In current day Rwanda, hundreds of men and women sit in rows in a wooden hall near Rutshuru, deep in eastern Congo. They have just finished a two-week “re-education” course run by the M23 rebellion. At the front, commander Sultani Makenga poses a question that is less inquiry than instruction: do they understand that only force can free their country from misrule in Kinshasa?
What is happening in that hall is not simply recruitment. Most of these people won’t pick up rifles. They are being trained as the bureaucratic backbone of a parallel administration that now stretches across large swathes of North and South Kivu. While diplomats in Washington and Doha speak the language of ceasefires, accords and implementation, M23 is quietly doing something much more durable; it is building a state.
Washington’s narrative, fronted by Donald Trump’s claim to have “ended” multiple wars, treats eastern Congo as a conflict on its way to resolution, a box to be ticked in a list of foreign policy wins to flaunt to the public. On the ground, the opposite is unfolding. Under the cover of peace processes, M23 is transforming military gains into a self-financing order that will be very hard to unwind.
A Parallel State in Everything but Name
The most striking feature of the current phase of the war is how little it resembles a temporary insurgency. M23’s armed force has roughly tripled in size over the past year. It controls key border corridors from Uganda down past Rwanda to Burundi and Lake Tanganyika. It has appointed its own governors and mayors in places like Goma and Bukavu, installed loyal community leaders when traditional chiefs fled, and begun issuing its own visas at border posts, refusing documents stamped by Congolese embassies.
At the same time, its leadership is investing heavily in political indoctrination. Civilian officials, from heads of state-owned companies to local administrators, are required to attend re-education courses like the one near Rutshuru. The focus is less on weapons drills than on a structured narrative of Congo’s history, the failures of Kinshasa, and the virtues M23 claims to embody: discipline, sacrifice, commitment, a new vision of “good governance” rooted in their authority.
Training camps for fighters follow the same logic. Former Congolese soldiers who defect and militiamen who surrender are not simply absorbed; they are broken down and rebuilt. Recruits describe a motto that sums up the process: “Destroy, Build, Confidence.” Hunger, humiliation and harsh discipline come first, then a sense of belonging to something more efficient and serious than the chaotic state they left behind.
Taken together, these elements; control of borders, parallel courts, tax systems, indoctrinated civilian and military recruits amount to a de facto state structure. M23 does not need formal recognition to function as a government where it rules.
Federalism as a Political Alibi
Politically, M23 presents its project not as secession but as reform. It insists it does not want to carve off eastern Congo as an independent entity. Instead, it calls for the country to be reorganised into a federal state with far greater autonomy for the provinces. Its internal charter, which underpins the re-education courses, explicitly envisions a future Congo with weak central authority and strong regional governments, stimulated by the free movement of people and goods.
On the surface, this demand is not irrational. Congo is enormous, historically neglected from the capital, and chronically misgoverned. Many Congolese outside the east would also welcome a more federal system. That is precisely what makes the narrative so effective. It allows M23 to frame its territorial control as a preview of decentralisation rather than as occupation.
But the timing matters significantly. Calls for federalism, coming from a movement that has just seized land by force, function as a political alibi for cementing those gains. A negotiated federal arrangement that leaves current realities intact would lock in M23’s authority without requiring it to disarm or surrender its economic base. The language of institutional reform becomes a shield for fragmentation.
If international mediators are not careful, they risk legitimising a system in which Congo remains unified on paper but is effectively partitioned into zones of enduring rebel rule.
Minerals as the Driving Force
What makes this moment even more dangerous than earlier cycles of rebellion is that M23 is no longer operating on a financial tightrope. It is tapping into one of the richest segments of the global economy to prop themselves up: critical minerals.
The movement now controls dozens of mining sites across North and South Kivu. The most important is Rubaya, a coltan mine that alone produces around 15 percent of the world’s supply of the ore used to make tantalum for smartphones, computers, aerospace components and medical devices. United Nations investigators estimate that taxes and fees imposed by M23 on mining and trade in such areas bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, money that flows through Rwanda into refining networks in Asia.
This is where the conflict ceases to be just a local security crisis and becomes a structural feature of the global supply chain. As long as the world’s appetite for cheap electronics and advanced technology keeps rising, the ores under eastern Congo will remain extraordinarily valuable. And as long as M23 controls access to those ores in the territories it holds, it has a built-in source of revenue that does not depend on foreign donors or whatever concessions Kinshasa grants in peace talks.
You cannot sanction geology. You can blacklist individual commanders or companies, but as long as demand for tantalum, tin and gold persists, there will be buyers and there will be middlemen. That reality gives M23 a form of fiscal sovereignty. It can pay fighters, reward local elites, finance roads, and keep its administrative machine running without asking anyone’s permission.
In that sense, what is taking shape in eastern Congo is a new model of rebellion; a resource-sovereignty state that deliberately avoids declaring independence, preferring the safer status of a permanent “temporary problem” within a formally unified country.
Selective Western Pressure
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Rwanda’s government continues to deny that it backs M23, insisting its deployments along the border are defensive measures against the Hutu FDLR militia that operates from Congo. Yet U.N. experts have documented Rwandan military support to M23, and Congolese and international diplomats describe the group as effectively a Rwandan proxy.
At the same time, Rwanda retains the status of a favoured security partner for many Western capitals. Rwandan troops protect foreign projects in Mozambique, contribute to peacekeeping operations, and Kigali has signed controversial migration deals with countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. Its tourist board sponsors Western sports teams. It knows how to speak the language of stability and partnership.
That dual role undermines the leverage Washington and European governments claim to wield. Sanctions have been imposed on some M23 and Rwandan officials and businesses. More measures are reportedly ready if Kigali does not meet commitments to “lift its defensive measures”, essentially pulling troops out of Congo. But the broader relationship remains intact, and so does Rwanda’s role as a corridor for both minerals and political influence.
This is the uncomfortable truth behind Trump’s declaration of peace. State-to-state agreements between Kinshasa and Kigali may look good on a podium, but the decisive actor on the ground is a rebel movement with its own economic base and administrative project. It is not a signatory to the Washington accords. It has every incentive to sit through peace talks, make vague commitments, and then continue building its institutions while diplomats congratulate themselves on progress.
A Conflict that May Outlast a Peace Agreement
For ordinary Congolese living under M23 rule, the outcome is profoundly ambiguous. Some residents in Goma and Bukavu concede that security has improved, especially at night. Street crime has dropped. You can move after dark without the same fear of random violence. But that order has a price. Banks are shuttered. Journalists and activists have fled or sought U.N. protection. Land disputes are being arbitrated by rebel-run courts that may be more interested in demographic engineering than justice. People who do not “respect the rules” face harsh consequences.
This is how a de facto state takes root: it offers predictability where there was chaos, services where there was neglect, and a coherent story where the official one has long rung hollow. People adapt because they have to. Over time, adaptation shades into resignation.
From the outside, it is tempting to view eastern Congo as just another crisis that needs a summit, a framework, a monitoring mechanism. But the deeper danger is that the war has quietly outgrown the peace process designed to end it. M23 is not primarily negotiating for a place at the table. It is organising to survive alongside or beneath whatever agreements are signed above it.
Unless the international conversation begins to grapple honestly with that reality, properly fusing federalism, mineral wealth and the parallel institutions that M23 is constructing, talk of “ending” the conflict will remain little more than rhetoric. On paper, Congo will still be whole. In practice, a mineral-rich slice of its east will be governed by a movement that has discovered how to live indefinitely in the grey zone between rebellion and recognition.
Peace deals can stop battles. They cannot, on their own, dismantle a state that has already begun to be built.
