Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: A new rebel alliance in eastern Congo threatens to drag the rest of the country into war, Mauritius experiences its worst riots in decades, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi outlines a succession plan.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: A new rebel alliance in eastern Congo threatens to drag the rest of the country into war, Mauritius experiences its worst riots in decades, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi outlines a succession plan.

Congolese Power Struggle

A new development in the decades-long conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo threatens to draw the rest of the country into a wider war.

Last week, former President Joseph Kabila, who led Congo from 2001 to 2019, joined an armed coalition that seeks to challenge the current administration “by all means, including force.” Now, some analysts believe that an insurgency that has so far been concentrated in eastern territories could make its way to the capital of Kinshasa in the country’s west.

Kinshasa “now confronts a more formidable opposition: an armed movement with demonstrated military capabilities, led by a former president with extensive political networks,” commentator Samson Kasujja wrote last week in the Great Lakes Eye.

The new coalition, called the Front for the Refoundation of the Nation (FRN), unites militias and opposition figures under one banner. It includes the Rwanda-backed M23 movement, which has controlled vast areas of eastern Congo since 2022, and its broader political coalition, the Congo River Alliance, led by Corneille Nangaa, the former head of the country’s electoral commission.

The FRN’s members have diverse goals. M23, for instance, purports to seek protection—and a greater political voice—for Congo’s minority Tutsi population, which has long faced discrimination. Kabila, meanwhile, likely aims to use his political connections to unseat Congo’s current president, Félix Tshisekedi, his former coalition partner turned rival.

But on a broader level, Congo’s conflict is rooted in competition over land and mineral resources. Congo produces more than 70 percent of the world’s cobalt and is home to deposits of other metals that are essential to the technology and defense industries.

The escalation of the insurgency demonstrates the failure of a so-called peace deal between Rwanda and Congo brokered by the Trump administration last year, whereby the Congolese government agreed to give the United States preferential access to minerals in exchange for U.S. security support, and Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government, in turn, agreed to stop backing the M23 in exchange for private U.S. investment in minerals processing.

If the conflict spreads, it will have a........

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