Lately the African continent has been the focus of global attention and discussions on the present and future of Africa, especially with regards to the highly topical questions concerning the global and African state of peace and security. As multiple extremely complex armed conflicts continue to cause chronic instability and vulnerabilities in several African states and regions, they also directly affect the state of international security in the 21st century in an intensively interconnected and globalized world from an economic, political and peace/security perspective. Accordingly, this research article offers an in-depth analysis of some of the major causes and explanations of the existing wars in Africa related to the illicit exploitation of resources, vulnerability, and control. The goal of this work is to reveal and analyze the complexity of 21st-century wars in Africa and their deep interrelated causes by applying the example of the long and banal armed conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Thus, the authors argue that the destabilization of the political and socio-economic situation in Africa, and DRC in particular, is directly connected to local and regional conflicts over access to various forms of resources, influence, and power, but also to the artificially created chaos by various interested power parties for expansion, profit, and hope for further profit. In this sense, it has been emphasized that conflicts of so-called ‘low intensity’, artificially maintained over a long period of time, pose no lesser degree of threat to the regional state of peace and security.
В статье автор анализирует причины конфликтов в ДРК и возможные пути их предупреж-дения и урегулирования. В этой связи исследование было направлено на выявление факторов, питающих конфликты, прослеживание их динамики, возникновение новых угроз стабильному миру в регионе, а также определение механизмов для урегулирования очагов напряженности.Ключевые слова: конфликт, власть, воен-но-политические проблемы, вооруженные груп-пировки, этнические и социальные противоре-чия, вооруженная оппозиция, соглашение о мире.
The research focuses on the problem of military-political instability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo experiencing continued armed conflict for a long time. Dozens of illegal armed groups both Congolese and foreign origin continue to destabilize situation in the eastern part of the country causing humanitarian disasters. Due to governmental weakness, economic backwardness, chronical lack of finance resources, interethnic conflicts, all-round and widely spread corruption of the authorities, the Congolese government at the moment is not able to overcome scores of problems including the problem of security. Assistanceprovided to the DRC by itspartnerssuch as, first of all, the former metropolitan country Belgium, as well as the USA, Great Britain, the Europe Union and China works only in favourof these country-donors. They are attracted by rich Congolese natural resources which the DRC remaining one of the poorest countries in the world cannot turn to advantage to the full extent because of its economic backwardness. In exchange for so-calleddevelopment programmes, expensive strategic raw material (such as coltan, wolfram, casseterit, cooper, gold, niobium, and other) is being extracted and exported from the country, in addition, often on the inequivalent basis. This is taking place for the reason that numerous mines and open-cast mines are being controlled by different illegal armed groups and not by the central government. Therefore, it turns out that in the context of a military-political crisis, for so-called partners it is more beneficial to pursue their own interests. Furthermore, western ideologists arouse "separatism-oriented" theories similar to "balkanization", in other words, a breakdown of this giant country into several independent states. The Congolese are tremulous to this issue, they try to counter such approachs and defend the territorial integrity of the DRC. However, it is not an easy task. The impediment is unsettled relations with neighbouring countries - Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi which for tens of years exploit illegally natural resources of the DRC and try to lay hold of frontier Congolese territories.
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