Lithium and the Reconstitution of US Power in Africa

In brief

• Chinese firms owned an estimated 79 percent of African lithium production in 2025 and control roughly two-thirds of global lithium refining capacity. The United States has sought to curb this reach. Within the first eighteen months of the Trump administration, it brokered a peace and minerals framework between the DRC and Rwanda (December 2025), closed a US$553 million government loan for the Lobito Corridor railway (June 2026), and backed KoBold Metals' bid to acquire the Roche Dure deposit at the Manono complex — one of the largest undeveloped hard-rock lithium resources in the world (lithium mined from solid rock, rather than extracted from brine).

• Washington's belated entry into the current lithium and critical-minerals race runs through framework agreements, arbitration leverage, security guarantees, sanctions enforcement, and project finance. The State Department's Commercial Diplomacy Strategy for Africa, launched in May 2025, built these into formal policy: it retooled embassies into deal teams and replaced aid-delivery metrics with deal-closure metrics.

• The lithium supply chain functions as a diagnostic instrument for a broader question: is American power in Africa growing? Is the United States successfully making a bid for power through new geoeconomic channels of law, finance, logistics, and security, even while remaining largely absent from the channel that currently determines value capture — chemical conversion, the processing step that turns raw ore into usable battery material? Are we witnessing the emergence of a form of "framework power" that will convert into a material supply-chain position for the US, and will African governments continue to find these American-born frameworks worth operating inside?

The measurement problem

Any assessment of American power in Africa depends on what one chooses to measure. Measured by ownership of productive assets in the lithium sector, the United States barely registers. Benchmark and Fastmarkets analysts estimated in 2025 that 79 percent of African lithium output was Chinese-owned, a share projected to decline only to 65 percent by 2035 even as total volumes nearly double.

In Zimbabwe — Africa's largest producer — Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, Sinomine, Chengxin, Yahua, and Tsingshan dominate mining and the trade in concentrate: ore that has been crushed and partly processed on-site, but not yet chemically refined. Huayou's own operations at the Arcadia mine exported roughly 400,000 tonnes of concentrate in 2024, according to Zimbabwe's state minerals marketer, the MMCZ — about half of the country's total lithium exports that year — and the company brought a US$400 million, 50,000-tonne lithium sulphate plant into production in early 2026.

In Mali, Ganfeng Lithium has consolidated full ownership of the Goulamina project by buying out its remaining Western partners.

In the DRC, the Chinese-controlled Manono joint venture certified the country's first lithium exports in July 2026, trucking concentrate overland to Kalemie for shipment via Tanzania to Chinese refineries, under a bilateral DRC–China agreement that granted duty-free access to Chinese buyers of Congolese minerals from 1 May 2026.

Measured by the midstream — the refining stage that sits between mining and battery manufacturing — the asymmetry is starker: China holds an estimated 65–75 percent of global lithium chemical refining capacity, against a global installed base of roughly 465,000 tonnes LCE (lithium carbonate equivalent, the standard unit for comparing different lithium chemicals) in 2025. [That 465,000-tonne LCE figure is not directly comparable to Zimbabwe's 400,000 tonnes of concentrate cited above: concentrate tonnage measures raw, partly processed ore shipped out for refining elsewhere, while LCE tonnage measures the weight of finished, battery-grade lithium chemical the refining industry can produce. The two numbers happen to sit close together, but they describe different stages of the same supply chain and should not be read as comparable quantities].

IEA figures place Chinese processing capacity at around 62 percent of the global total as of 2024, with China's dominance extending downstream too: roughly 85 percent of anode production and close to three-quarters of battery cell manufacturing capacity by value.

By these metrics alone, one could conclude that the United States has lost Africa's lithium, and with it a meaningful share of the twenty-first century's most consequential industrial input. That conclusion holds only if ownership and refining share are the right things to measure.

Eighteen months of American activity following the election of Donald Trump in the same sector argue for measuring differently: going beyond who owns the mine to who resolves the dispute over the mine; who refines the ore, who finances the railway that moves it, and who guarantees the peace that makes moving it possible. This article works through each of these channels in turn — instances, collectively, of what this article later terms geoeconomic power — then asks what the balance between them means for where power in the twenty-first century may be heading.

Four channels of a reconstituted power

Arbitration and legal venue. The clearest case sits at the Manono deposit, in the DRC's Tanganyika province, home to one of the world's largest known reserves of hard-rock lithium. Its Roche Dure block alone is large enough that, once developed, it could supply a meaningful share of global lithium demand.

AVZ Minerals, an Australian company, held the original rights to Roche Dure until the DRC stripped them in 2023. AVZ took the dispute to the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), the World Bank-affiliated tribunal that adjudicates state–investor disputes, and has not withdrawn the claim. In July 2025, KoBold Metals — a California-based exploration company that uses artificial intelligence and geological modelling to locate ore deposits, backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos rather than by the US government — signed a framework agreement with Kinshasa committing roughly US$1 billion to acquire AVZ's claim and develop Roche Dure. Kinshasa granted KoBold seven exploration permits the following month, alongside a commitment from KoBold to digitise colonial-era geological archives held at Belgium's Royal Museum for Central Africa.

Through this sequence, the United States positioned itself — via a privately capitalised American firm — as the resolution mechanism for a dispute it did not originate: an Australian claimant and a Congolese state enterprise now route their disagreement through an American-brokered settlement. That settlement has yet to produce a resolved title or a tonne of exported ore: KoBold has paused construction pending the outcome of the ownership dispute, which remains open as of August 2026. Figure 1 explains what the Manono deposit is, who KoBold is, and what the deal has and has not yet achieved

The mechanism now attached to Manono is not new to American statecraft, and it did not originate in Africa. Washington has traded security and market access for resource guarantees at least since the 1945 Quincy Pact with Saudi Arabia, and it wrote preferential hydrocarbon terms into Iraq's post-2003 reconstruction under conditions closer to compulsion than negotiation. The most direct precedent, however, sits eight months before the DRC–Rwanda framework described below: in April 2025 the United States and Ukraine signed an agreement establishing the US–Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund, giving Washington a claim on future revenue from Ukrainian mineral, oil, and gas licensing in exchange for continued military support.

Congolese officials cited the Ukraine deal explicitly during the 2025 negotiations that followed, with one key difference: Ukraine received investment and implicit backing without a formal security guarantee, while the DRC received a peace framework with a named adversary — a framework examined below, and one whose implementation has proven far harder than envisaged. What is new is the density and speed of replication — Ukraine, then the DRC, then preliminary conversations with several other African governments, inside eighteen months — which points to a template rather than an improvisation.

The template does not travel automatically, and its stalled cases are as revealing as its successes. In May 2026 Zambia suspended talks on a US$2 billion health package after Washington linked its conclusion to a separate minerals agreement demanding preferential access for US companies and a ten-year data-sharing arrangement; Zimbabwe withdrew from a parallel US$367 million health negotiation the same year on similar grounds. Neither refusal ended the relationship: both governments can continue to negotiate on narrower terms, and neither the minerals nor the health components have been declared closed on either side. The DRC and Uganda, by contrast, accepted comparable linkage without the same public rupture — the DRC's US$1.2 billion, five-year health partnership closed in February 2026 alongside its minerals commitments.

Read in isolation, Zambia and Zimbabwe look like failures of the transactional model. However, assessed alongside Ukraine, the DRC, and the preliminary conversations reportedly under way with several other governments, they signal calibration: Washington is assumedly testing how much linkage a given counterpart will accept and potentially adjusting the terms it offers next. That posture marks a genuine shift in how Washington calculates its interest in Africa: relationships once weighed by strategic or ideological alignment are now ostensibly priced deal by deal. This suggests a certain coherence and deliberateness in Washington's approach that many may debate.

That shift carries its own risk: durability. If a government spends two years negotiating security guarantees, financing terms, and mineral-access provisions with one American administration it is doing so at great risk. US foreign policy runs on electoral cycles; its current Commercial Diplomacy Strategy itself replaces a different doctrine and could be reversed, defunded, or reordered after the next change of administration, in much the way USAID's programming was in 2025.

Beijing's state-owned enterprises and development banks do not carry a comparable turnover risk from one election to the next — whatever their other liabilities. A setback for Washington in Lusaka or Harare in 2026 need not foreclose a better offer in 2027, as argued above — but a signed framework in 2026 carries no guarantee of surviving to 2029, and African counterparts absorb that uncertainty when they commit years of negotiating capital to an American deal.

KoBold's own structure illustrates the point at a smaller scale, and points to something deeper than election timing. The American channel into Manono runs through the personal capital and risk appetite of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, not through a government agency — two individuals whose fortunes, priorities, and commercial or philanthropic interests could shift for reasons that have nothing to do with African lithium. It offers a window into where American geoeconomic power currently sits. A great deal of it runs through private companies, individual investors, and four-year political mandates — young, contingent institutions. 

China's state-owned mining and refining companies answer to a party-state that plans in decades, not electoral terms, and that does not depend on any single founder's continued interest.

Chinese advantages in lithium-processing technology will not last forever; technical leads narrow over time. The institutional continuity behind them, however, is a different kind of asset altogether — one the current American approach has no real equivalent for. Figure 2 sets out this comparison between the US and China's approaches..

Security. In December 2025, Presidents Tshisekedi and Kagame signed a five-part framework in Washington covering a peace agreement, a regional economic integration plan, a declaration of principles, a US–DRC strategic minerals partnership, and a US–Rwanda economic framework. The strategic partnership grants the United States preferential access to Congolese mineral reserves and a joint governance role in the DRC's mining sector, provisions now facing a constitutional challenge in Congolese courts.

The peace side of that package has not held. Within days of the December signing, M23 forces advanced on Uvira, South Kivu's second-largest city, killing dozens of civilians and displacing roughly 200,000 people despite the ceasefire. Independent monitoring in early 2026 put implementation of the framework's core security provisions at under a quarter complete, with the joint oversight mechanisms meant to track compliance failing to convene for months at a time. The US Treasury sanctioned Rwandan military commanders in March 2026 and a Rwandan gold-refining network in June for continued violations, and fighting between Congolese forces and M23 persisted across North and South Kivu through the first half of 2026. None of this is a minor implementation lag. The underlying conflict runs through two prior Congo wars and three decades of contested claims over the eastern borderlands, and a single signing ceremony in Washington was never going to resolve it.

What the framework reveals, on this evidence, is how far Washington is willing to commit — diplomatically, financially, and through sanctions — to secure a minerals relationship it judges strategically necessary, even against a conflict this intractable and a peace process this fragile. That Washington negotiated the package at all, and has kept working it through months of stalled implementation, says more about the priority US foreign policy now assigns to securing lithium- and cobalt-adjacent supply chains than it does about America's capacity to deliver peace in the Great Lakes region. The Ukraine arrangement discussed above follows a similar logic: both agreements pair a contested, unresolved security situation with mineral-access provisions, which suggests a pattern in what Washington now considers worth the diplomatic risk, though one data point plus one fragile case is a thin basis for calling it a doctrine.

China's comparative disadvantage in this specific channel is structural, whatever one makes of the DRC case's fragility. Beijing's foreign policy doctrine of non-interference precludes the kind of mediated peace process, troop-withdrawal timeline, and sanctions enforcement that Washington has attempted, however imperfectly, in eastern DRC: China supplies capital, infrastructure, and offtake, but does not attempt to resolve the conflicts that put its own concessions at risk, because doing so would require exactly the diplomatic and military engagement its doctrine renounces.

Whether Washington's willingness to try constitutes a durable structural advantage, or a costly commitment to a conflict that may not resolve on any timeline, is not yet answerable. It depends on whether the effort in eastern DRC eventually produces a stable minerals corridor, or whether it becomes a template Washington hesitates to repeat the next time a mineral-producing region destabilises. Sahel instability already threatens Nigerien uranium and, prospectively, Malian lithium, and no comparable American framework has emerged there, yet.

Finance and logistics. The Lobito Corridor reached financial close — the point at which the financing agreements are signed and funds can begin to flow — in June 2026: US$753 million for the Lobito Atlantic Railway, of which US$553 million is a fifteen-year loan from the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). The DFC is the US government's development-finance agency: it lends US taxpayer-backed capital to private-sector infrastructure and energy projects in developing countries, and functions as Washington's closest counterpart to China's state development banks, which have financed the bulk of Belt and Road infrastructure across Africa.

The Lobito loan is senior secured, meaning the DFC is repaid before other lenders and holds collateral rights over the project if it fails. The remaining US$200 million came from the Development Bank of Southern Africa. The DFC's Africa portfolio now exceeds US$11 billion, its largest regional book. The corridor's stated targets — a tenfold capacity increase to 4.6 million tonnes per year, transit times cut from roughly forty-five days by road to about two days by rail — would materially alter the export geography of the Copperbelt, the copper- and cobalt-mining region spanning southern DRC and Zambia, and prospectively of any future lithium production from the DRC's western reaches. Figure 3 sets out the financing structure and its targets.

The Trump administration executed a financing pledge originated under the Biden administration. Indeed, the commercial turn in US–Africa policy technically predates both administrations: the Obama administration's Power Africa initiative (2013) and the first Trump administration's Prosper Africa programme (2018) had already begun reorienting US engagement toward investment facilitation over aid delivery. What changed after 2025 is the velocity and the explicitness of the shift — commercial diplomacy became the stated organising doctrine of the Africa relationship rather than a strand running alongside others.

Diplomacy as dealmaking. In May 2025 the State Department's Bureau of African Affairs launched its Commercial Diplomacy Strategy, the formal doctrine of "trade, not aid." Ambassador Troy Fitrell's launch remarks asserted that "assistance involves a donor and a recipient, but commerce is an exchange between equals." Accordingly, embassies are being retooled into deal teams; ambassadorial performance is assessed on transactions facilitated; commercial diplomacy trips now include private-sector participants in government meetings. By April 2026 the Bureau described its organising question as no longer "how much aid did we deliver?" but "how many deals did we help close?"

Trade over aid: the quality-of-engagement argument

The story from both the administration's advocates and its critics is complicated. Semafor's early-2026 coverage found that while the backlash over abrupt cuts to health programmes was real, African officials and business leaders often responded more favourably in private, arguing that a transactional framework hands them leverage a donor-recipient relationship never offered. The United States enters this transactional field carrying no direct colonial history on the continent — a distinction African sovereigntist discourse increasingly draws — and without the accumulating record of infrastructure-quality disputes and opaque contract terms that has complicated the reputation of Chinese engagement in several jurisdictions.

The counter-case carries equal weight. The former USAID mission director in Uganda argues that the Commercial Diplomacy Strategy assumes African markets are already able to absorb large-scale private capital — an assumption that overlooks how much of that capacity was itself built and maintained by the aid programmes now being cut. A functioning capital markets authority, for instance, is what lets a foreign investor trust that a securities transaction will be properly regulated and a contract dispute fairly adjudicated. Agricultural research stations are what let a lender price the risk on a farming loan. Disease surveillance systems help stop outbreaks from shutting down mines or  shipping routes before an investment pays out. Six decades of American aid quietly helped build and fund institutions of exactly this kind across the continent. Her phrase, "trade through development, not trade instead of development," captures a sequencing problem. Withholding the aid that maintains these institutions at the same moment trade is meant to replace aid means trade has a thinner institutional foundation to build upon.

The end of conditionality — and a missed opening?

In March 2026 the State Department vaunted that American diplomacy in Africa would "respect sovereignty, use quiet leverage on values-based issues, avoid public moralizing and virtue signaling." As such, democracy promotion and human-rights conditionality — the connective tissue of US–Africa relations since the post-Cold War period — have been withdrawn as public instruments.

The clearest cost of that withdrawal sits inside the extractive sector itself. For nearly two decades, US-funded programmes underwrote the machinery that lets communities and watchdogs hold mining and oil operations accountable: USAID has backed the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) since 2006, funding the audits and civil-society participation that let citizens in producer countries see what mining companies actually pay their governments. Dodd-Frank's Section 1502, however imperfectly enforced, required US-listed companies to trace whether their minerals financed armed groups in the DRC, and gave conflict-minerals monitors and community advocates a legal hook that did not depend on Congolese enforcement capacity. In February 2024, USAID and EITI signed a five-year memorandum of understanding meant to deepen that engagement — a long-term commitment made barely a year before USAID itself was dismantled in 2025.

The critical-minerals boom is precisely the moment when decades of investment in transparency, community consent processes, and rights monitoring around extraction would have paid off, both for African communities and for Washington's own claim to differentiate itself from Chinese extractive practice. Instead, the infrastructure that gave that claim substance is being withdrawn just as the stakes rise. Whatever the intentions behind the pull-back, the effect is a missed opportunity to convert decades of accumulated trust and credibility with civil society and mining-affected communities into leverage at the one moment that credibility might have mattered most competitively.

Lithium supplies a second illustration of the same shift, from the opposite direction. Zimbabwe's 2027 concentrate-export ban — a domestic industrial-policy choice that donor-era conditionality would likely have discouraged as market-distorting — has already pulled more than a billion dollars of Chinese refining investment onshore. It is exactly the kind of unilateral policy choice that would once have faced external pushback, and it is succeeding, on its own narrow terms, at the same moment external conditionality is being withdrawn more broadly. Whether Zimbabwe's result generalises is yet to be seen.

What the lithium supply chain reveals

African lithium production is projected to grow by roughly 127 percent between 2025 and 2035, driven by Zimbabwe, Mali, Ethiopia, and Namibia — making the continent one of the principal sources of incremental global supply this decade.

Ore, in other words, is not scarce. What is, however,  is chemical conversion: the transformation of spodumene and petalite — the raw lithium-bearing rock — into lithium sulphate, carbonate, and hydroxide, the refined chemical forms battery manufacturers actually use. That capacity sits overwhelmingly in China, and where it is being built in Africa, Chinese firms are building it: Huayou's and Sinomine's sulphate plants in Zimbabwe are the direct, compliant response to Harare's 2027 concentrate-export ban. African beneficiation mandates — rules requiring ore to be processed domestically before export — are sound in intent, but are being satisfied fastest by the firms whose dominance they were meant to dilute. These firms alone currently possess the metallurgical know-how and the integrated offtake — pre-arranged contracts guaranteeing a buyer for the refined product — needed to comply profitably.

Set against this, the American channels into African lithium remain concentrated in the four areas just described: arbitration, security guarantees, development finance, and commercial diplomacy. Chinese firms shipped the DRC's first lithium exports in July 2026 through their own industrial channels while KoBold's adjacent claim remained in arbitration.

What the United States has tried to build across these four channels is a form of geoeconomic power: the use of economic instruments — trade, investment, development finance, and sanctions — to pursue strategic objectives that great powers have historically pursued primarily through military or diplomatic means. Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris, who popularised the term, draw a distinction worth keeping in view: geoeconomic instruments are not the same as material control. A framework agreement, a financing package, or a sanctions regime only functions for as long as the counterpart continues to find it worth honouring; unlike a mine a country physically holds, a geoeconomic instrument can be renegotiated, ignored, or reversed by the other side, in a way China's direct ownership positions cannot. Susan Strange's account of structural power in international political economy, which located leverage in control over the finance, security, knowledge, and production structures surrounding a transaction rather than in the transaction's content, is also an elucidating term to frame the US's power plays in Africa.

Whether American geoeconomic or structural power is growing, in the sense of compounding into a durable and self-sustaining advantage, is not yet established. What the evidence supports is a narrower claim: American geoeconomic engagement in African lithium is evolving rapidly, along channels distinct from the ones China has built, and Washington is investing in those channels at a pace not seen in at least two decades. Whether that evolution compounds into growth depends on continuity — in the DFC's mandate, in the DRC framework's enforcement, in the political appetite for a deal-team model of diplomacy — that a change of administration is not obliged to preserve. It depends, more fundamentally, on the countries the frameworks govern continuing to find them worth honouring: a framework is only as strong as the willingness of its counterparts to operate inside it, and that willingness belongs to Kinshasa, Lusaka, and Harare to give or withhold.

Where this may be heading

The propositions worth testing over the next five years are narrower than a claim about American power rising or falling. Positional leverage of the kind described above — controlling a venue, a route, a financing structure — only holds for as long as the parties governed by it continue to find it worth respecting, and that is true whether the position belongs to Washington or, in the material channels, to Beijing.

Conversion capacity in the fullest sense is an instructive metric to monitor — the industrial conversion of ore into battery-grade chemicals, and institutional conversion of signed agreements into operating plants, functioning rail lines, and a peace that actually holds. On the current record, all three remain the weakest parts of the American position, and there is no strong basis yet for assuming that changes soon.

The more interesting variable may not be Washington's or Beijing's at all. Zimbabwe's export ban, whatever its execution risks, forced roughly US$1.4 billion of Chinese conversion investment onshore within three years — a reminder that African governments retain real leverage over both suitors when they choose to use it.

The DRC extracted security guarantees, a special envoy, and the digitisation of colonial-era geological archives as part of the price of American entry, even though the security guarantees themselves remain unfulfilled on the ground. Zambia and Zimbabwe are testing what Washington will demand in exchange for health data. None of this proves that African statecraft will consistently outmanoeuvre either great power; it simply shows that the space for doing so has widened, and that how it is used over the coming years is at least as open a question as anything Washington or Beijing does next.

The United States has shown clear interest in entering this contest — through frameworks, financing, and security guarantees rather than through the direct material control China has built — but Washington may also be discovering that displacing China's position in African lithium is not achievable on any near-term timeline. At the moment, Washington is attempting to draft the rules while China is already shipping the cargo, and the rules hold only for as long as African governments find it worth their while. Whether rule-setting of this kind can function as a durable form of power in twenty-first-century geoeconomic competition — against a rival with direct material control, and against African governments increasingly able to set their own terms — is a genuinely open question.

Notes and Sources

Lithium, China and African mineral supply chains

Cook, Claudia (Fastmarkets). Remarks at the Lithium Supply & Battery Raw Materials Conference, June 2025, reported in Giann Liguid, “Expert: African Lithium Key to China’s Battery Supply Chain Dominance,” Investing News Network, 1 July 2025

Reuters. “Huayou to Start Zimbabwe Lithium Sulphate Production Early 2026,” 17 October 2025. Reports Huayou’s US$422 million acquisition of Arcadia in 2022, the US$300 million concentrator commissioned in 2023, and the US$400 million lithium-sulphate plant with capacity exceeding 50,000 tonnes annually.

Ecofin Agency. “China Tightens Its Hold on Africa’s Lithium Industry,” 8 June 2026.

Caixin Global. Lu Yutong, “Zijin-Controlled Manono Project Launches Congo’s First Lithium Exports,” 29 July 2026. The Manono Lithium JV is 54.9% owned by Zijin’s Jinxiang Lithium, 35.1% by Cominière and 10% by the DRC state; the resource is approximately 6.47 Mt LCE.

U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). “China Dominates Global Trade of Battery Minerals,” 21 May 2025.

Semafor. “KoBold Metals Inks Minerals Exploration Deal with DR Congo,” 21 July 2025.

Liguid, Giann. “Billionaire-backed KoBold Metals Secures DRC Licenses in Push for Manono Lithium,” Investing News Network, 28 August 2025.

Caixin Global. “Zijin-Controlled Manono Project Launches Congo’s First Lithium Exports,” 29 July 2026.

U.S. minerals diplomacy and geoeconomics

Baskaran, Gracelin, and Meredith Schwartz. “Breaking Down the U.S.-Ukraine Minerals Deal,” Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), 27 February 2025.

Al Jazeera. “What Is in the US-Ukraine Minerals Deal?” 1 May 2025.

Mayer Brown. “US-Ukraine Minerals Deal: Unlocking Ukraine’s Mineral Potential,” 6 May 2025.

Semafor. “Africa Weighs Trump’s Commercial Diplomacy Versus Sovereignty,” 18 March 2026.

Semafor. “The Flaws of ‘Trade Not Aid,’” 19 January 2026.

Fitrell, Troy. “Remarks for Launch of Bureau of African Affairs Commercial Diplomacy Strategy,” U.S. Department of State, 14 May 2025.

U.S. Department of State. “A New Model for Economic Prosperity in Africa,” April 2026.

U.S. Department of State / U.S. Mission to the African Union. “America First in Africa,” March 2026.

U.S.–Africa health, minerals and sovereignty agreements

Reuters / Al Jazeera. “Zambia Delaying US Deals over Minerals and Data Demands,” 4 May 2026.

Odongo, Jacobs Seaman. “DR Congo Signs $1.2bn US Health Deal As Zambia and Zimbabwe Walk Away,” Nile Post, reproduced by allAfrica, 26 February 2026.

Neef, Julian. “Minerals at the Negotiating Table: Resource Politics and Peace in Eastern DRC,” PRIF Blog, 15 July 2026.

Oakland Institute. “US-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement Faces Constitutional Challenge in Court,” 4 February 2026.

U.S. Department of State. “Strategic Partnership Agreement Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” 4 December 2025.

DRC–Rwanda peace process

Washington Informer. “Congo Continues to Suffer Despite Signing of Peace Agreement: The Offensive in DRC Continues to Target Civilians,” 23 December 2025.

HumAngle. “Rwanda, DR Congo Fail to Fulfil Commitment 7 Months After Washington Accord,” 3 February 2026.

Human Rights Watch. “End to Abuses Still Distant in DR Congo,” 3 February 2026.

U.S. Department of the Treasury. “Treasury Sanctions Rwandan Gold Refinery and Network Enabling Illicit Conflict Minerals Trade,” 25 June 2026.

U.S. Department of the Treasury. Sanctions against the Government of Rwanda and senior Rwandan military commanders, 2 March 2026.

The Presidency of the Republic of South Africa. “South Africa Withdraws Troop Contribution to MONUSCO,” 8 February 2026.

Lobito Corridor and U.S. commercial diplomacy

Africa Finance Corporation. “AFC Achieves Financial Close on Landmark US$753MM Lobito Corridor Railway Project,” 3 July 2026.

U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). “DFC Announces New U.S. Financing for Africa’s Lobito Corridor.” 8 February 2024

Transparency, regulation and institutional mechanisms

U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) / Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). “EITI and USAID Strengthen Collaboration,” 5 March 2024.

U.S. Congress. Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Pub. L. 111–203, §1502 (2010).

Theoretical framework

Blackwill, Robert D., and Jennifer M. Harris. War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

Strange, Susan. States and Markets. London: Pinter Publishers, 1988.

Zimbabwe’s Chinese investment

Discovery Alert. “Zimbabwe Lithium Export Ban & Processing Plants Guide,” 2026.