Christoph N. Vogel, Conflict Minerals Inc.: War, Profit and White Saviourism in Eastern Congo, Hurst & Company, 2022, ISBN: 978-1-787-38706-5 295 pp., £20.00 (paperback), available as an eBook.

From around the mid-2000s onwards, Western advocacy organizations adopted a simple yet powerful campaign narrative to explain the persistence of conflict and violence in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Armed groups were fighting to gain access to and profit from the region’s mineral wealth. Western consumers could help alleviate conflict and suffering by pressuring electronics giants such as Apple and Intel to stop sourcing these ‘conflict minerals’. In the 2010s, the conflict minerals campaign led to a plethora of Global North policy initiatives and legislation—from the USA and Canada to the EU and the OECD—seeking to sever the link between mining and conflict in the eastern DRC.

Christoph Vogel’s Conflict Minerals Inc. offers the first book-length appraisal of how transnational initiatives to regulate ‘conflict minerals’ have influenced conflict dynamics and the daily lives of Congolese in the eastern DRC. For this, Vogel focuses on the industry-led International Tin Supply Chain Initiative (iTSCi), which remains today the most visible and far-reaching initiative exporting ‘conflict free’ tin, tantalum, and tungsten from the region. His core argument is that iTSCi has produced a range of outcomes counter to its stated objectives. These include ‘new modes of corruption, resistance to external regulation, the recycling of wartime elites and a rise in unemployment and socio-economic precarity that has benefited armed group recruitment’ (p. 12). This has created, Vogel contends, new processes of marginalization and exclusion, while leading to more, not less, violence.