The Central African region, encompassing Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, has endured some of the most devastating conflicts anywhere in the world over the past three decades. The 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which roughly 800,000 people were killed in the span of a hundred days, sent shockwaves across the region and helped ignite two successive wars in neighboring Congo that drew in the armies of half a dozen other African states.
Burundi, meanwhile, endured its own brutal ethnic civil war through much of the 1990s and 2000s before a fragile peace process gradually took hold, only for renewed political crises around disputed elections and constitutional changes to periodically threaten that stability in the years since.
Eastern Congo in particular has never fully escaped the shadow of these regional wars, remaining home to dozens of armed groups competing over territory, mineral resources, and ethnic grievances. Despite one of the largest and longest-running United Nations peacekeeping deployments in the world, cycles of displacement and violence continue to recur, most recently through the resurgence of armed rebellion in the region’s mineral-rich borderlands.