Summary

Since the remobilisation of the Rwandan-backed M23 armed group in 2021, the conflict in eastern Congo has become a struggle not only over territory and mineral deposits, but also over the routes through which goods move. Hundreds of roadblocks across Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu enable armed actors to tax trade, regulate movement and compete for economic and political leverage. Examining the commodity chains of gold, cacao and beer reveals how these checkpoints connect local conflict dynamics to regional and global trade. Rather than representing unstructured anarchy, this landscape is a ‘roadblock heterarchy’: fragmented but structured competition in which different actors exercise authority over circulation according to distinct political and economic logics. Understanding conflict therefore requires following commodities throughout their supply chains, rather than focusing only on where they are produced.

Key Findings

• Circulation is a primary axis of the conflict economy. Value is captured at bottlenecks throughout supply chains, making the governance of movement as important as the governance of territory.
• The roadblock landscape is not chaos, but structured competition. Different actors organise authority over circulation according to contrasting political projects, spatial positions and economic constraints, creating a fragmented but patterned landscape of extraction.
• Different commodities create different opportunities for control and rent extraction. Their physical properties influence how armed actors intervene in their circulation.
• Eastern Congo’s roads connect local conflict to regional and global economies. Checkpoints along commodity routes form part of wider circuits of exchange, including Indian Ocean trading networks.
• Western leverage over these circuits is structurally limited. Gold and other commodities move through trading networks that can circumvent regulatory frameworks focused on supply chain transparency in European and American markets.

Policy Implications

The limits of Western leverage over commodity chains need to be recognised. Greater attention to regional fiscal governance may provide a more relevant entry point where commodity trading networks are structured to circumvent Western oversight.

Conflict policy needs to encompass trade corridors and consumer markets, not just production sites. Focusing primarily on mines and other sites of extraction risks overlooking where value is captured and political and economic competition occurs along supply chains.

Agricultural frontier conflicts need to be considered through supply chain governance. The movement of commodities such as cacao can be closely connected to land conflicts, armed mobilisation and competition over trade.

Consumer supply chains can contain important fiscal chokepoints. Everyday goods such as beer can provide significant sources of revenue for armed actors, making consumer markets relevant to understanding conflict financing.

Stabilisation efforts need to account for the governance of circulation. Roadblocks are not simply symptoms of disorder but places where competing actors exercise authority, regulate movement and generate revenue.

This report was published as part of the TRACE (Trade, Rents, and Authority in borderland Checkpoint Economies) project, and was first published on the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) website.