Photograph Source: Blaise-Pascal MUHEKA – CC0

In recent years, more people around the world have begun to encounter images of Congo’s suffering on their phones: a child emerging from a cobalt mine, a collapsed tunnel, families fleeing violence. Viral clips of displaced communities and reports of mass killings circulate across our screens. Yet even as this visibility grows, what remains almost entirely invisible is the full scale of the crisis and the direct connection between that violence and the very devices through which we witness it.

Congo’s devastation is not a local failure, but the logical outcome of a global economic system that profits from extraction, militarization, and silence. The world may be watching Congo more than before, but it still refuses to see itself in the story.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), located at the heart of Africa, is the continent’s second-largest country and among the richest in natural resources. Yet for decades its people have endured relentless violence, mass displacement, poverty, and environmental devastation. Since colonial rule, Congo’s mineral wealth has been systematically exploited by foreign powers and corporate interests, with independence reshaping—but never dismantling—these extractive structures. Today’s crisis is therefore the continuation of a long history of plunder. Resource extraction for global markets remains a central driver of instability, drawing local, regional, and international actors into competition over control. More than 100 armed groups now operate in eastern Congo, many financed through illegal mineral trade, turning the country’s immense wealth into a weapon against its own people.

The current crisis

The contradiction between technological progress and human devastation is not incidental. It defines the present crisis in the DRC. Currently, the DRC provides the world with many natural resources, such as copper, cobalt, coltan, lithium, gold, and diamonds, many of which are used in electronics, electric vehicles, batteries, and green-energy technologies. AI data centers are increasing demand for cobalt and other minerals even more. Controlling these resources is therefore crucial: the DRC holds 70% of the world’s coltan reserves and over 50% of cobalt, meaning whoever dominates Congo dominates the future of technology.

Rather than delivering prosperity, Congo’s extraordinary mineral wealth has produced a “resource curse.” Competition for coltan, cobalt, gold, and diamonds drives violent conflict, forcing miners, often children, into brutal, unsafe conditions while forests are cleared and rivers contaminated in the scramble for profit. In November 2025, dozens were killed when a bridge at a mine collapsed, a tragedy that illustrates how extraction proceeds with total disregard for human life. Because the richest deposits lie in the eastern provinces, these territories have become the epicentre of militarization, where armed groups, militias, and even state forces battle for control while communities are displaced and terrorized.

The environmental destruction deepens the crisis: forests are cleared to reach mineral deposits, mining releases vast amounts of carbon and nitrogen dioxide, and toxic mining waste poisons rivers and lakes, wiping out agriculture and fishing, the very means by which people survive.

The humanitarian consequences are catastrophic. By 2025, there are over 6.9 million people internally displaced, the highest number in Africa, 1.2........

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