Each month, approximately 45,000 people die from violence, hunger, disease, and other effects of displacement as a result of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The country is often said to be plagued by a 'resource curse.' During each period in history since its discovery by the West, the DRC has possessed the resources the world craves and the world has sought these without regard for the consequences to the Congolese people. The catastrophic consequences of Congo's history of natural resource exploitation are the direct and indirect death of millions of Congolese people. The current war in Congo is multi-causal in nature but explanations are often reduced to describing it as an ethic conflict based on objective grievance. Objective grievance such as inequality, ethnic tensions, land disputes, and lack of democracy do exist, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient to explain the cause of the violent conflict, and more importantly, they fall short in explaining why this conflict has continued for years. The reality is the conflict is an economic war in which the trade of conflict minerals, gold and the 3Ts (tin, tantalum, tungsten), is directly linked to the financial sustainability of the groups fighting …

The research described in this report developed the theoretical and conceptual framework for understanding, recognizing, and anticipating the origins, dynamic mechanisms, perceptions, and social structures of Islamic social reform movements in the Muslim homeland and in diaspora communities. This research has revealed valuable insights into the dynamic mechanisms associated with reform movements and, as such, offers the potential to provide indications and warnings of impending violence. This study produced the following significant findings: (1) A framework for understanding Islamic radicalization in the context of Social Movement Theory was developed and implemented. This framework provides a causal structure for the interrelationships among the myriad features of a social movement. (2) The degree to which movement-related activity shows early diffusion across multiple social contexts is a powerful distinguisher of successful and unsuccessful social movements. Indeed, this measurable appears to have significantly more predictive power than volume of such activity and also more power than various system intrinsics. (3) Significant social movements can occur only if both the intra-context 'infectivity' of the movement exceeds a certain threshold and the inter-context interactions associated with the movement occur with a frequency that is larger than another threshold. Note that this is reminiscent of, and significantly …