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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