The political economy of the state of siege in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Civil conflict and institutional failure represent persistent barriers to economic development in resource-rich regions, yet the effectiveness of emergency governance interventions remains poorly understood. We examine the causal impact of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s 2021 State of Siege, which transferred administrative authority from civilian to military officials in North Kivu and Ituri provinces to address escalating violence and governance failures. Exploiting the quasi-experimental variation in treatment assignment across eastern provinces, we employ Matrix Completion methods to construct counterfactual outcomes using granular incident-level data from the Kufatilia Artisanal and Small-scale Mining Tracker spanning 2019-2023. We find that the State of Siege failed to achieve significant improvements in any measured outcome. Child labor, corruption, environmental degradation, mining disputes, roadblocks, and violence persisted at levels consistent with pre-intervention trajectories despite substantial expansion of military authority and resources. These results underscore the limitations of security-centric approaches in fragile states and highlight the need for comprehensive institutional reforms that simultaneously address coercive capacity, fiscal infrastructure, and legal frameworks to break cycles of violence and resource predation.