When Félix Tshisekedi and Paul Kagame signed the Washington Peace Accords in December 2025 under the beaming supervision of US President Donald Trump, the ceremony was meant to close one of Africa’s longest-running wounds. Halfway through 2026, the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo tells a grimmer story: a peace framework repeatedly violated, both sides trading accusations, and a population that has heard promises of calm too many times to believe this one.
The architecture of the deal was always precarious. The June 2025 Washington agreement was signed between the DRC and Rwandan foreign ministers — but the March 23 Movement, the Rwandan-backed rebel force that seized swathes of North Kivu, was not a party to it. M23 was instead shunted into separate talks in Doha, which produced a Declaration of Principles in July and a framework agreement in November. Two tracks, one war, and no single table where all the guns are represented.
That structural gap is now the story. A ceasefire exists on paper; on the ground, violations have been repeated enough that neither Kinshasa nor the rebels bother pretending otherwise. Analysts who followed the Doha process warned from the outset that neither side had much incentive to abandon maximalist positions, and that the negotiations would drag well into 2026. They have been proven right with depressing precision.
What gives the accords their strange durability is not African diplomacy but American minerals. The eastern DRC sits atop some of the planet’s richest deposits of cobalt, coltan, gold and lithium — the raw materials of the energy transition and the defence-industrial base. US companies have been rushing into Congo before the ink on the peace deal is fully dry, and Washington’s interest in stability is inseparable from its interest in supply chains that do not run through China.
This is the uncomfortable core of the 2025–26 settlement: it is a minerals deal wearing a peace deal’s clothes. That is not automatically fatal — plenty of durable peaces have been underwritten by hard economic interest. But it means the accord’s survival depends on whether American commercial appetite translates into sustained diplomatic pressure on Kigali and Kinshasa, or evaporates the moment the mining contracts are signed and secured.
For the wider region, the stakes are immediate. The DRC’s instability has repeatedly drawn in its neighbours and split the continent’s blocs. East African states seen as friendlier to Kigali and Southern African ones sympathetic to Kinshasa have jostled to lead the mediation, hobbling the African Union and exposing how rivalrous the continent’s institutions remain when a resource-rich prize is in play.
Kenya has a particular interest here, and a particular embarrassment. Nairobi led an earlier East African Community military and diplomatic push into the eastern DRC that ended in acrimony, with Kinshasa accusing the regional force of coddling M23. That failure is part of why mediation migrated to Washington and Doha in the first place — a quiet indictment of the EAC’s capacity to police its own neighbourhood.
The humanitarian ledger is the part the summitry tends to skate over. Years of conflict have displaced millions in the Kivus, and every violated ceasefire resets the clock on aid access, planting seasons and the faint possibility of return. For the people of Goma and its hinterland, the distinction between a framework agreement and a functioning peace is measured in whether it is safe to sleep at home.
The optimistic reading is that a flawed process is still a process — that declarations of principle, however violated, at least establish a text to hold the parties to. The pessimistic reading is that Africa has once again outsourced its most dangerous conflict to external powers whose interest is extractive and whose attention is fickle. Both readings can be true at once.
Watch whether the US keeps diplomatic weight on the file now that the mineral access it wanted is materialising, whether the African Union can finally speak with one voice rather than as competing camps, and whether the next dry-season fighting shatters the framework entirely. A peace that runs on fumes can travel a surprising distance. It cannot travel forever.
