> When modernization occurs, economic activity eventually requires degrees of consistent identification of individual people, to enable accounting and distribution. Without identity and credentials, volume of trade can’t scale.

I see no reason why they can’t; trade can operate based on immediate transfer of goods, and thereafter the prospect of continued further trade is incentive enough to continue to behave honestly.

> So, how to integrate with a wilderness busily operating according to its own rules? Well, if you have to let the wilderness come to you, isn’t that inviting collisions?

I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “inviting collisions”. If you mean that more advanced civilisations have to integrate places like Congo otherwise some sort of invasion will occur, I would suggest that this is implausible for fairly obvious reasons.

Obviously environment has significant political and economic effects, but I would caution against excessive determinism. Many more stable polities have existed in similar physical environments—just look at the Republic of Congo next door, for example, or the relative stability of Switzerland, notwithstanding transport difficulties in the mountains. The Second Congo War was abnormal even in this state of underdevelopment.

> It seems like colonialism and race are big juicy targets of exploitative blame, but if you look around, there’s a certain reality that the gravitational forces of modernity would have caused these tribal groups to collide and descend into conflict with any amount of activity that didn’t ease the exposure of ethnic tribal groups into modernization (and thus accounting, identification and representative credential provisioning) over multiple generations, very, very carefully. I don’t know that such a thing ever would have happened gently.

Tribal identities do not inevitably lead to conflict. Their propensity to cause conflict is determined by previous conditions. Colonial reliance on identity as a tool of division is one reason why these identities lead to conflict. Otherwise, they are one plausible dividing line, but by no means a determinative one.

If the claim here is that tribal identification is necessary to enable trade because identification is difficult, this is probably untrue. One path to trade is based on tribal identification, as I think you are saying. Collective responsibility ensures that tribes must maintain credibility by ensuring that individual members are honest. But trade can quite easily take place without much trust; it simply requires immediate exchange of goods. This is the method by which trade operated in much of human history.

> That the wilderness persists, and with it conflict among diverse customs, traditions and ways of life, seems to show that maybe it’s less about the colonialism, and more about way the (now entrenched) urban areas are forced to interact with a coarse intolerance for disorganized demand. It’s probably been this parasitic/addictive feedback loop for long enough that the equilibrium is a known quantity determined long ago, through layers of stacked moral hazards.

Sorry, a little confused here as well—who is coarsely intolerant for disorganized demand?

Economic patterns in the Congo are largely the product of Belgian decisions. The exploitation of natural resources is most of the economy; that started under them. Pre-colonial Congo is not my area of expertise but I imagine that whatever equilibrium was reached was not associated with slaughter of the scale of the Second Congo War. As for moral hazard, could you elaborate?

> Those layers are certainly the ghosts of a colonial era, but now what? The colonial era is over, but the parasitic core of an urbanized gravitational whirlpool still produces the effects of a faceless entity, an architecture of amoral economy. The tribal ethnic groups still fight, and their spoils get eagerly mopped up and wrung out in buckets harvested by spectators.

The situation is more contingent on international interference than is immediately obvious. To start, the current government needs to purchase weapons from somewhere; it purchases these weapons due to money earnt as a result of international involvement by mineral companies. The DRC would not be able to manufacture many weapons by itself. At the very least this would cause a reversion of tribal conflict to a state without modern weapons; this would likely reduce the death rate. The situation is not particularly easy to solve, but probably not intractable yet.