# Conflict Minerals > [!info] Gateway page > This is the **vocabulary entry** — what the phrase means and what rhetorical work it does. The subject itself is mapped at **[[Conflict Minerals Hub]]**, which threads the colonial origin story, the Congo wars, the regulatory experiment, and the 2025-26 minerals diplomacy across roughly forty pages. "Conflict minerals" refers to raw materials mined in conditions of armed conflict and human-rights abuse, whose sale helps finance the violence. In US law the term centres on the **3TG** — tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold — sourced from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and its neighbours. In common usage it is extended to **cobalt**, the [[Lithium-Ion Battery]] metal, much of it mined in the DRC. The formal statutory definition lives in [[Dodd-Frank Section 1502]]. ## What the term does The phrase is doing a specific kind of work, and it is worth naming. It **relocates responsibility from the site of the violence to the point of purchase** — the claim is not that a Congolese militia is doing something wrong, which nobody disputes, but that a company in Cupertino or Seoul is implicated in it by having bought the output. That relocation is what made supply-chain regulation thinkable at all. It is also a term that has been fought over precisely because of its scope. Compare the [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]]'s "conflict diamond," which covers only violence by **rebel movements against legitimate governments** — a definition narrow enough that a government massacring people at a diamond field falls outside it. The Kimberley Process failed to widen that definition in November 2025. ## Where to go from here | If you want | Go to | |---|---| | The whole subject, all five trails | [[Conflict Minerals Hub]] | | The materials, traceability and smelter chokepoint | [[Conflict Minerals Supply Chain]] | | Who does what, from mine to phone | [[Conflict Minerals Ecosystem]] | | The chronology, 1885 to 2026 | [[Conflict Minerals Timeline]] | | The US statute and its hollowing-out | [[Dodd-Frank Section 1502]] | | The Congolese history underneath it | [[Congolese History Hub]] | | The strategic-minerals framing that now competes with it | [[Critical Minerals]] | ## See Also [[Lithium-Ion Battery]] · [[Rare Earth Elements]] · [[Supply Chain]] · [[E-Waste]] · [[Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining]]