Democratic Republic of Congo Archives

Thursday

December 4, 2025

Trump’s peace process pageantry

The US Institute of Peace was taken over by DoGE in January and now appears to have undergone a makeover both inside and out. Its new name is emblazoned on the front: “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.” The President loves deals and good branding, perhaps as much as he professes to love peace. On Thursday, in the high-ceilinged atrium of the building, he hosted a celebration of a peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. The actual peace agreement in question was signed over the summer with shaky results. Nevertheless, leaders from several East African nations, as well as the UAE and Qatar turned up to bear witness to the ceremonial acknowledgement of the agreement.

Friday

October 20, 2023

Christopher Sandford

How the CIA interfered in the Congo

As everybody knows, as soon as you start to talk to any historian of postwar life in any Latin American or African or Southeast Asian country, the discussion quickly turns to the role of the CIA in subverting democracy. From the Truman-era coups in Syria and Egypt, through regime change in Guatemala, assassination in the Dominican Republic, the fomenting of industrial unrest in Guyana, and both the military and covert US involvement in Vietnam, it seems overseas intrigue was the rule and long periods of benign neglect the exception.

Tuesday

May 23, 2023

Peter A. Coclanis

The African exception to the population bust

Earlier this year, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote a provocative piece making the case that there are two kinds of people in the world: “Those who believe the defining challenge of the twenty-first century will be climate change, and those who know it will be the birth dearth, the population bust, the old age of the world.” Douthat made this bold claim not just because he believes the population bust is the more important of the two challenges, but because, in his view, it is being comparatively neglected due to all the attention paid to irrepressible climate doomsayers.