Peace deals are often announced with handshakes, photo ops, smiles, and celebratory headlines. They are moments of spectacle that are framed as victories of diplomacy and stability. While some peace deals ought to be celebrated, behind the press conferences and applause, we must also ask: What is actually being exchanged in the name of peace? Whose lives continue to be disposed of in the name of peace deals?

During a press briefing on  Friday, June 27, US President Donald Trump announced that a peace deal between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda has been signed. In his announcement to the press, Trump stated that though he does not know much about the conflict in eastern Congo, it was one of the worst wars he has seen and that he also happened to have someone who was able to settle it—his senior Africa advisor, Massad Boulos. He then asserted that as part of the deal, the United States will also be getting the mineral rights from the Congo. While there is much to unpack in the details of the deal, Trump’s casual remark about securing mineral rights cannot be overlooked, especially as this agreement, like many before it that have failed, is being celebrated as a victory not just for the people of eastern Congo but for the world.

But if war has truly ended, why must peace always come in exchange for minerals?

This deal, which was finalized in Washington, raises critical questions about the meaning of peace. Trump claims the conflict has ended, yet mineral extraction in the DRC  has long functioned as a form of war, one waged not just with weapons, but through dispossession. For decades, the Congolese people have lived with the consequences of violent extraction: displacement, environmental degradation, forced labor, and the erosion of community life. The minerals being handed over in this agreement have already been at the center of a  war, one that dispossesses people of land, health, and future. What is framed as peace is in fact the continuation of imperial violence, where the tools of war this time will be contracts and Western  corporations.

In her book Remaindered Life, Neferti X. M. Tadiar writes that “we live in a time when every day brings ample evidence of the disposability of human life. It is a casual use of the word—human—for the very disposability of this life.” Dispossession, in this context, is not only historical, it is ongoing. “A war of dispossession,” Tadiar reminds us, “is the mode of accumulation dominantly understood as the ‘original’ or ‘primitive’ basis of the rise of capital, even as those who struggle to survive in this moment know intimately well that a racist, sexist war of dispossession is the beating heart of contemporary global capitalism.”

The DRC, with the world’s largest reserves of cobalt, diamonds, zinc, and uranium,  continues to be a site of imperial hunger, where the lives of the Congolese people are rendered expendable in service of global supply chains and Western profit. More than 40,000 children alongside adult mining workers continue to work in mines under toxic, inhumane conditions. These children and the communities they are part of live what Tadiar calls “remaindered lives”: lives marked as disposable, wasteful, or necessary only insofar as they serve capital. Peace deals in this global system are often nothing more than a pause in direct confrontation so that the violence of extraction may continue uninterrupted.

Tadiar writes that “waste is the object of the new imperialism,” and in the Congo, both the land and its people have long been treated as waste, exploited, paid below minimum wage, and left behind. The mines that produce cobalt for phones and electric cars are surrounded by devastated ecosystems, sick workers, and impoverished communities. Trump’s so-called peace deal cements a long-standing imperial relationship: the extraction of value from African soil without regard for the people who live on it.

The assertion that this peace deal has finally culminated the conflict  in the DRC distracts from the real terms of the deal: a reinforcement of Western control over Congolese land and labor. Tadiar reminds us that capitalism “sustains its dominance, often at the cost of intensified inequality and environmental degradation.” In the DRC, the cost is borne by children and communities who inhale dust and dig for minerals to power devices and enrich Western economies. To declare victory while announcing rights to minerals is to declare the rights to the human lives in Congo. Mineral extraction cannot be separated from the Congolese people, who labor under extreme conditions to produce that wealth. Tadiar observes that “people constantly make do to get by; it is they who have to fine-tune the art of revaluing modernity’s waste into the arts of life making.” In the DRC, mining has become survival. Entire communities rely on artisanal mining not out of choice but out of necessity, forced to convert waste—environmental, economic, and social—into survival.

Tadiar pushes us to see that “capital has for centuries profited from the disposability of human and nonhuman lives.” Trump’s announcement is not a rupture from this history; it is a continuation of it. The DRC does not need peace deals that convert its minerals into bargaining chips. It needs sovereignty, environmental justice, and a world that stops treating African life as collateral damage in the pursuit of global convenience.

To call this a successful peace deal and a final end to war is to misname the ongoing violence in the DRC. The war over minerals in Congo has never ceased; it has only taken different forms. Today, it is waged not only through armed conflict but through the quiet violence of environmental degradation, economic exploitation, and peace deals that continue to prioritize imperial gain over human lives.

---

---