{"id":55873,"date":"2026-11-02T11:46:31","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T16:46:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/?post_type=cu_story&p=55873"},"modified":"2026-11-02T14:41:00","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T19:41:00","slug":"resource-wars-and-the-search-for-peace","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/story\/resource-wars-and-the-search-for-peace\/","title":{"rendered":"Resource Wars and the Search for Peace"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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\n Resource Wars and the Search for Peace\n <\/h1>\n \n \n\n

Drawing on 450 interviews, Carleton researcher Evelyn Namakula challenges conventional understandings of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

For more than two decades, the international community has poured its resources, expertise and peacekeepers into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). And yet, lasting peace has remained painfully out of reach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Dr. Evelyn Namakula<\/a>, a human rights professor and researcher in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies<\/a> at Carleton University, that persistent failure points to a more fundamental problem \u2014 that the people in power are looking for solutions in the wrong places. The powerful neglect local people\u2019s agency, cultures and knowledge systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This is a foundational tenet of Namakula\u2019s new book, Resource Wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Prospects for Peace via African Knowledge Systems<\/a><\/em>, the culmination of years spent trying to understand not only why conflict in the DRC persists, but why so many attempts to end it have been unsuccessful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Namakula grounds her analysis in the experiences of those living with the consequences. The book draws on more than 450 interviews, many conducted with people in communities that endure the armed conflicts and resource plunder especially since 1996. However, their experiences and knowledges have too often been absent from conversations about the DRC\u2019s present and future.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cWithout engaging the Congolese at the grassroots, their cultures and their values, peace and security will continue to remain in limbo.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Listening, however, carries a tremendous weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over years of research in the DRC, Namakula has spoken with families displaced by violence and mining from their homes, former and current child soldiers, politicians, military personnel, NGOs, civil societies, militia members, people living alongside unfathomable mineral wealth while desperately struggling in poverty, and survivors of violence that she sometimes still finds difficult to comprehend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are times, she says, when the experiences of these people follow her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSometimes I close my office\/room door when their stories come and what I have seen,\u201d Namakula says. \u201cAnd I find that tears are flowing from my eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Namakula explains that the emotional weight of those encounters shaped the way she researched and wrote Resource Wars<\/em>. Drawing on her work across political economy, colonial history, human rights, natural resource governance, peace and security, and African Indigenous philosophy, she grounds the book in the knowledge and lived experience of Congolese people. Their voices, in turn, have shaped her understanding of what a lasting peace might actually look like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tracing the conflict through history and first-hand accounts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Namakula has spent much of her career<\/a> studying resource-based conflict, peacebuilding and the political economy of extraction. Her work fits naturally within the interdisciplinary terrain of Carleton’s Human Rights and Social Justice<\/a> program, where questions about rights \u2014 who defines them, who protects them and, often, who gets left outside their protection \u2014 are inseparable from questions about power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Few places bring those questions into sharper relief than the DRC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rich in cobalt, copper, gold, coltan, cassiterite, tungsten and other minerals increasingly central to the digital transition, renewable energy and the global economy, the country has endured decades of armed conflict, foreign intervention, political instability and resource exploitation. The United Nations has maintained a peacekeeping presence there since 1999, with little lasting peace and security to show for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere is no peace and security,\u201d she says. Over time, she describes in the book, many Congolese have lost trust not only in their own political leadership, but in the international institutions, governments, corporations and non-governmental organizations that have arrived promising assistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than locating the conflict within a single failed institution or political moment, Namakula approaches it simultaneously at three interconnected levels: national, regional and international. Congolese political leadership matters. So do the regional politics of neighbouring states. But so, too, do multinational corporations, foreign governments and international institutions operating in a country whose resources have long been coveted far beyond its borders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou cannot have peace without bringing these three together,\u201d she says. \u201cThey are so interconnected.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is an argument rooted in history and Resource Wars<\/em> reaches back through the DRC’s brutal experience of European colonialism and follows its legacy through post-independence politics, regional conflict and the contemporary greed driven global scramble for minerals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That history provides the book\u2019s broader framework, while Namakula\u2019s years of field research brought another dimension to her understanding of the conflict. At times, what she heard challenged her own assumptions. Before undertaking the research, for instance, she says she tended to think of militia leaders as simply perpetrators of violence. Then she met \u201cJames,\u201d a pseudonym she gives to one of the men she interviewed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He described a life in the forest, separated from his wife and children, and asked Namakula a question: did she think this was the life he would have chosen?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI would have loved to be in a decent home with my family,\u201d she recalls him telling her. \u201cCircumstances force me to be here (in a forest).\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other encounters contested her assumptions about child soldiers and armed groups. She met educated people, including university graduates, whose lives had been overtaken by tragedy. Again and again, she heard about hunger, lost parents, absent employment, insecurity and governments unable or unwilling to protect their communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCircumstances force people into these behaviours, this violence,\u201d Namakula says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Dr. Evelyn Namakula is a professor and researcher in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWalking on gold\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The DRC\u2019s extraordinary natural wealth has done remarkably little to enrich or protect many of the people who live there \u2014 a contradiction that runs throughout Resource Wars<\/em>. \u201cYou can walk along the banks of rivers, and you literally see gold,\u201d Namakula says. \u201cPeople say, \u2018We are walking on gold, but we are always languishing in poverty.\u2019\u201d This cruel paradox has become even harder to ignore in an era of electric vehicles, smartphones, renewable energy technologies and growing competition for critical minerals.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cToday, I think none of us can claim that we don’t have any metals or minerals from Congo. The gadgets that we use, that we have made part of our lifeblood, contain Congo\u2019s minerals and metals.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

At the same time, the language surrounding the green transition is overwhelmingly optimistic: electrification, decarbonization, green energy, modernization. Namakula asks what that transition looks like from the places where the materials enabling it are actually removed from the earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the mineral-rich Katanga region, she describes a landscape where mining concessions can be heavily protected even while surrounding communities remain vulnerable. Homes and community infrastructure can give way to extraction. Elsewhere, particularly in eastern Congo, competition for resources intersects with armed conflict and regional geopolitics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The forms of violence may look different, Namakula says, but they are connected by the same systems of extraction. The distance between \u201cthere\u201d and \u201chere (Canada),\u201d she argues, is much smaller than we often imagine. That places some responsibility on the consumer societies benefiting from the DRC’s resources.
Namakula’s critique also extends beyond individual purchasing choices and interrogates the systems that make them possible: corporations doing the extracting, governments pursuing access to critical minerals, international institutions overseeing peace and development, and an economic order capable of turning instability itself into an opportunity for profit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We have created a world I think, where politics lies to us and tells us that we are separate from what\u2019s happening in the DRC because of the national borders and categorization such as developed and developing world, core and peripheral states,\u201d she says. \u201cBut in reality, we are deeply interconnected. Climate change is teaching us that lesson\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Human rights for who?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For Namakula, that interconnectedness also makes what\u2019s happening in the DRC a Canadian story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before coming to Carleton University, Canada\u2019s international reputation for peacekeeping and multilateralism was part of what made the country appealing to her as a place to live and work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, she is less certain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Canadian mining interests are among those operating in and connected to the region, and Namakula worries that Canada’s growing focus on critical minerals and economic interests risks reproducing some of the same top-down thinking where core states exploiting peripheral states, which her book challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Economic considerations are real, she acknowledges. Governments cannot simply ignore them. \u201cBut I think we need to think deeply.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If human rights are universal, Namakula asks, what happens when protecting them conflicts with economic interests? And if the technologies powering wealthier countries’ transition toward a greener future depend upon extraction elsewhere, what obligations travel with the minerals?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Resource Wars<\/em> is not purely an indictment of failed approaches. Namakula also looks toward Afro-centric peacebuilding and African indigenous knowledge systems, including expressions of Ubuntu rooted in human interdependence. Her proposal is not to reject international cooperation. Instead, she imagines local, national, regional and international actors working together, but with Congolese people participating as protagonists rather than recipients of solutions devised elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don’t want people also to retreat into too much nationalism, this mentality of that we have to fight for ourselves,\u201d she says. \u201cI dream of a global society, where we genuinely care for each other regardless of national and racial differences.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite everything she has encountered through her research, Namakula remains hopeful.
Not because the systems she studies have given her much reason to be. Her hope comes from the people themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen you go to the grassroots,\u201d she says, \u201cyou find that people have not lost hope, who want peaceful change.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One such person who Namakula met in the DRC stays with her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The woman knew Namakula lived in Canada, a country she had never visited and imagined as belonging to people very different from herself. But she wanted Namakula to carry a message back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen you cut me, the same blood will flow,\u201d Namakula remembers her saying. \u201cTell them that we are also human beings here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Namakula, it comes back to this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe survive in the measure that we treat each other as human beings,\u201d she says, \u201cand care for each other.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"People<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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