Pandemic–Conflict–Climate Nexus in Sub-Saharan Africa and the DRC

Abstract

The contemporary security environment of the Sub-Saharan Africa challenges the analytical boundaries of the traditional International Relations by demonstrating the growing interconnectedness of military conflicts with pandemics, ecological disruptions, displacement, resource competition, and institutional vulnerability. This article conceptualises this overlapping pressure through a Pandemic-Conflict-Climate Nexus, arguing how these ostensibly distinct threats cannot be adequately captured by state-centric and militarised approaches for explaining region’s contemporary security dynamics. Drawing on regional and country level analysis of Sub-Saharan Africa and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and integrating insights from recent scholarly works and empirical development, this article develops a multidimensional framework that brings together human security, environmental security, regional security complex theory and post-colonial approaches. The DRC represents a particularly revealing case because its protracted eastern conflicts intersect with transboundary insecurity, forced displacement, public health emergencies, climate vulnerabilities, and competition over globally strategic mineral resources. Recent developments, including the 2025 United States-facilitated peace agreement between DRC and Rwanda alongside the Doha Declaration of Principles involving the DRC government and the Alliance Fleuve Congo (AFC)/ March 23 Movement (M23) demonstrate the increasingly multilayered nature of international involvement in the conflict. Concurrently, the DRC’s centrality to global cobalt production and copper supply chains has leveraged its strategic importance amid competition over critical minerals and energy-transition supply chain. The article argues that these intersecting vulnerabilities are neither domestic nor reducible to conventional conflict dynamics; rather, it generates from historical legacies, regional security processes, transnational vulnerabilities and global political-economic structure. The article consequently calls for a reconceptualization of African security beyond crisis management towards preventive diplomacy, cooperative sovereignty, climate-resilient development, health-security governance, responsible resource stewardship, and locally embedded peace building. The DRC from this perspective is not just a case of fragility, rather it is a critical geopolitical arena in which the boundaries between human security, resource sovereignty, regional order and global governance are being renegotiated.