# Séverine Autesserre Professor of political science at Barnard College, and the most-cited academic source for the argument that the conflict-minerals frame is analytically wrong and operationally harmful. Her books — ***The Trouble with the Congo*** (2010, which won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order), ***Peaceland*** (2014), and ***The Frontlines of Peace*** (2021) — build a single argument: international peacebuilding fails in the Congo because it treats local conflicts as epiphenomena of national and regional politics, and because interveners inhabit a professional culture that systematically discounts local knowledge. The article that matters most for this cluster is **"Dangerous Tales: Dominant Narratives on the Congo and Their Unintended Consequences"** (*African Affairs*, 2012). It identifies three Western narratives about the DRC — **minerals as the cause of the conflict; sexual violence as its main consequence; extension of state authority as the solution** — and argues that each is a simplification adopted because it is fundable and marketable, and that each produced counterproductive intervention. On minerals specifically, the argument is that the frame licensed a supply-chain response to a problem whose actual drivers are land, citizenship, local authority and security-sector failure. The empirical descendant of that argument is [[Laura Seay]]'s work on [[Dodd-Frank Section 1502]]; the descendant one generation on is the critique of *Cobalt Red* — see [[Siddharth Kara]]. It should be read alongside the countervailing evidence, which is real: the 2024 *Journal of Accounting Research* study finding 1502 decreased conflict in covered mining regions, and IPIS field surveys showing 3T militarisation falling sharply. Autesserre's claim is not that supply-chain regulation does nothing. It is that a narrative simple enough to campaign on is usually too simple to intervene on. ## See also [[Laura Seay]] · [[Dodd-Frank Section 1502]] · [[Conflict Minerals Supply Chain]] · [[Siddharth Kara]] · [[Conflict Minerals Hub]]