# Conflict Minerals Hub Four metals — **tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold**, the "3TG" — sit inside nearly every electronic device on earth, and a large share of them pass through a region where controlling a mine has meant controlling an army's payroll. Add **cobalt**, which the batteries need and which the Democratic Republic of the Congo supplies about three-quarters of, and you have the subject this hub maps: not a mineral category but a 140-year argument about who owns the ground under central Africa and who is allowed to profit from it. The vault treats conflict minerals as a **political-economy** subject, not a geological one. The ore is not the interesting part. The interesting part is the recurring structure: a distant buyer needs something only this ground has, an armed force controls the ground, an intermediary launders the provenance, and a regulator arrives late, gets captured or exhausted, and leaves the structure intact under a new name. > [!info] Start here > **[[Conflict Minerals Chain Map]]** for the ASCII pit-to-product flow · **[[Conflict Minerals Ecosystem]]** for the actor map · **[[Conflict Minerals Timeline]]** for the chronology from the Berlin Conference to the 2026 sanctions · **[[Conflict Minerals Watchlist]]** for what is still open right now. --- ## The five trails ### 1. Extraction colonialism (1885–1960) The origin story, and the one most people skip. [[Leopold II]] held the [[Congo Free State]] as personal property and ran a rubber-and-ivory terror on it; [[E. D. Morel]] reverse-engineered the whole system from shipping manifests and [[Roger Casement]] documented it on the ground. When Belgium annexed the territory, the concession model survived the change of flag: [[Union Minière du Haut-Katanga]] became one of the largest mining companies in the world on a labour regime that the state helped enforce. The trail's sharpest single fact: uranium from the [[Shinkolobwe]] mine in Katanga, shipped to New York by [[Edgar Sengier]] before the United States had a bomb programme worth the name, supplied roughly two-thirds of the ore behind the Manhattan Project. See [[Shinkolobwe and the Manhattan Project]]. ### 2. Cold War capture (1960–1997) Eleven days after independence, the province holding the copper seceded. [[Union Minière du Haut-Katanga]] redirected its tax payments from Kinshasa to [[Moïse Tshombe]], which is what made the [[Katanga Secession]] financially possible. [[Patrice Lumumba]] was dead within seven months; the [[Assassination of Patrice Lumumba]] page separates what the [[Church Committee]] established about American plotting from what Belgian and Katangese hands actually did. [[Mobutu Sese Seko]] then spent 32 years converting the mining economy into a personal one — see [[Zairianization]] and [[Gécamines]], whose copper output fell 93% in six years. ### 3. The war economy (1996–present) The [[First Congo War]] and [[Second Congo War]] were not started by minerals. They were *sustained* by them. The [[UN Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources in the DRC]] documented three "elite networks" turning a war into a business. The 2000 tantalum spike pulled artisanal Congolese coltan into world markets; [[Bosco Ntaganda]]'s career traces the revolving door between rebellion, army commission and mining rent. Today [[M23]] holds Goma, Bukavu and the [[Rubaya Coltan Mine]], and [[FDLR]] remains Kigali's stated reason for being there. ### 4. The regulation experiment (1998–2026) [[Global Witness]] invented the field with a 1998 report on Angolan diamonds; the [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]] was the first attempt at a fix and remains stuck behind its own definition. [[Dodd-Frank Section 1502]] tried something different — mandated disclosure rather than prohibition — and produced the most genuinely contested evidence base in the vault. The [[OECD Due Diligence Guidance]] supplied the five-step framework everyone else adopted; [[ITSCI]] was supposed to make it work on the ground and was shown instead to launder. ### 5. The 2020s inversion (2024–2026) Running underneath all five trails is a sixth thread the cluster maps separately: **[[Security-for-Minerals]]** — the contract form in which a government that cannot secure its territory pays for force with the resource revenue that force is meant to make collectible. It runs from [[Union Minière du Haut-Katanga]]'s tax advance to Tshombe in 1960, through [[Executive Outcomes]] and [[Sandline International]] in the 1990s, to [[Wagner Group]] and [[Erik Prince]]'s [[Vectus Global]] today. The human-rights framing said *source carefully, even if it costs more*. The China-competition framing says *source faster, from wherever*. The second is winning. The [[Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity]] and the [[US-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement]] were signed the same day; [[KoBold Metals]] and a US-backed consortium moved on [[Glencore]]'s cobalt while [[CMOC]] kept expanding. Meanwhile Congress moved a Section 1502 repeal bill out of committee and the administration sanctioned a Rwandan gold refinery — deregulating disclosure and escalating sanctions at the same time, with no apparent contradiction felt. --- ## The comparative layer The Congo is the deepest case in this vault. It is not the only one, and setting the others beside it is what turns a country study into a theory. [[Conflict Resources Atlas]] does that work: what varies across cases is not the mineral but **fungibility after processing, who holds the ground, where the buyer sits, and whether extraction is artisanal or industrial.** | Case | The lesson it carries | |---|---| | [[Blood Diamonds]] — Sierra Leone, Angola, Zimbabwe | Definitional narrowness is the price of universal membership. [[Operation Hakudzokwi]] killed at least 214 people and produced no conflict diamonds | | [[Myanmar Conflict Minerals]] | Half the world's heavy rare earths, and **almost no binding regime reaches it**. The minerals moved; the statutes did not | | [[Indonesian Nickel Boom]] | Licensed industrial operators, a functioning state, no armed group — and documented deaths, deforestation and displacement of an uncontacted people | | [[Lithium Triangle]] | Where the contested question is consent, not violence. Chile ran a full consultation and still split the affected communities | | [[Deep-Sea Mining]] | The frontier: a contest not over who holds the ground but over **who may authorise taking it at all** | | [[Minerals Diplomacy]] | The 2025–26 answer to all of the above — acquisition instead of regulation | ## Directory | Layer | Pages | |---|---| | **Spines** | [[Conflict Minerals Ecosystem]] · [[Conflict Minerals Timeline]] · [[Congolese History Hub]] · [[Conflict Resources Atlas]] · [[Conflict Minerals Chain Map]] · [[Conflict Minerals Watchlist]] | | **Eras** | [[Congo Free State]] · [[Belgian Congo]] · [[Zairianization]] | | **Events** | [[Katanga Secession]] · [[Assassination of Patrice Lumumba]] · [[Shinkolobwe and the Manhattan Project]] · [[Elisabethville Massacre]] · [[Battle of Kolwezi]] · [[First Congo War]] · [[Second Congo War]] · [[M23 Offensive of 2025]] | | **People — Congo** | [[Leopold II]] · [[E. D. Morel]] · [[Roger Casement]] · [[Edgar Sengier]] · [[Patrice Lumumba]] · [[Moïse Tshombe]] · [[Larry Devlin]] · [[Mobutu Sese Seko]] · [[Laurent-Désiré Kabila]] · [[Bosco Ntaganda]] · [[Corneille Nangaa]] · [[Félix Tshisekedi]] · [[Paul Kagame]] · [[Dan Gertler]] · [[Massad Boulos]] | | **People — elsewhere** | [[Charles Taylor]] · [[Foday Sankoh]] · [[Jonas Savimbi]] | | **People — the argument** | [[Ian Smillie]] · [[Charmian Gooch]] · [[Séverine Autesserre]] · [[Laura Seay]] · [[Siddharth Kara]] · [[Christoph Vogel]] · [[Ben Radley]] · [[Adam Hochschild]] · [[Farai Maguwu]] | | **Companies** | [[Union Minière du Haut-Katanga]] · [[Gécamines]] · [[Glencore]] · [[CMOC]] · [[KoBold Metals]] · [[Entreprise Générale du Cobalt]] · [[Forminière]] · [[Kilo-Moto]] · [[The Metals Company]] · [[Myanma Economic Holdings]] · [[Myanmar Economic Corporation]] | | **Organizations** | [[Global Witness]] · [[M23]] · [[FDLR]] · [[Kachin Independence Army]] · [[United Wa State Army]] · [[ITSCI]] · [[Responsible Minerals Initiative]] · [[ARECOMS]] · [[Congo Reform Association]] · [[Special Court for Sierra Leone]] · [[International Seabed Authority]] · [[UN Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources in the DRC]] | | **Regulation** | [[Dodd-Frank Section 1502]] · [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]] · [[OECD Due Diligence Guidance]] | | **Concepts** | [[Conflict Minerals Supply Chain]] · [[Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining]] · [[Rubaya Coltan Mine]] · [[Critical Minerals]] · [[Minerals Diplomacy]] | | **Comparative cases** | [[Conflict Resources Atlas]] · [[Blood Diamonds]] · [[Myanmar Conflict Minerals]] · [[Hpakant]] · [[Man Maw]] · [[Indonesian Nickel Boom]] · [[Lithium Triangle]] · [[Deep-Sea Mining]] | | **Private military** | [[Security-for-Minerals]] · [[Executive Outcomes]] · [[Sandline International]] · [[Vectus Global]] · [[Branch Energy]] · [[Tony Buckingham]] · [[5 Commando]] | | **Documents** | [[A Rough Trade]] · [[The Heart of the Matter]] · [[Fowler Report]] · [[The ITSCI Laundromat]] · [[GAO Conflict Minerals Report 2024]] | | **Works** | [[King Leopold's Ghost]] · [[Cobalt Red]] | | **Method** | [[Congo Free State Mortality Debate]] | | **Deals** | [[Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity]] · [[US-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement]] | | **States** | [[Democratic Republic of the Congo]] · [[Rwanda]] | --- ## Four things to hold onto > [!warning] The numbers in this subject are contested, and the contest matters > Congo Free State mortality is argued between roughly 1.2 and 10 million. The Second Congo War toll of "5.4 million" is a model output whose plausible range runs from under 900,000 to 7.6 million depending on one baseline assumption. Artisanal cobalt is often quoted at 20–30% of DRC output; by 2024 it was around 2%. UNITA's "$3.7 billion" is an NGO estimate with no published method. Myanmar jade's "$31 billion" is a price-peak upper bound against Myanmar's own $1.5 billion filing. Mugabe's "$15 billion" at Marange is a political claim by an implicated party. Ukraine's "$500 billion" minerals deal was capitalised at $150 million. > > Every one of these numbers is used as a weapon by someone. **Assume the famous number is the top of a range until you find the method.** Cite the range, never the headline alone. **Minerals rarely start wars; they determine how wars end, or don't.** The 2001 coltan price crash did not stop the fighting. The 2019 cobalt crash did not stop artisanal digging. Monocausal resource-conflict models fail on their own evidence. **The state is a combatant in the mining economy, not a referee of it.** IPIS field data finds the Congolese army interferes with more artisanal mines than all non-state armed groups combined, and operates close to half the mapped roadblocks in the Kivus. **The map has barely moved since 1930.** The copper belt, the Kivu tin and coltan, the Ituri gold, the Kasai diamonds — all were enclosed, mapped and staffed under a concession-plus-coerced-labour model built between 1885 and 1930. The shareholders changed. The geography did not. ## See also [[Critical Minerals]] · [[Rare Earth Elements]] · [[Deep-Sea Mining]] · [[Regulatory Capture]] · [[Human Rights]]