its eastern DRC headquarters before January 2025.

Ongoing peace processes have also been limited by their reluctance to challenge existing economic power dynamics – or to account for the reality of the players on the ground. This is particularly evident in the Doha and Washington frameworks. Presented as attempts at high-level diplomatic re–engagement following the failure of Angolan mediation on behalf of the African Union, these processes illustrate the international community’s stubbornly persistent blind spot towards the criminality sustaining ongoing conflicts.

The M23 has methodically consolidated a de facto, deeply illegal, parallel administration. It exercises direct control over several lucrative mining sites in North and South Kivu, and imposes taxes on all local economic activities, including trade, transport, agriculture, and artisanal and semi-mechanized mining. These forms of criminal governance leave no choice to civilians but to finance this sanctioned entity. The M23’s economic activities sustain the movement and enrich its leaders. Meanwhile, the group’s illegal activities, particularly from mineral flows, generate revenues that may provide economic and strategic benefits to Rwanda, Uganda and beyond. More significantly, they incentivize the movement to continue.

In spite of this, the Doha process failed to sufficiently take into account that the M23 is a non-state armed actor that has – thanks to external support – established itself as an autonomous territorial power, with its own economic resources and the capacity for sustainable administration. Even more worryingly, the framework carefully avoided addressing the central issue of the political economy of war. Neither the capture of natural resources, nor illegal taxation, nor the control of illicit cross-border trade featured among the main topics of discussion. Yet if these financial flows are left to endure, the incentives to continue the conflict will remain intact.

The Doha process was thus caught in a paradox: seeking to end a war, while refusing to address the illicit political economy that sustains it. Unsurprisingly, the end result, in November 2025, was a ‘framework agreement for comprehensive peace’ that the M23 leadership described as a ‘mutual scam, a seller of fake diamonds paid with fake dollars’.

The Washington process showed greater lucidity in recognizing the centrality of the war economy. The Washington Accords, signed in December 2025, are betting on contributing to peace by transforming economic potential into a lever for stabilization between the warring parties. However, by failing to challenge the existing power relations and predatory economies upstream, this approach risks promoting the economic normalization of illegal activity, benefiting actors capable of operating in unstable environments that have been politically ‘stabilized’ by diplomacy.

In the absence of strict conditions, the Washington Accords could primarily benefit US interests and consolidate states and political-economic networks that already profit from the war economy in eastern DRC. The promise of new investment flows, security assistance and economic partnerships could strengthen these actors without requiring, in return, a clear break with cross-border predatory circuits. The desired stabilization would thus become a mechanism that enables accumulation, rather than a tool for transformation.

Finally, the failure to call out regional responsibilities is another major deficiency in the recent diplomatic approaches to the situation in the DRC. Despite the reports and data establishing Uganda’s involvement in the political economy of the conflict, both the Doha and Washington processes were reluctant to name and involve the country in the discussions and the accords.

The ongoing conflict in eastern DRC exposes a hard truth: peace efforts that ignore the transnational illicit economy that sustain war are bound to fail. As long as armed groups and regional actors profit from violence, diplomacy is doomed to remain detached from realities on the ground. Meanwhile, civilians continue to pay the price through insecurity, poverty and displacement, and future generations are put at risk.