ABSTRACT
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been endowed with a wealth of biodiversity and natural resources, including the world’s second largest tropical rainforest, making it one of the two great ‘lungs of the earth’ along with the Amazon (Seyler et al. 2010). The country has also been blighted by almost two decades of armed conflict since the spill over from the Rwandan Genocide in 1994 led to an invasion of the DRC in 1996 (see Brisman and South 2013; South and Brisman 2013). Intra- and inter-state conflict has continued since then, including what has been termed ‘Africa’s World War’ (Prunier 2009; Stearns 2011), as well as the recent M23 rebellion in North Kivu.
