Imposing Peace Through Power in the International Arena: A Critical Insight into the Peace Agreement Between the DRC and Rwanda Under U.S. Mediation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article offers a critical investigation of the peace agreement signed on June 27, 2025, between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda under United States mediation, analyzing it not as a breakthrough in reconciliation but as a case of strategically engineered peace. Despite being hailed as a diplomatic success, developments between June and September 2025—during which the UN reported 1,087 deaths in the conflict zone—reveal the persistence of violence and cast doubt on the durability of this externally imposed settlement. Drawing on structural realism, smart power theory, coercive diplomacy, and postcolonial political economy, the study argues that the United States did not act as a neutral mediator but as a geopolitical entrepreneur seeking to secure mineral supply chains and counter Chinese influence. The mediation succeeded not through mutual confidence-building but through a calibrated combination of diplomatic pressure, economic inducements, and implicit security guarantees. Its effectiveness relied on a moment of strategic convergence: Rwanda’s growing international isolation and the Congolese government’s domestic vulnerability. The article demonstrates that the agreement’s apparent success is rooted in power asymmetry, strategic dependency, and conditional compliance rather than genuine reconciliation. It highlights the tension between imposed peace—designed to stabilize extractive corridors—and sustainable peace, which requires local legitimacy and structural transformation. By exposing the agreement as a case of humanitarian imperialism disguised as conflict resolution, the article questions the legitimacy of Western-led peacebuilding models in postcolonial contexts. Finally, it proposes policy recommendations urging international mediators to move beyond coercive stabilization toward equitable partnership frameworks, while calling on African states to develop autonomous mediation architectures capable of resisting neocolonial forms of diplomatic tutelage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".