Cobalt Colonialism: How the DRC Powers the Global North’s Green Transition

The Democratic Republic of Congo is presented to the world as a resource — a seam of minerals waiting for extraction, refinement and shipment. In radio spots, corporate reports and policy papers this is framed as progress: cobalt for batteries, coltan for phones, lithium for storage. But when you look closer, the “green transition” championed by the Global North is simply a new vocabulary for an old practice: extracting wealth from the Global South while leaving devastation in its wake.

This is not a story about scarcity of resources. It is a story about who controls those resources, who benefits from them, and who pays the social and ecological cost. It is, in short, a story about power.

From Leopold to Multinational Supply Chains: Historical Continuities

The violent patterns seen in the DRC today are not anomalies that emerged after independence; they are continuities of a long history. The Congo was central to European imperial plunder — a landscape commodified under Leopold II’s rule, where extraction and brutality were the political economy. That logic did not die with formal empire; it mutated.

As Adam Hochschild writes in King Leopold’s Ghost, the Congo Free State was “not a colony but the world’s only private colony — the personal possession of a single individual.”

Contemporary extraction follows the same blueprint: external demand sets the terms, local governance is weakened or co-opted, and violence — economic, political and physical — enforces supply. Minerals are turned into global commodities; communities are reduced to labour pools or obstacles to be removed. Language changes, but the operation remains recognisably colonial.

The Mechanism: How the Green Transition Reproduces Extraction

The Global North’s shift to “green” technologies requires vast quantities of specific minerals. This demand is framed as urgent and moral: save the planet by switching to electric vehicles and renewable systems. But moralising the commodity does not alter the politics of its production. A few structural points to note:

Supply chains concentrate value outside the DRC. The country supplies around 70–75% of global cobalt production, yet almost none is refined locally.¹ Raw extraction is low-paid and environmentally destructive, while most value is captured further along the chain — in refining, tech assembly and corporate branding — largely outside African borders.
Actors of accumulation are multinational. Mining firms, traders, smelters and financiers — many headquartered in the Global North or transnational corporate hubs — structure the market and determine prices, labour standards and practices. Chinese state-owned and private companies now control roughly 80% of DRC cobalt output, illustrating how transnational capital continues colonial extraction under new management.²
Instability is profitable. Weak governance, contested territories and conflict can be exploited to secure concessions, favourable contracts or control over informal economies. Instability becomes an economic condition, not merely a humanitarian crisis.
Green rhetoric masks continuity. Calling a mine “critical for the energy transition” sanitises the social and ecological violence it produces and absolves consumers and states in the Global North from responsibility.

The result is a peculiar inversion: the rhetoric of environmental stewardship facilitates extraction regimes that threaten the very ecosystems and communities supposedly being protected.

Human and Ecological Costs

Extraction in the DRC is not an abstract policy problem — it is embodied in human lives and in the region’s ecology. Communities living near mines report destroyed farmland, polluted waterways and shattered livelihoods. Informal and artisanal miners operate under precarious and hazardous conditions; women and children are disproportionately exposed to risk.³ These social harms are compounded by militarisation: armed groups, private militias and state security forces often contest control over mines and transport routes.

At the same time, the Congo Basin rainforest — a vital carbon sink and one of the world’s last great biodiversity reserves — faces mounting pressure from industrial encroachment. Forest degradation, soil erosion and contamination from mining chemicals are ecological damage that spreads far beyond local communities. Ecocide here is not collateral damage; it is a by-product of a model that translates natural commons into private profit.

Resistance, Sovereignty and Alternatives

Despite the bleak picture, the story is not only one of victimhood. Congolese workers, community organisers, environmental defenders and local movements are resisting in diverse ways: organising for safer conditions and fair pay, pushing for community control over resources, documenting abuses and contesting illegitimate concessions.

Solidarity must centre these struggles rather than speak for them. Our role — as readers, as activists, as consumers in the Global North — is to shift attention and power toward those who live the consequences and demand alternatives.

What would a different approach look like?

Local sovereignty over resources: Communities and nations must have genuine control over how resources are used and who benefits — not token consultation or cut-price concessions.
Value added locally: Building refining, processing and manufacturing capacity in the Global South breaks the pattern of raw extraction for foreign profit, creates decent jobs and retains more value locally.
Supply chain accountability: Buyers and states must be held responsible for the human and ecological conditions of production, not merely for sourcing “conflict-free” minerals in name.
A just transition that is not colonial: If the energy transition is to be ethical, it cannot rely on new waves of extraction that reproduce colonial patterns. Justice must be non-negotiable — for workers, communities and ecosystems.

What Readers in the Global North Must Understand

It is tempting to see the DRC as a tragic exception or a governance failure to be fixed by technical solutions. That view is convenient because it lets consumers and policymakers imagine that swapping suppliers, auditing mines or buying “ethical” labels is sufficient. It is not.

If we are serious about planetary survival and social justice, the green transition must include structural shifts in political economy: redistribution of power, democratic control of resources and reparative responsibilities from those who have historically profited from extraction.

We must also confront our own demand. Technologies do not appear out of thin air; they are the product of choices. Those choices have consequences we are obliged to reckon with.

Solidarity and Steps Forward

If you want to act in meaningful solidarity, here are immediate, politically coherent steps:

Centre Congolese voices. Read and share analysis written by Congolese activists, scholars and community groups. Amplify their demands rather than narrating their suffering.
Support community-led organisations. Prioritise funds and attention to grassroots groups that work for labour rights, environmental defence and local governance.
Hold corporations and states accountable. Pressure manufacturers and governments to publish transparent supply chains, support local value addition and accept binding accountability for harms.
Demand policy change. Campaign for trade, aid and investment policies that do not privilege extractive profit over human rights and ecology.

Closing: Power, Not Pity

The Congo does not need our pity. It needs the end of a system that makes its land and labour profitable for others. It needs international responsibility that recognises historical injustice and refuses to replace old forms of extraction with new ones under green branding.

If the green transition is to mean anything, it must begin by dismantling the extractive relations that have long defined the Congo’s place in the world economy. Anything less is merely continuity in new clothes.

“He who feeds you, controls you.” — Thomas Sankara

In solidarity with Congolese struggles for sovereignty, dignity and ecological survival.

Sources

UNCTAD (2023). Commodities and Development Report 2023: Critical Minerals and the Energy Transition. ↩
Reuters (2024). “Chinese Firms Dominate Congo’s Cobalt Sector Amid Global Supply Chain Tensions.” ↩
Human Rights Watch (2023). “What Do We Get Out of It?” Human Rights Abuses in the Cobalt Mines of the DRC. ↩