The Democratic Republic of Congo and the Rwanda backed AFC/M23 alliance have a new DRC M23 peace roadmap. It follows five days of closed door talks in Geneva, Switzerland, from 17 to 21 August.
That headline alone will not surprise close observers of the Doha process. What matters more is what sets this agreement apart from the ceasefires and frameworks that came before it and mostly failed to hold.
Start with verification. Under the Nairobi and Luanda processes, launched in 2022 by the East African Community and Angola respectively, negotiators repeatedly wrote verification mechanisms into their texts. The Congo Research Group and the International Crisis Group have both noted that those mechanisms stayed largely theoretical, with monitoring bodies poorly resourced or sidelined once fighting resumed.
The Swiss talks produced something more concrete under the DRC M23 peace roadmap. The parties agreed a standardised method for reporting alleged ceasefire violations, and a first verification mission tied to that method was scheduled for Minembwe in South Kivu on Monday 24 August, a specific, dated commitment rather than a general promise.
The second major feature of the DRC M23 peace roadmap is oversight of implementation itself. Analysts of the Nairobi and Luanda processes described a pattern of resolutions signed with little follow through. The Swiss talks addressed that directly.
The two sides agreed to set up a separate mechanism dedicated to reviewing progress under the Doha Framework Agreement and flagging problems as it is put into practice. That is a direct answer to the framework’s most damaging setback so far.
That setback happened in April, also in Switzerland, in the town of Montreux. Negotiators there agreed a prisoner exchange, 311 AFC/M23 detainees for 166 held by Kinshasa, as a confidence building step. Benjamin Mbonimpa, AFC/M23’s permanent secretary, announced the deal at the time. Months later it still had not been carried out. Reporting has traced the delay to Congolese legal procedures and a lack of political will on both sides, and the episode nearly collapsed the wider dialogue. The review mechanism agreed in August exists largely because that failure happened.
There is also a shift in who is steering the DRC M23 peace roadmap. Nairobi was an East African Community initiative. Luanda was led by Angola’s president, Joao Lourenco, who withdrew his country from the mediator’s role in March after accusing both sides of obstinacy.
The current effort sits inside the Doha Framework for a Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed in Doha in November 2025 and mediated jointly by Qatar and the United States, with Togo representing the African Union and Switzerland hosting. Massad Boulos, the United States senior advisor for Africa, said on X that he was encouraged by the additional progress made in Switzerland and reaffirmed Washington’s support for stability in eastern DRC and the Great Lakes region.
Despite progress, the DRC M23 peace roadmap does not resolve the conflict’s harder questions. Sanctions against M23, the release of remaining detainees and the timing of political reforms are still sticking points between Kinshasa and the AFC/M23 alliance, Al Jazeera reported. President Felix Tshisekedi’s government has previously called for the group’s dismantlement in its current form, a position the alliance rejects given the territory it now controls, including Goma and Bukavu.
Another challenge facing the DRC M23 peace roadmap is Rwanda’s insistence that any M23 withdrawal be linked to the neutralisation of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, an armed group with roots in the 1994 genocide. Kinshasa has resisted treating that as a precondition.
The DRC M23 peace roadmap is therefore best read as a test of whether new monitoring and review tools can survive contact with the same politics that broke Nairobi, Luanda and, more recently, Montreux. The Minembwe mission and the implementation review mechanism, not the roadmap announcement itself, will show whether anything has genuinely changed.
