# Conflict Resources Atlas The comparative layer of [[Conflict Minerals Hub]]. The Congo is the deepest case in this vault, but it is one case. This page sets the others beside it so the pattern — and the variation — is visible. The organising insight is that **what determines whether a resource funds violence is not the mineral. It is the interaction of four variables.** ## The four variables | Variable | Why it decides the outcome | |---|---| | **Fungibility after processing** | Gold, diamonds and tantalum become untraceable once refined or cut. Nickel from a named smelter does not. Regimes work where a chokepoint exists and fail where it doesn't. | | **Who holds the ground** | A rebel movement, a national army, a militia, or a company with a state contract. Every certification regime built so far has been drafted around one of these and blind to the others. | | **Where the buyer sits** | A regime binds only its own registrants. Dodd-Frank reaches SEC filers; the EU regulation reaches EU importers. **Both are blind to a Chinese buyer, and roughly all of Myanmar's rare earths and half of Congo's cobalt go to China.** | | **Whether the extraction is artisanal or industrial** | Artisanal supply is diffuse, deniable and impossible to police at source; industrial supply has an address, a licence and an owner. | ## The cases | Case | Commodity | Who controls the ground | Binding regime? | Where it goes | |---|---|---|---|---| | **[[Democratic Republic of the Congo]]** | 3TG, cobalt, copper | [[M23]], [[FDLR]], the Congolese army, [[Glencore]], [[CMOC]] | [[Dodd-Frank Section 1502]] (3TG only, hollowed out); EU regulation | China, then everywhere | | **[[Blood Diamonds]]** — Sierra Leone, Angola, Zimbabwe | Rough diamonds | Rebel movements, then a national army at Marange | [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]] — rebels only | India for cutting, then retail | | **[[Myanmar Conflict Minerals]]** | Jade, heavy rare earths, tin | [[Kachin Independence Army]], the UWSA, the Tatmadaw | **Almost none** — see below | China, overwhelmingly | | **[[Indonesian Nickel Boom]]** | Nickel, cobalt | Licensed industrial operators, mostly Chinese-owned | None applicable; US tax rules exclude rather than regulate | Battery and stainless supply chains | | **[[Lithium Triangle]]** — Chile, Argentina, Bolivia | Lithium brine | States and licensed operators | ILO 169 consultation, enforced through domestic courts | Global battery chains | | **[[Deep-Sea Mining]]** | Polymetallic nodules | Nobody yet — the contest is over who may authorise | UNCLOS via the [[International Seabed Authority]], which the US is routing around | Not yet produced | ## What the comparison actually shows **1. The regimes are commodity-shaped, and the commodities move.** Dodd-Frank covers four minerals in ten countries. It therefore does not cover jade, rare earths, cobalt, nickel or lithium anywhere on earth, and covers no mineral at all outside central Africa. **A company sourcing tin from a mine controlled by a 30,000-strong armed group in Myanmar has no US conflict-minerals reporting obligation, because the tin is Burmese and not Congolese.** The gap is not an oversight; it is the statute working exactly as drafted. **2. Definitional narrowness is the price of membership.** The [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]] defines a conflict diamond as one used by *rebel movements* against *legitimate governments*. That excluded Zimbabwe's army killing at least 214 miners at Marange to seize the field for the state — see [[Operation Hakudzokwi]]. The narrowness is why 60 participants covering 99.8% of rough production joined at all. You can have universal membership or a definition that reaches states. Not both, under a consensus rule. **3. The regimes bind the wrong end of the chain.** Every scheme built since 1998 regulates the buyer, because the buyer is reachable. But roughly all of Myanmar's heavy rare earths, most of its jade, and more than half of DRC cobalt production flow to a buyer that no Western regime binds. **4. Minerals sustain wars; they rarely start them.** The Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission found flatly that *"the exploitation of diamonds did not cause the conflict in Sierra Leone"* — pointing instead to endemic corruption, institutional collapse and youth exclusion. The Congo wars began over refugees and regime security. The 2001 coltan crash did not stop the fighting. **Resource-predation models explain how a war pays for itself, not why it starts.** **5. The frontier is moving from ground to sea, and from disclosure to acquisition.** The 2020s answer to mineral insecurity is not better due diligence. It is [[Minerals Diplomacy]] — state-to-state acquisition of supply — and, if the permits issue, [[Deep-Sea Mining]] of ground no state owns. > [!warning] The recurring numerical failure > Every case on this page has a headline number that is an upper-bound estimate hardened into fact by repetition: UNITA's "$3.7 billion" (NGO estimate, no published method), Myanmar jade's "$31 billion" (a price-peak year, against Myanmar's own $1.5bn EITI filing), Mugabe's "$15 billion" at Marange (a political claim by an implicated party), the Congo's "5.4 million" dead (a model output with a contested baseline), Ukraine's "$500 billion" minerals deal (actual capitalisation: $150 million). **Assume the famous number is the top of a range until you find the method.** ## The thread that runs under all of them **[[Security-for-Minerals]]** — the contract form in which force is paid for out of the resource revenue it is meant to secure. Katanga 1960, [[Executive Outcomes]] in Sierra Leone, [[Sandline International]] in Papua New Guinea, [[Wagner Group]] in the [[Central African Republic]], [[Vectus Global]] in the Congo and Haiti. The popular version of that lineage — "mercenaries paid in blood diamonds" — is largely unproven; the documented version is stranger and more durable. ## See also [[Conflict Minerals Hub]] · [[Conflict Minerals Chain Map]] · [[Conflict Minerals Watchlist]] · [[Security-for-Minerals]] · [[Conflict Minerals Ecosystem]] · [[Minerals Diplomacy]] · [[Critical Minerals]] · [[Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining]]