The COVID-19 pandemic, and efforts to control its spread—including lockdowns, social distancing measures, and border closures—have led to unprecedented health, humanitarian, and socioeconomic shocks worldwide. These shocks, in turn, are raising the likelihood that risks for many forms of violent conflict—crime, armed conflict, violent extremism—may increase. Because it is crucial for the United Nations (UN) to adopt a conflict-sensitive lens in all relevant operations across the humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding (HDP) nexus to prevent an increasingly volatile situation from deteriorating further, this policy brief makes recommendations for strengthening implementation of conflict sensitivity based on extensive interviews with UN staff across the nexus.

In 2017, the Congo Research Group (CRG) published a comprehensive study of companies owned by members of former President Joseph Kabila’s family, using publicly available documents to show their involvement in over 80 corporations around the world. This gave them ownership over 450 miles of diamond concessions along the Angolan border, contracts worth millions working on mining projects, shares in the largest mobile phone company, and vast tracts of farmland. The contrast between the family’s relative poverty before it came to power in 1997 and this wealth is striking. However, it was difficult to as-sess the value of these assets or the overall wealth of the family and its members, or to prove any crimes beyond conflicts of interest.