Abstract In January 2025, the March 23 movement (M23) captured the city of Goma for a second time, marking a deeply symbolic moment in the decades-long conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). North Kivu’s capital, home to 1.5 million people and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons who have fled surrounding areas amidst fighting since late 2021, had previously fallen to rebels on four occasions since 1996. In this latest iteration, neither the subcontracting of armed groups under the Wazalendo (‘patriots’) moniker, nor the intervention of African peacekeepers and private contractors, prevented the demise of the Armed Forces of the DRC (FARDC) at the hands of the M23 and its allies of the Rwanda Defence Force (RDF). The M23 kept progressing, also taking South Kivu’s capital Bukavu in February 2025. Subsequently, it has deployed its own brand of government, nominating new political authorities and reorganizing local governance—much like the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) rebellion in the late 1990s. In 2025, the DRC counts over six million internally displaced persons amidst a concoction of conflicts featuring a hundred armed groups and a steep increase in foreign involvement compared to the previous decade.
Christoph Vogel (2025) studied this question.