Negotiated peace for extortion: the case of Walikale territory in eastern DR Congo

War in the Democratic Republic of Congo has increasingly been explained as a means to get access to natural resources and as a strategy to get control over informal trading networks linking the DRC with global markets. In most of these accounts, the complexity of war economies is underestimated. One element that is often missing is that systems of economic exploitation, which have been developed by armed groups during the Congolese war, tend to persist in the post-conflict context and seem to be hardly affected by the peace process. Based on an evaluation of the case of the Congolese National Army's (FARDC) non-integrated 85th Brigade, a former Mayi-Mayi militia now operating under the banner of the FARDC and deeply involved in the exploitation of cassiterite in Walikale (North Kivu), this paper illustrates how mechanisms of exploitation that have been instituted during the war can largely survive in peacetime conditions. In purely economic terms, this case would suggest a departure from patterns of profit accumulation in war conditions towards profiteering under the seeming order of the DRC's reestablished state institutions.