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In a rehearsal studio in the Echo Park neighborhood in Los Angeles, Kurtis Blow was limbering up and getting loose. Earlier this year, his left arm swelled up abruptly, requiring four surgeries to resolve what was eventually diagnosed as deep-vein thrombosis. Blow usually holds the mike in his right hand when he raps, but he had to get his left arm going, he said, “because it’s my ‘Throw your hands in the air’ arm.”

Lithe at age sixty-six, Blow was dressed in leather cargo pants, a track jacket, and a black baseball cap with the words “I AM HIP HOP” above its brim. He was whipping himself into shape for a “Legends of Hip-Hop” concert to be held just after Thanksgiving at the Peacock Theatre, in downtown L.A. He will be on a stage that will also feature such foundational rappers as Big Daddy Kane, Doug E. Fresh, and two members of the Furious Five, Melle Mel and Scorpio.

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Blow’s youngest son, Michael, the studio’s owner, manned the d.j. deck, wearing a hoodie from Stanford, his alma mater. The rapper’s eldest, Kurtis, Jr., nodded his do-ragged head to the beat and offered counsel alongside his mother, Kurtis, Sr.,’s wife of forty-two years, Shirley. (The Walkers, to use the family’s civilian surname, also have a third son, Mark.)

It has been forty-five years since the release of Blow’s song “The Breaks,” the first rap single to be certified gold. Blow had already scored a novelty hit, “Christmas Rappin’,” at the end of 1979, the watershed year in which rap transitioned from clubs in the Bronx and Harlem to singles pressed on vinyl, chief among them “Rapper’s Delight,” by the Sugarhill Gang. “I had a singles deal with escalating options,” Blow recalled. “I had to sell thirty thousand records in order to do another single. The Christmas rap sold over four hundred thousand copies. So the producers said, ‘What do you want to do for your next single?’ ”

Blow was first discovered a couple of years earlier, when he was spotted in performance by Robert (Rocky) Ford, Jr., a Billboard journalist covering the burgeoning rap scene. Ford and a colleague on the ad-sales side, J. B. Moore, were so impressed by the teen-age performer that they asked if they could produce and co-write records with him. Blow agreed, and, abetted by Ford’s and Moore’s connections, became the first rapper to sign with a major label, Mercury.

With Ford and Moore eager for a follow-up to “Christmas Rappin’,” Blow said, “I told them, ‘Well, I want to do a song for all my b-boys.’ I was a hard-core break-dancer and a d.j. as well. James Brown was my thing. The most important part of a song for a b-boy is the break, the part where the vocals drop out. So I wanted a song with a lot of breaks.”

As Blow recalls, Moore, a bespectacled white man in his late thirties, was intrigued by the connotations of the word “breaks.” It could refer to good breaks and bad breaks. It was a homonym for brakes, the things you pump to slow down your car. And it was also, as Blow articulated, a musical term. Moore and Blow fashioned a litany of breaks/brakes in all manner of categories.

Some of them betrayed the thought processes of the older writer, e.g., “And the I.R.S. says they wanna chat / (That’s the breaks, that’s the breaks) / And you can’t explain why you claimed your cat.” Other lyrics, like one in which Blow exhorted a girl in brown to stop messin’ around, bore the stamp of the rapper himself.

The end result was an infectious bop enlivened by Blow’s exuberant rapping style, which was inspired, he said, by the rhyming patter of Hank Spann, a d.j. on the New York radio station WWRL, then devoted to R. & B.

“The Breaks” was a crossover smash, and it bent the course of musical history. Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, the married rhythm section of Talking Heads, were so taken by the song that they name-checked the rapper in “Genius of Love,” the 1981 post-punk-funk single by their side project, Tom Tom Club: “Stepping in a rhythm to a Kurtis Blow / Who needs to think when your feet just go?”

“When that song came out, I was, like, cheesin’ so much you could’ve put a banana in my mouth sideways,” Blow said.

In a Zoom call, Frantz avowed that the influence of “The Breaks” goes even deeper. “The timbale breaks in the first Tom Tom Club single, ‘Wordy Rappinghood,’ were inspired by the timbale parts in ‘The Breaks,’ ” he said. It had an effect on Talking Heads, too. Once, when David Byrne was stuck on a lyric for the song “Crosseyed and Painless,” Frantz recalled, “I said, ‘David, there’s this new thing called rap, and if you could just rap a part it would be cool.’ ” He played him “The Breaks,” which yielded Byrne’s now famous “Facts are simple and facts are straight” bars.

Blow is proud of his squeaky-clean image, which was a conscious choice. “I made two hundred and forty-three rap songs and never used profanity,” he said. “I sacrificed my career so guys like Chuck D and KRS-One could come up and really teach and empower our youth.”

He’s Kurtis Blow, and he wants you to know that these are the breaks. ♦

Three dozen climate negotiators and scientists were at Lincoln Center the other day, in the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre, to see a performance of “Kyoto,” about the landmark 1997 treaty on greenhouse-gas emissions. It was a bittersweet reunion for “Team Climate U.S.A.,” as Sue Biniaz, a State Department lawyer for more than thirty years, put it, while addressing the group in the lobby after the show. On the one hand, “we usually work in total obscurity,” she said. “So to make it the subject of an incredible play is really, really nice for us.” On the other hand, “we are no longer in that business.” The Trump Administration eliminated the department’s climate-negotiation office in April, a few months after announcing its withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

The play stars Stephen Kunken as an oil lobbyist named Don Pearlman, who addresses the audience at the outset. “I think we can all agree on one thing,” he says. “The times you live in are fucking awful.” Then, with a smile, he adds, “The nineteen-nineties were freakin’ glorious!” His cynicism in playing the Saudis against the Tanzanians and the Chinese is matched only by his hunger for cigarettes. (The actual Pearlman died of lung-cancer complications in 2005, at sixty-nine.) Yet Kunken gives the character a roguish charisma, in his tireless defense of American freedom, that Biniaz couldn’t help observing was arguably fictional. “Don was not nearly as charming in real life,” she said, to knowing laughter.

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The cast and the forlorn climateers mingled. Biniaz remarked that she was struck by how well something as ostensibly dry and technical as multilateral negotiation translated to the stage. “There’s a certain performative aspect to the negotiations where you might have to appear more frustrated or angry than you actually are,” she granted. “There’s also kind of an onstage-offstage aspect. It’s, like, ‘Oh, So-and-So is just so annoying.’ You’ll say, ‘Yeah, but offstage he’s really a nice guy.’ ”

Kunken, for his part, felt that the core theme of the story—arriving at consensus—was an apt metaphor for live theatre. “Doing a play is coming to an agreement,” he said. “Every actor wants to tell their character’s story: this is my moment. And another actor says, ‘I know, but, if you do that, then you’re missing this set of beats for me.’ You’re in front of an audience, and any single person on any given night can pull the focus by doing something extraneous.”

Tim Lattimer, a former deputy office director at the State Department, and a longtime environmentalist, asked Kunken if he was familiar with the Scott Freeman studio, an acting school. “Oh, sure,” Kunken said.

“Scott and I did high-school theatre together,” Lattimer said. “I’ve had people say I shouldn’t have been a scientist.”

A memorable scene in the play depicts the various international delegations arguing over punctuation marks in a singsong cadence. The real-life negotiators praised this as an illustration of the art of “constructive ambiguity,” allowing each country to declare slightly differing interpretations of victory. “The Chinese negotiator, my counterpart there, was named Su,” Biniaz recalled, referring to Su Wei. “We were the two Sues. We one time had something without commas, which is how I wanted it. And he said, ‘I accept that, if we add a comma,’ because his English was so amazing that he knew that that would give him a slight advantage. It was like playing tennis with someone who’s better than you—forces you to up your game. And every time I was with Su, even though this was not his native language, I felt like I had to be completely in the zone.” She added, “One of our major principles is called common but differentiated responsibilities. So I wrote an article called ‘Comma but Differentiated Responsibilities.’ ”

One of the playwrights, Joe Robertson, mentioned another Chinese negotiator, an academic named Shukong Zhong, whose command of English was such that he translated Charles Dickens in his spare time. “Dickens was viewed as sort of the epitome of the terrors and excesses of Western capitalism,” Robertson said. “So he was very popular in China.”

“Professor Zhong was amazing,” Biniaz agreed. “He would always argue for principles before you could start negotiating. He would talk about ‘In China, when a housewife makes a rice meal, she starts with rice.’ Our guy was Dan Reifsnyder at the time, and he would have some other metaphor, about how, when he cooks, he usually starts with a recipe. The whole room was just watching the two of them go back and forth.”

“A duel of metaphors,” Robertson said.

“All about the kitchen.”

Joking, one of the ex-negotiators asked Joe Murphy, the other playwright, if they were going to tackle the Paris agreement next. “This is the first of a trilogy!” Murphy replied. “Yeah, the next one’s like ‘The Empire Strikes Back.’ Copenhagen: everything collapses and it’s a disaster.” Then would come Paris, as “Return of the Jedi,” a bit of optimism before, well, the fucking-awful present. Tim Lattimer raised his hand. “Can I just say thank you for doing it in this theatre and not the Koch Theatre?” ♦

When I visited the king of Bukumu, Mwami Butsitsi Kahembe IV Isaac, he was dressed in a crisp white caftan, with the skin of a leopard killed by his great-grandfather slung over his shoulders. A crown of matching fur sat on his head, and an ivory-tipped scepter announced his rank. The surroundings were less elegant. The king told me ruefully that his ancestral palace had been destroyed thirty years ago by combatants from the Hutu tribe, and that he had not yet found the resources to rebuild it. We met instead at his office in a compound at the edge of the city of Goma, in the eastern Congo. Mwami Isaac, as he is known, arrived in a chauffeur-driven Land Cruiser, escorted by three bodyguards carrying assault rifles.

It was a bright fall morning, but the sky was hazy with smoke from Mt. Nyiragongo, the volcano that loomed thousands of feet above. The Bukumu kingdom occupies about a hundred and thirty square miles in the province of North Kivu, and large portions of it are covered by black lava scree. Nyiragongo has erupted several times in recent decades. In 2021, lava consumed an entire neighborhood, killing dozens of the king’s subjects and forcing thousands more to flee.

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At the time of the eruption, Mwami Isaac was twenty-six, but already several years into his reign; he had taken the throne after studying political science at a university in Goma. “I rule over every aspect of my people’s lives,” he said. “They see me as the keeper of their traditions and as a symbol of unity, as well as the bridge between tradition and modernity.” There were some traditions that Isaac had been unable to uphold. “The people believe that when the volcano erupts, the king is upset,” he explained. His forebears had offered sacrifices, “including cows and sometimes virgin girls.” With a cheeky smile, he said that modern human-rights laws forbade sacrificing virgins, so the volcano did what it wished.

In a waiting room outside the office, petitioners sat on benches, facing a wall decorated with photographs of Bukumu monarchs. The earliest shows Mwami Isaac’s great-grandfather, wearing a belted military uniform enlivened with heavy gold medallions. In the most recent portrait, Isaac sits on an intricately carved throne with a distant look, as if surveying his domain.

The Bukumu kingdom is a small part of a vast country that has been riven for centuries by tribal disputes and colonial violence. As Isaac told it, his kingdom’s history is rife with treachery, usurpation, and murder. His great-grandfather came to power during King Leopold II of Belgium’s bloody occupation of Congo, and ruled for five decades. His succession was contested, though; Isaac’s grandfather and father both inherited the throne as children and were forced to vie for power with a relative who was twice appointed as regent. According to Isaac, the regent was a cruel and greedy man who killed his subjects, took their land, and allied himself with Congo’s dictator, Joseph Mobutu. After the regent died, his son ruled unlawfully for twenty years before dying in an explosion. Isaac’s father reclaimed the throne, but died when Isaac was two—shot by a rival in the office where we were sitting.

Map by Supriya Kalidas

In January, there was another tumultuous transfer of power in North Kivu. After years of fighting with Congolese government forces, a rebel army known as the M23 seized control of Goma and a large swath of surrounding territory. A framed photograph on Mwami Isaac’s desk showed him posed with the M23’s military chief, General Sultani Makenga. With a laugh, Isaac told me, “I also have a photo of myself with President Tshisekedi”—the current leader of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “But I’ve put that photo away.” Tshisekedi lives in the capital, Kinshasa, which sits nearly a thousand miles away, toward the Atlantic coast. The M23 fighters were heavily armed and close at hand; they were also backed by the neighboring state of Rwanda, whose border runs along the edge of Goma. “As king, I must obey the decisions of the state,” Mwami Isaac said. “Now I must obey the M23, because here it is the government.”

The fighting over Goma had been fierce; several thousand people died, including hundreds of civilians and government troops. But it was only the latest manifestation of a decades-long fight between the D.R.C. and Rwanda, which has grown to involve several other countries and scores of ethnic militias in the forests of eastern Congo. The governments involved have stoked the fighting with Romanian mercenaries, Russian fighter jets, and Chinese drones. “The only way to survive in this minefield is to stay neutral,” Mwami Isaac said. But he acknowledged, “It’s difficult to rule over seven hundred thousand people and stay apolitical. We try and maintain a balance.”

The fighting in eastern Congo seldom makes the international news, except during extraordinary spasms of violence. This summer, though, there was a moment of renewed interest, when President Donald Trump announced that he had “stopped” the war—one of eight (or perhaps nine) conflicts that he claims to have resolved in his quest for a Nobel Peace Prize. Emissaries from Rwanda and the D.R.C. dutifully appeared in Washington, to be photographed shaking hands, making optimistic speeches, and signing agreements. In a parallel effort, the government of Qatar oversaw negotiations between the M23 rebels and the Congolese government. For months, the two initiatives plodded along, with photo ops and declarations of good will. Meanwhile, the fighting kept up, and military leaders talked about more aggressive campaigns. In two visits that I made to Rwanda and eastern Congo this fall, the war seemed far too entrenched to be easily stopped. Many observers feared that it would grow until it stretched across the country to the capital.

In Goma, it’s easy to see signs of conflict, but difficult to tell whether they were caused by recent battles or by earlier ones. The M23 incursion in January left buildings pocked with bullet holes; it also left hundreds of victims buried in an unmarked cemetery next to the city’s airport. Their graves are set among older ones on acres of weeds and rocks.

The airport, surrounded by a security wall festooned with razor wire, was partly destroyed in the fighting, despite being guarded by one of the largest U.N. peacekeeping forces in the world. Intended as a regional “stabilization mission,” the force includes ten thousand troops, spread between Goma and a few other locales. It is estimated to have cost twenty-seven billion dollars since its inception, in 1999—but, because it lacks an effective mandate to intervene to halt violence, it is considered all but irrelevant.

The presence of peacekeepers in eastern Congo can seem like the U.N.’s way of apologizing for failing to halt the Rwandan genocide, a singularly brutal conflict that is the wellspring of the current violence in the region. For three months in 1994, Hutu extremists, who represented the ethnic majority in Rwanda, conducted a monstrous slaughter of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus. At least eight hundred thousand people died, many of them executed by drunk men who had been urged by the Hutu-led government to exterminate their neighbors. Victims were murdered with machetes, garden hoes, and clubs; their bodies were tossed into rivers, dumped in ditches, and hurled into wells and pit latrines. Churches offered sanctuary, until men arrived to murder the families inside. The killers referred to what they were doing as “work” and to their victims as “cockroaches.” By the time it was over, Rwanda’s Tutsi population had been reduced by eighty-five per cent.

“Good news, sir—we’ve made some major improvements to the leaning, on-fire, rat-infested tower.”

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Throughout the violence, the U.N. resisted calls to intervene, and refused to describe what was happening as a genocide. So did the U.S. State Department. The task of halting the slaughter was left largely to the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a Tutsi guerrilla army led by an enigmatic thirty-six-year-old named Paul Kagame.

The R.P.F. eventually seized the capital, Kigali, and Kagame took control of the government. The killing wound down, but ethnic tensions remained. The same people who had organized the genocide led an exodus of Hutus across the border into the D.R.C., and as many as a million settled in camps around Goma. When a cholera epidemic broke out there, killing some fifty thousand people, the international relief community hastened to provide the Hutu refugees with food, shelter, and medical care. As Philip Gourevitch wrote in “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families,” his haunting book about the genocide, the outside world had largely ignored the extermination of the Tutsis, but it “responded to the mass flight of Hutus . . . with passionate intensity.”

It was perhaps inevitable that the war that had begun in Rwanda would continue in Congo. Though the Hutus in the camps were largely civilians, there were thousands among them who had participated in the mass killing, and their leaders quickly became a Hutu government in exile. They remained armed, and continued to conduct raids against the Tutsis across the border.

In 1996, Rwanda’s new government sent troops into the camps to root out the génocidaires. In a short and vicious campaign that became known as the First Congo War, Kagame’s army pursued the Hutu forces across the country, all the way to Kinshasa. In the capital, the Rwandans overthrew President Joseph Mobutu. In his place, they installed a local ally, Laurent-Désiré Kabila—a gold entrepreneur and a former Maoist rebel leader.

At first, Kabila ruled the D.R.C. in concert with the Rwandans. But before long he turned against his patrons, and they launched a new incursion to force him out. The Second Congo War, as it became known, divided the region: several African nations took sides with Kabila, while Uganda joined forces with Rwanda. The fighting dragged on for five years, until a peace agreement was signed in 2003. By then, Kabila had been shot dead by one of his soldiers, and his son Joseph had been handed control of the country.

While a succession of treaties and opaque power-sharing deals have determined who rules in Kinshasa, the violence in the eastern hinterlands has never stopped. Armed groups have proliferated in a complex web of alliances, defections, and betrayals. An estimated hundred and twenty militias are now active, propped up variously by governments around the region and by political factions within the D.R.C. Among the most prominent forces are the M23, aligned with Rwanda, and the Wazalendo and the F.D.L.R., aligned with the Congolese government. Massacres are commonplace, and huge numbers of people have been killed by fighters, or by displacement, starvation, and disease. The estimated over-all death toll since the First Congo War broke out is between four and six million.

In Goma, three decades of humanitarian crisis have had a curious effect: a population boom. The city has grown from about a hundred and sixty thousand inhabitants to as many as two million, primarily owing to displacement by war from the surrounding countryside. The residents, victims and perpetrators alike, are generally busy trying to survive. The city sits alongside Lake Kivu, and men spend their days on the shoreline, waiting with sponges and water buckets for cars to wash. Others line up to serve as day laborers, filling sacks with sand transported by barge and then carrying them on their backs to delivery trucks. From the docks, ferries run to the city of Bukavu, a hundred and twenty miles down the shore. Bukavu, like Goma, fell to the M23 early this year.

Most of Goma is a warren of improvised housing, with tin shacks for the poorest and cinder-block huts for those a little better off. But the market streets are jammed with people buying and selling. Women in elegant African-print dresses carry burdens on their heads; men in cast-off Western clothes push wooden carts laden with potatoes and carrots. The atmosphere is noisy and sociable, a hubbub of music and conversation. Occasionally, jeeps full of M23 fighters push past, while the civilians pretend to ignore them. Like the king of Bukumu, the city’s residents have largely adjusted to the M23, but they know that it’s safer not to engage.

Along the lakeshore are the headquarters of relief agencies: U.N.H.C.R., I.C.R.C., War Child, Tearfund. Around town, you see plastic sheets and grain sacks stamped with the joined-hands emblem of U.S.A.I.D.—the world’s largest aid agency, before it was decimated by the Trump Administration. U.S.A.I.D.’s demise has removed the main source of rape kits, H.I.V. medications, and nutritional supplements for malnourished children, essential support for millions of people in eastern Congo.

At a hospital in Goma, the director, a jovial man in a doctor’s coat and blue Crocs, told me that he and his staff were handling about five rape cases every day. He believed that many more women were being attacked, but that not all of them had the means, or the courage, to come seek treatment. Rape is routinely used as a weapon of war in eastern Congo; U.N. investigators say that the incidence of sexual violence is among the worst in the world. The director said that most of the assaults took place on the outskirts of Goma and in the countryside beyond. Armed men invaded houses and raped women, often in front of their husbands, who were then killed. Other women were assaulted while they worked in the fields or fetched firewood. Sometimes they were gang-raped, or violated with foreign objects. The director said that the most difficult case he had dealt with recently was a woman who had a tree branch jammed into her vagina. She had survived, thanks to intensive surgery.

I asked who was committing this violence. Was it the F.D.L.R. militia, which is led by the remnants of the Hutu génocidaires? Or was it the M23? The director shrugged. The rapists attacked at night, and usually did not announce which group they belonged to. All he could say, as a doctor, was that there were more rapes now than before. At the hospital, he and his colleagues tested victims for H.I.V. and gave them clothes and “dignity kits,” containing soap, menstrual pads, and other essentials. In cases of severe trauma, they offered psychotherapy. But, since U.S.A.I.D. ended its support, they had been unable to supply rape kits to collect evidence. There were also no courts handling rape cases in Goma, so he and his team were the only outlet for any testimony that victims dared to provide.

One afternoon, I saw an elderly woman hoeing the ground in the unmarked cemetery across from Goma’s airport. She introduced herself as Zabandora, and told me that she was planting soybeans. It was open land, and she lived nearby, she explained, waving toward a row of shacks. Two harvests a year gave her just enough to live on. During the recent fighting, she had stayed away and prayed, returning to her crops only when it was all over. At the graveyard, she found people burying relatives and told them that she usually planted there, between the headstones. They said that they would understand if she continued.

Goma has a few wealthier residents. On the lakeshore is a smattering of luxury hotels and opulent villas; the current style favors complex curving façades, wrought-iron verandas, and mirrored glass rising above the street. The M23 occupies several handsome buildings, including a well-guarded compound with landscaped gardens for its political leaders.

Despite Congo’s widespread poverty, it is extraordinarily rich in natural resources. Near Goma, there are lucrative mines for gold and for coltan, which is crucial to manufacturing batteries and cellphones. Farther west is an enormous copper belt, much of which is in Chinese hands. In the D.R.C., who profits from the sale of resources has long depended on who holds political power, or who controls the territory.

In an earlier era, the area around Goma, a region of vast lakes and forests, was the ivory belt of equatorial Africa, and the target of slaving expeditions from the Arab world. Tippu Tip, a notorious trader in the nineteenth century, amassed some ten thousand slaves and a fortune in ivory, growing rich enough to once make a serious attempt to secure his own autonomous state in eastern Congo.

During the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, European colonial powers carved up Africa for their own use. Germany secured the lands that are now Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania; the sprawling wilderness of Congo went to King Leopold II of Belgium. The colonists took up where Tippu Tip left off, plundering the forests for ivory and other resources. Although slavery was formally outlawed, the practice persisted with unusual brutality. Before the Belgians withdrew, in 1960, they extracted billions of dollars’ worth of rubber and precious metals, at the cost of millions of Congolese lives. Like other colonists, they left only because a U.N. mandate forced them out, and they did not go quietly. Congo’s first elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, who showed sympathies for Moscow, was executed in 1961, in an operation orchestrated by Belgium and the C.I.A.

The battle for control of land and resources in Congo fuels the current conflict, too. The militias at work in the east compete for money and influence, much of which comes through links to mining interests. They live off whatever can be extracted from the land—gold and coltan, cacao, charcoal made by burning down forests.

“The carpet pads aren’t magic.”

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Nearly all the militias are based around ethnicity. The F.D.L.R. is avowedly Hutu. The M23, founded in 2012, styles itself as a protector of the Tutsis. Congo’s Tutsi population, estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, is a small minority in a country with more than a hundred million citizens, but a significant presence in North and South Kivu, where they are concentrated. The Tutsis are traditionally herders and tend to be richer than the Hutus, who are farmers; their relative wealth is a source of resentment. In Congo, Tutsis face widespread discrimination and bigoted invective. As a result of the 1994 genocide and the subsequent fighting, tensions between the tribes intensified—and so did Rwanda’s interest in protecting Tutsis across the border. Although the Rwandan government denies being involved with the M23, it has persistently supplied direction, money, and manpower, along with drones and other technology; several thousand Rwandan soldiers participated in the siege of Goma.

The M23’s most prominent representative in Goma is Bertrand Bisimwa, who leads its political wing. When I met him, he blithely dismissed the idea that the M23 was an occupying force. “We are Congolese citizens,” he said. “We cannot be invaders of our own country.” He denied accusations of war crimes, as well as reports that miners and farmers had been forced to bribe soldiers to use their own land. The money was merely a “security tax,” he said. “We play the role of the state.”

He lost his composure only when speaking about his enemies, whom he accused of being drug addicts and cannibals. “They are given a specific face as their enemy—the face of a Tutsi,” he said. “The war we are waging is an existential war.”

Around Goma, there are persistent rumors that the M23 is actually commanded by Rwanda’s President, or perhaps its former defense secretary. During my visit, people seemed to defer to another leader: an ebullient figure named Corneille Nangaa. I met Nangaa one morning at a friend’s villa on Lake Kivu. He was wearing a sharply tailored dark suit, a Tesla baseball cap, and a blue shirt with a metal Hugo Boss insignia. He carried a walking stick carved from pale wood. As security men fanned out, Nangaa led me to a table on a fastidiously clipped lawn, where waiters brought an extravagant breakfast. More guards stood on a nearby dock, staring out to Lake Kivu.

Nangaa is the head of the Congo River Alliance, a large, ethnically mixed rebel group, but he spent much of his earlier career working for the Congolese government. In 2018, as the head of the national electoral commission, he oversaw one of the murkiest and most influential political deals in Congo’s recent history.

King Mwami Butsitsi Kahembe IV Isaac rules a traditional domain near the Rwandan border, in an area that has seen vicious fighting. “The only way to survive in this minefield is to stay neutral,” he said.

At the time, Joseph Kabila had been President of the D.R.C. for seventeen years, overseeing an administration known for its unfettered corruption. As the Presidential election approached, Kabila was increasingly unpopular, and a viable opponent was found: Félix Tshisekedi, a thickset, pugnacious man who was the son of a prominent opposition leader. Tshisekedi ended up winning, but the election was so dubious that many observers assumed he had done so by cutting a power-sharing deal with Kabila.

Nangaa handled the difficult negotiations around Kabila’s departure. It was Congo’s first peaceful transfer of power in decades, but it didn’t last. Within a few years, both Nangaa and Kabila had fallen out with Tshisekedi and fled across the country to Goma, where they allied themselves with the M23. Kabila has been visiting African capitals to build support for the militia, which he is rumored to be helping to fund with a huge fortune that he built while in power. This past September, Tshisekedi retaliated by having Kabila tried in absentia and sentenced to death for war crimes and treason.

From our breakfast table, Nangaa gestured at forested hills that rose above the lake. “That’s Rwanda, a country which has accomplished everything we have not,” he said. I had heard the same sentiment from many others in the region. The D.R.C. is vastly larger than Rwanda, with nearly ten times its population and far more abundant natural resources, but it has proved incapable of securing peace or prosperity for its citizens. Rwanda, by contrast, has made enviable social and economic progress in the past few decades. People who live on the Congolese side of the border often cross into Rwanda to get mail and to do their banking. The M23 established its compound in Goma conveniently close to the crossing.

Nangaa complained that the Congolese government had thwarted free enterprise. He told me that, at the Berlin Conference, the colonialists intended the D.R.C. to become the Congo Free State—which, in his eccentric interpretation, was a libertarian paradise. “Our vision is to go back to that original idea, so that everyone can come and do business here,” he said. “If Trump wants to come, he’ll come and do business.” Trump has said forthrightly that he expects the U.S. to get a portion of the D.R.C.’s mineral wealth in exchange for fostering talks; Gentry Beach, an American financier who is friends with Donald Trump, Jr., recently visited and reportedly spoke of taking over a major coltan mine.

Before the D.R.C. can become the Congo Free State, Nangaa said, “it first needs to create a state.” A country requires an effective army, police force, justice system, and administration—but, he said, “here it’s all corrupted.” With a solicitous look, he added, “Everyone can blame the West, but it values hard work. Here, the people don’t work.”

Nangaa argued that Tshisekedi had chronically mismanaged the country. In 2022, after a period of relative quiet, the M23 began clashing with the Congolese Army, a corrupt and largely ineffectual force. Tshisekedi invited troops from countries around the region to come fight for his regime, and hired mercenaries from Eastern Europe. In an arms-buying spree worth billions of dollars, he acquired Turkish attack drones and Russian warplanes. When that didn’t halt the M23, his government called up fighters throughout Congo to join the Wazalendo—a nationalist militia movement whose name means “the patriots.” Tshisekedi urged his supporters to fight “for our Congolese identity.” In a fit of paranoia, he also arrested dozens of generals he suspected of siding with the M23, along with influential Tutsis who were accused of espionage.

To fill out the ranks of the Wazalendo, Tshisekedi distributed weapons to ethnic militias and criminal gangs. Nangaa told me that, though the M23 controlled Goma, many Wazalendo remained active around the city. “Our boys are arresting them, even now, ten to twenty of them every night,” he said. (According to Human Rights Watch, the M23 is also killing them; scores of young men have been found shot dead.)

Nangaa assured me that the war would be won before long. “We have a project for the country,” he said. “We know what we want to do.” The D.R.C. had no roads through the countryside, he pointed out. “After creating the state, we must connect all the territories, to get the people together.” Once the various tribes were linked, it would “take away discrimination,” he said. “That is how we create a nation. I have a dream, just like Martin Luther King said.” Nangaa laughed, pleased with his formulation.

For the country to be reformed, Nangaa said, “Tshisekedi must be removed by force. He doesn’t have the capacity to understand what he has to do as head of state. What is important to him is to enjoy the red carpet.” Nangaa is unabashed about his own aspiration to be the D.R.C.’s next President. Over breakfast, I asked about his walking stick. “This?” he said, raising it aloft. “It gives me power.”

“What kind of power?” I asked.

“All kinds of power,” he said and smiled.

In June, when Trump announced that he had brought peace to eastern Congo, he described it as “a glorious triumph.” But the M23 had not agreed to disband. A militia spokesman told the Associated Press, “We are in Goma with the population, and we are not going to get out.”

A Western diplomat in the region told me that the M23 seemed to be attempting to set down permanent roots in North Kivu. They had upended the traditional system of justice, administered by tribal chiefs. After registries of property deeds were burned during the fighting, the M23 had simply handed out land to people it favored.

Taking Goma had given the M23 control of a vast arsenal left behind by the defeated Congolese Army—as much as a third of the country’s military equipment, the diplomat said. The militia had also acquired an estimated twelve thousand new troops, many of them captured government soldiers who were either enticed or forced to serve. “The M23 have never enjoyed this level of control before,” the diplomat said. “The risk for them is they now have fallen into the same trap as the D.R.C. government—having to administer the territory they control.”

If the M23’s stewardship of North Kivu is a test case for running the country, it is not encouraging. Patrick Muyaya, the D.R.C.’s minister of communication, told me that electricity and banking services had lapsed in Goma, while the “ethnic cleansing of Hutus” had continued. In July, according to the U.N., M23 fighters massacred more than three hundred civilians in a group of frontline villages about forty miles from town. “Every day, there is killing,” Muyaya said. “The people running that part of the country—the only thing they know is crime.”

An hour’s drive northwest of Goma, across a vast moonscape of black lava, is a shambolic roadside community called Sake. For several years before the fall of Goma, it was a frontline town in the fight between the M23 and government forces. Displaced people’s tents, made from plastic sheeting supplied by N.G.O.s, are pitched alongside abandoned homesites, many of them burned to their foundations. The settlement is dug into jagged rock around a Catholic church, the Miséricorde Divine.

The priest, a burly man with wary eyes, explained that he had been appointed to Sake in 2023, when the Wazalendo were entrenched there. As the M23 moved in, he said, it captured several hundred Hutu refugees and forcibly trucked them away. The church was looted and burned, and the town became “like bush,” he said, with almost no inhabitants remaining. “We had to start from zero again.”

Gradually, people had returned, but they struggled to sustain themselves, and attacks continued. Some drivers for a relief agency had been kidnapped during a visit to the priest’s compound, so no one stayed overnight at the church anymore. When I asked if he slept there, he retorted, “How could I leave? I’m the priest.” But many of the civilians were packing up and heading to Goma. “They think it’s an oasis of peace,” he said wryly. Along with the threat of violence in Goma, there was a shortage of food, because the farmers who supplied the city had fled their land. The priest said that he was forty years old and had known nothing but conflict in his life. With a disgusted look, he said, “I’m very tired of fighting, and I call upon the leaders to end it.”

The Presidents of Congo and Rwanda have spent much of the past year trading insults. Tshisekedi has likened Kagame to Hitler and declared, “One thing is responsible for this situation, and that is Rwandan aggression.” Kagame tends to be cutting, rather than blunt. When Tshisekedi threatened to send his air force to strike Rwanda, Kagame responded, “Tshisekedi is capable of everything except measuring the consequences of what he says.”

The son of Tutsi exiles to Uganda, Kagame served as an intelligence officer in the Ugandan Army before returning to lead the Rwandan Patriotic Front. As President, he has been the subject of both praise and condemnation abroad. He is a ruthless strategist capable of waging bloody wars, but he has also fostered a remarkable program to reintegrate tens of thousands of former génocidaires into Rwandan society. He has been accused of many authoritarian acts, including assassinating political opponents, but he has turned his country into a regional powerhouse, with a disciplined army that has been deployed to aid embattled allies. “Rwanda has made itself an amazingly efficient place to work and do business in—as long as you stay in your lane,” a former State Department official told me. “You want to root for them. But, on the other hand, they have been responsible for several decades of horrific actions inside D.R.C.”

I met Kagame in a boardroom at his Presidential office. Tall and rake-thin, he spoke with gnomic deliberation. When I asked about the peace process, he said, “It’s important to be optimistic. Otherwise, why would you get to work? But, realistically, the amount of pessimism is very significant.” He was dismissive of interventions from the “international community” in eastern Congo. “The U.N. has been involved in this problem for the last thirty years,” he said. “They have spent billions of dollars, on peacekeeping missions, N.G.O.s, all kinds of things. What has come out of this effort?”

Gradually, he worked his way toward blaming the Congolese for the conflict in the east. “It’s not Rwanda that is the most affected by the problem,” he said. “There are complex problems that originate from colonial times, when borders were being drawn, and then there are matters of tribes and ethnic groups. Most of these are to be found in any other place. But they have been overcome by governance internally, even if this is to be assisted by external actors.” Finally, he said, “After all these years, Congo can’t find a formula where the first responsibility goes to domestic leaders. You can’t just keep all this blame game going on.”

Some critics have argued that the remaining F.D.L.R. Hutu militias, which may have as few as two thousand soldiers, pose a minimal threat to Rwanda. When I raised the idea, Kagame replied evenly, “When a hurricane is building up, we should work from the assumption that it might come our way.” He added, “Our interpretation is, what happened here is enough. We’re not going back.” People who accused Rwanda of aggression, he said, were “silencing the victim and, in the end, turning the victim into the perpetrator.”

Kagame suggested that I speak to his longtime aide James Kabarebe, who was as gruff as his boss was elliptical. An ex-soldier in his mid-sixties, Kabarebe has led Rwandan forces in every significant conflict since the genocide. When Kabila was installed as President of the D.R.C., Kabarebe became the head of Congo’s Army; then, after the two fell out, he led the fight to depose him. He now holds the cumbersome title of Rwanda’s “minister of state for foreign affairs in charge of regional cooperation.” After the fall of Goma, the U.S. government sanctioned Kabarebe, accusing him of aiding the M23 and of facilitating the illegal export of minerals from Congo.

In his office, Kabarebe claimed that his government did not support the M23, saying, “We have put their leaders in prison.” (He was referring to the former M23 warlord Laurent Nkunda, who is supposed to be in a Rwandan jail but is rumored to be living freely under government protection.) Yet he also suggested that Rwanda would be justified in supporting anyone who protected Tutsis. After the conflict of 1994, he said, “the international community assisted the genocidal forces to move into the D.R.C.” Since then, he argued, the border had posed an existential threat to Rwanda. “Having a genocidal army next door is suicidal,” he said. “This is not understood well in the West.”

Kabarebe contended that the Hutu militia posed a commercial threat, too. “We have a soldier posted along every metre of the border,” he said. “We do this to protect the mountain gorillas, which are the basis for our tourism industry.” Tourism, much of it built around wildlife, accounts for roughly ten per cent of Rwanda’s economy. Kabarebe said that since 2018 the militias had staged dozens of attacks in the parks where the gorillas live. At one point, mortar shells crashed down near a gorilla-research center established by Ellen DeGeneres. (As a Rwandan aide told me, “We can’t have that.”)

Outside observers say that the main reason for Rwanda’s interest in D.R.C. is to control its mineral wealth. Among other things, the Rwandans have been said to secretly transport niobium from a mine near Goma across the border and then export it. Rwanda’s annual gold exports have increased sixfold in eight years, to $1.5 billion. Kabarebe vehemently disputed the accusations. “The mineral exploitation has nothing to do with the conflict with D.R.C.,” he insisted. “It’s about security. The minerals go as they go, but Rwanda has nothing to do with it.”

Kabarebe cited several cross-border attacks in 2022 as the impetus for the latest intervention. “President Kagame decided to take defensive measures to protect our border,” he said. “And then this narrative began that Rwanda was an invader wanting the minerals of the D.R.C.” Western countries had applied sanctions to Rwanda, and to Kabarebe personally, but he described them as a minor irritant. “I’m used to it,” he said. “I am happy and comfortable here.”

The frontline town of Mweso is only sixty-two miles from Goma, but the trip takes six hours by Land Cruiser, along a road that has devolved into a cratered gantlet of rocks and mud. Near the halfway mark begins a ragged, ill-defined war zone, where the M23 prevails in roadside villages, but much of the surrounding wilderness is held by the Wazalendo.

The few settlements I passed through were dismally poor. People gazed sullenly at my truck, though a few excited children ran alongside, begging for money or a “stylo”—a pen to do their schoolwork. There were almost no other vehicles on the road, aside from a handful of green Army jeeps carrying M23 fighters.

The landscape, full of mountainsides riven by forests and terrace farms, provided a visible index of contested territory. An immense valley led to a line of blue mountains in the distance: Virunga National Park, where the mountain gorillas coexisted uneasily with F.D.L.R. Hutu fighters. The valley was once deeply forested, but its trees had been burned for charcoal, to provide income for militants and their families.

For about three hours, the track wound through a seemingly endless range of green hills populated by grazing cows—a kind of Congolese Switzerland. It was a single enormous farm, owned by the former President Joseph Kabila, whose known land holdings are nearly twelve times the size of Manhattan. As I descended back into the forest, the road became rocky, and the crops turned to sugarcane and cassava. This was Hutu territory, where the M23 were interlopers.

Mweso was a bleak whistle-stop town, built around a main street—a mud wash, on the night I arrived—lined with ramshackle bars, phone-card kiosks, and car-repair shops. Mweso’s electricity came from a patchwork of noisy diesel generators, and the restaurants were dirt-floored places that sold plates of fatty goat meat and boiled cassava mash. In the hills above the town, the M23 and a local Hutu militia that called itself the C.M.C. had established positions, from which they traded gunfire. The M23 held Mweso, but the C.M.C. carried out frequent raids into town to supply its fighters.

Hundreds of displaced people have taken shelter in a school in Mweso after fighting overtook their villages.

A Médecins Sans Frontières outpost sat behind a security wall, and a hundred yards down the road was a hospital, which M.S.F. helped fund and oversee. With nearly three hundred beds and four hundred and fifty staff members, it was the largest medical facility around, and one of the busiest.

The acting director, Alain Ntsirie Kubuya, told me that the hospital operated on a permanent emergency footing; malaria and other diseases were rampant, as was malnutrition, because the war had prevented people from planting crops. The hospital also took in about fifteen wounded patients a week, from all sides. Kubuya said that his staff had established an agreement with the leaders of the fighting factions: “We inform the occupiers of the zone that we are going to retrieve a wounded person.” The militias generally respected the M.S.F. as a neutral body, he said, but occasionally there was trouble.

A middle-aged man in an orange T-shirt that read “Happy International Nurses Day” introduced himself as Sifumungu Byenda Bisgod, the head of surgical nursing. A few days earlier, he and his team had informed the M23 that they were retrieving a wounded Wazalendo fighter from the field, but, when they reached a roadblock, the soldiers there pulled everyone out of the vehicles and wanted to execute the man. The crew argued back, and finally the soldiers relented. “This kind of thing happens about twice a week,” he said.

Bisgod said that there had been some early difficulties with putting rivals in the same ward, so now they kept the factions apart. Only nurses and doctors were allowed access to Wazalendo patients. “We tell them to keep a low profile and, once they are feeling better, not to go wandering around, as they are in an M23 zone,” Bisgod said. Some patients had gone into town, been recognized as Wazalendo, and been murdered on the spot. After a patient recovered, the hospital crew informed the M23 that they had to “make a movement,” a euphemism for returning a fighter to his comrades. “We do this without going into too many details about who it is we are taking,” Bisgod said.

In the Wazalendo ward, seven or eight fighters lay in cots. The oldest was thirty-nine, the youngest seventeen. A few had lost limbs, and wore bloody bandages on the stumps. They looked wary, but, after Bisgod introduced me, a fighter named Tchayo agreed to talk. A stern young man in a blue T-shirt with his foot in a cast, he shared a bed with another man who had lost an arm. Tchayo and four others in the room had been wounded in a firefight with the M23 three weeks earlier. One comrade had been killed. Afterward, local farmers had helped the survivors reach a spot where there was phone reception, and they had called the hospital to come pick them up.

Tchayo had been a primary-school teacher before he became a fighter for the C.M.C., nine years ago. He said that he had joined because “Tutsi people have been aggressing us. We are Hutus. They were bringing their animals to eat our crops.”

Tchayo acknowledged that there had been a genocide in Rwanda, “but they have taken their war here,” he said. He mentioned that Tutsi militants had committed a large-scale massacre in his area. “They use the genocide as an excuse,” he said. When I asked what he planned to do when he got better, he replied, “My goal is to go back and do my job, because the enemy has not returned to Rwanda. So I will return to the fight.”

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In a ward about a hundred feet away, a government soldier whom I’ll call Jean lay bandaged all over, breathing with the help of oxygen. Jean, thirty-nine, had been deployed in Sake when it fell to the M23. Along with hundreds of others, he had been taken prisoner and pressed into service for the militia. After two months of training, there was a graduation ceremony, in which more than seven thousand new fighters were paraded before senior leaders. “Makenga came,” Jean said between wheezes. “Nangaa came.” Afterward, the soldiers were deployed to the front lines. On the way, Jean’s vehicle crashed, and he broke some bones and punctured a lung.

He explained that he had a wife and two children back home: “I don’t know anything about them since January.” Tears gathered on his cheeks. I asked how he felt about fighting for the M23. “It drove me crazy,” he replied softly. “You can see me crying. My unit was also my family.”

The malnutrition ward was filled with crying babies and distraught-looking parents. An emaciated man sat by a child stretched out semiconscious on a cot, where two other small children were receiving oxygen. The man wore a dirty jacket and rubber boots, and had unkempt hair. With eyes glistening, he gazed attentively at his child, who looked nearly dead of starvation. The doctor explained that the man and his family had been hiding in the forest for two months, because fighters had taken over their village. They had been surviving on roots, yams, and whatever else they could find. He had five children, but he had left the other four with his wife, to seek medical attention for the weakest one. I asked the doctor if the child could be saved. He said that he hoped so. What would the father do afterward? “He will go back to the forest, because the rest of his family is still there,” the doctor said.

In a filthy schoolhouse across the street, several hundred displaced people were camped out. A wizened community leader told me that they were from a village a few miles outside Mweso. Months earlier, they had fled during fighting between the rival militias. The M23 had ultimately been forced out, but when the villagers returned they discovered that fighters had burned their homes. “When they lose, they take it out on the civilians, and we are Hutu,” the leader explained. For now, he and the other able-bodied men and women were working as day laborers on local farms, earning the equivalent of about fifty cents a day. Were they safe now? I asked. “Here in town it is safe, but outside, in the farms, if the armed men see you, they kill you, even if you don’t have a gun,” he said. In his village, many people had been killed. “They threw them into the toilets,” he said.

As I was leaving Mweso, a pickup truck raced up in front of the hospital. A group of tough-looking young men clambered out and half carried one of their comrades out from the back. He was unsteady on his feet and had burns all over his torso and face. It seemed as if he had come straight from the battlefield. A Congolese man who was travelling with me whispered, “Wazalendo,” and suggested that we move along.

President Kagame’s emissary to the peace talks in the U.S. is Mauro De Lorenzo, an affable forty-nine-year-old who is fluent in five languages and conversant in several more. De Lorenzo grew up in Delaware and started visiting Rwanda in 1998, to research a Ph.D. thesis. He now holds citizenship there. When he speaks about Rwandans, he says “we.”

A few weeks into the new Trump Administration, Kagame sent De Lorenzo to Washington, to promote Rwanda’s interests. He quickly faced competition. Tshisekedi had written Trump a letter, gushing that his election had “ushered in the golden age for America,” and offering access to Congolese minerals in exchange for a security pact. De Lorenzo said that, when he arrived, “I found at least seven different lobbyists hired by different parts of the Congolese government. They were all sending out these proposals. I’ll exaggerate a bit: ‘We will give you twenty-four trillion dollars in Congolese minerals, and we’ll throw in a military base, and in exchange you will conduct a tactical nuclear strike on Kigali.’ ”

The Trump Administration had its own peculiarities. “You basically have the government of the United States and the White House, which are like these reinforced fortresses,” De Lorenzo said. “And then you have Mar-a-Lago, around which oscillates all sorts of asteroids, and where it’s not difficult for even low-level lobbyist types to gain access if they’re noticed on the terrace.” In mid-March, he said, “one of these asteroids finally collides with President Trump, and I heard that Massad Boulos was going to be the African envoy.”

Boulos, a Lebanese American transportation entrepreneur based in Nigeria, had no diplomatic experience, but he had a family link to the White House: his son is married to Tiffany Trump. De Lorenzo recalled that his appointment sent officials scrambling. “Insiders in Washington had been planning different things, and all that disappears—we now have this guy, an in-law,” he said. “Nobody knows what it means. Does it mean he talks to Trump every day? They don’t know. But it does mean he can talk to Presidents and other principals, people you could do business with.”

The pitch that De Lorenzo formulated cast Rwanda as a crucial player in the trade of resources from eastern Congo: “Look, this whole narrative that the war is about minerals—O.K., let’s assume there is interest in minerals, and that we’d like them to come from and go through Rwanda. And there should be nothing wrong with that. The problem is there has never been a state authority in eastern Congo. So let’s us be the place where people will invest in capital-intensive processing activities, which has traditionally eluded Africa.”

De Lorenzo’s conception is echoed in a plan, the Regional Economic Integration Framework, which is now a central feature of Trump’s peace deal. The accord, not so different in spirit from the colonial Berlin Conference, suggests that, rather than fight over the resources of eastern Congo, the various partisans should simply share them.

The Rwandans balked, but Qatar urged them to sign. The Qataris, along with their role as mediators, had a financial interest: they were already partners in a multibillion-dollar deal to turn Rwanda into a regional financial and logistics hub, and the minerals would provide enormous revenue. Rwanda also had experience in transporting and processing Congolese ores, which could help sell the deal to the U.S. A humanitarian expert in the region told me, “The fact is, everyone just wants to keep extracting from the D.R.C., and now President Trump does, too.” He went on, “With Trump, there’s what I call an immunity blanket, meaning ‘You give me what I want, and I’ll give you a pass on human rights.’ ”

Last month, the negotiators gathered in Washington to endorse the framework, but at the last minute Tshisekedi ordered his envoy to withdraw, reportedly because Rwanda would not remove ninety per cent of its troops from eastern Congo. De Lorenzo suggested that some Republicans in D.C. were pleased by the hitch in Boulos’s plan. “There’s Schadenfreude there about him messing things up,” he said. Boulos, he added, was “the Rodney Dangerfield of the Trump Administration—just trying to get a little respect.” But Boulos was persistent, and De Lorenzo, like other observers I talked to, felt that he had no option but to place his faith in him. “I think the only way for the process to move forward is if the U.S. gets behind it,” he said.

In mid-November, Boulos made a series of hopeful announcements: representatives from Congo, Rwanda, and the M23 had initialled the Regional Economic Integration Framework, as part of an agreement that “charts a clear path toward a peace accord.”

The document was not in itself a peace deal; it was a set of eight protocols that an eventual deal should observe. First among them were a prisoner exchange and a mechanism to monitor a ceasefire. Even Boulos acknowledged that these steps would be difficult to implement. “This is not a light switch that you just switch on and off,” he told reporters.

“You two are terrible parents.”

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Previous rounds of talks had also produced an agreement to exchange prisoners, but Tshisekedi had stalled. Corneille Nangaa, of the Congo River Alliance, told me that he believed many of the prisoners were already dead. Another agreement had called for militias to disarm, but, Nangaa predicted, “it will take decades to take away those guns.”

Patrick Muyaya, the D.R.C.’s minister of communication, spoke warily about the peace initiative. “We are making some progress, though not at the speed we would like,” he said. “For there to be real advances, we must insure that the M23 ceases to exist.” Like the Rwandan officials I spoke with, Muyaya insisted that his side was trapped in a fight for survival. “The people have the right to defend themselves if armed men are attacking your mother, your sister,” he said. “Of course, there are abuses. And the President is determined to bring those committing abuses to justice.” He brushed off the idea that the Hutu militias posed a threat: “This is just an excuse used by Rwanda to keep on looting resources.”

Outside observers say that the Wazalendo are growing more radical, and that anti-Tutsi sentiment is increasing. Yet they also note that the M23’s depredations have only made such sentiments worse. The Western diplomat said that Rwanda had an urgent interest in halting the war. “As long as there is conflict, you will have young men growing up in eastern D.R.C. with destabilization of the other as their imperative in life, and you will have opposition politicians in Kinshasa who will exploit that for political gain,” the diplomat said. But the incentives are complicated. Jason Stearns, an academic and a former U.N. investigator who has focussed on the conflict for decades, told me, “People want peace, but it’s not really in the M23’s interests. The same logic applies to Rwanda, but somewhat less so.” If Rwanda disbands the M23 and withdraws its troops from Congo, it loses its ability to project influence across the border. It may also lose a source of revenue. The peace deal offers Rwanda rights to refine and sell Congolese tin and tantalum, but it does not offer gold, the most valuable commodity. “A very large part of Rwanda’s economy relies on the D.R.C., and that could be a challenge in the future if they withdraw,” Stearns said.

It is possible that Washington will threaten targeted sanctions to compel Rwanda to make an agreement. But, the Western diplomat said, “they need to insure that the deal they sign is actually upheld.” The problem is that Tshisekedi is “incapable of upholding anything,” he went on. There is no guarantee that the Wazalendo will abide by an agreement with the M23. And Congo’s national army isn’t strong enough to hold the eastern territory alone, or to defeat the M23. After years of stoking outrage at Rwanda, Tshisekedi may find it politically difficult to make concessions—but he also seems unlikely to step aside. “You’d have to strangle Tshisekedi to get him to leave,” the diplomat said.

If the two sides can maintain a ceasefire, it will ease the crisis. But there will still be more than a hundred militias fighting for minerals and territory in eastern Congo. The diplomat mentioned one at work north of Goma: a vicious insurgent group whose leaders have sworn fealty to ISIS, and whose fighters had a gruesome habit of decapitating villagers. The militants were attracted by the gold mines in the area—and their presence provided Uganda with an excuse to intervene there with its own army. Uganda exports more than three billion dollars in gold a year, most of which comes from one mine in eastern Congo.

For the peace process to succeed, it will have to reverse a psychology of plunder that has afflicted the region for hundreds of years. Many of the people I talked with in Congo wished fervently for a new way of life but seemed barely able to conceive of one. In the hospital in Mweso, I met Irakunda, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of four, who was lying on a bed with children arrayed around her. She wore a bright print dress, and had one foot outstretched and wrapped in a bandage. The Wazalendo had appeared in her village the day before, and she had hidden inside the school. When the fighters began looting, the villagers shouted at them, so they opened fire, and one of the bullets struck her. She recounted all this as if she were describing a natural disaster. When I asked what she thought of the war, she laughed at the question; the war was just a fact of life. Finally, she said, “It’s the reason we are all poor. I am losing, because some people are making war.” ♦

One Saturday morning in early September, I got a WhatsApp video call from eleven strangers locked inside a secretive detention camp in a forest in Ghana. Their faces looked glazed with sweat and stricken with fear. In the background, I could hear birdsong and the drone of insects. An armed guard watched over the group as they huddled around a shared cellphone.

“There are big snakes here, and scorpions!” a male voice with an American accent called out.

“My stomach is really hurting, and we have to beg for food,” another man said.

A third added, “We fear we’ll be tortured and killed.”

One of the men, a car salesman and a real-estate agent from Miami, whom I’ll call Jim, gave me a tour of the scene: an open-air military complex known as Bundase Training Camp, some forty miles from Accra. “I have five U.S.-citizen children, and they don’t know where their father is,” Jim said.

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Just months earlier, one of these men had a job with UPS in Chicago. Another had lived in Houston, where he worked for his mother’s catering business, composed R. & B. music, and babysat his little brothers. Some had lived in the U.S. from an early age. Jim, a political refugee, had come to Miami from Liberia in the early nineties, when he was twenty-three, after his parents were murdered for their tribal and political affiliations during the country’s civil war. Others, including a twenty-one-year-old woman who had fled Togo fearing genital mutilation, had arrived in the U.S. recently, seeking asylum.

All of them had been taken from the United States against their will. Nearly all had been granted forms of legal relief that bar the government from deporting them to their home countries. At the heart of the protections they’d received was one of the most basic and sacrosanct concepts in both U.S. and international law: non-refoulement. This principle means that no nation should intentionally deport or expel people to a place where they are likely to face torture, persecution, death, or other grave harms.

The forest detainees had got my number from an Atlanta-based immigration attorney named Meredyth Yoon, who works as a litigation director for a nonprofit called Asian Americans Advancing Justice. “Traditionally, we focus a lot on immigration detention, and we engage in advocacy on issues affecting Asian American and Pacific Islander communities,” she told me. But, in recent months, Yoon has had to repeatedly reimagine her work, racing to help community members whose loved ones were seized in large-scale ICE raids and working to defend lawful immigrants from unlawful deportations. This spring, she’d agreed to represent Jim after learning that he’d been held in an ICE processing center in Folkston, Georgia, for more than two years. Jim had won asylum and become a lawful permanent resident of the U.S in the nineties. But, in 2011, he’d been convicted of bank fraud and, more than a decade later, ICE had initiated removal proceedings against him and detained him.

In late summer, Yoon learned that ICE had moved Jim to its Alexandria Staging Facility, in central Louisiana, from which detainees tend to get deported. Yoon contacted ICE to find out where the agency was planning to send him. ICE never answered her e-mails. At that point, Yoon told me, “more alarm bells started going off.”

Then, on the morning of September 8th, Jim called Yoon in a panic. “I’m in Ghana!” he cried out. Yoon scrambled to gather information on Jim and the other detainees who were being held with him. Four days later, she and her colleagues filed an urgent lawsuit, sketching the life-or-death fears of five of them. The next morning, I received the call from all eleven individuals held in Bundase Training Camp, who asked me to describe their plight. “They didn’t tell us where we were going,” Jim said that morning. “They just kidnapped us overnight and whisked us out.”

For months, I had been trying to document the Trump Administration’s secretive third-country removals. At first, getting access to any information was daunting. Some of the deportees were held in far-off prisons or detention sites; others had gone into hiding. Friends and relatives in the U.S. often felt terrified of speaking out, fearing retaliation. “I don’t know that the piece you’re contemplating is necessarily writable right now,” a leading lawyer on the topic, Anwen Hughes, of the advocacy group Human Rights First, wrote to me in late July.

Initially, I’d focussed on two groups of third-country deportees, known to human-rights lawyers as the South Sudan Eight and the Eswatini Five. The first group, from countries including Myanmar, Mexico, and Laos, had been deported, in early July, to South Sudan, a nation struggling to recover from a civil war. Days later, the second group—five men from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam, and Yemen, all of whom had lived in the U.S. for many years—had been deported to the southern African nation of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. There, they were detained in a maximum-security prison, without clear justification.

“And this is my room. My parents kept it the way it was when I was little.”

Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby

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These deportees appeared to have been handpicked by the Trump Administration to test a new approach to mass deportation. According to the Department of Homeland Security, all of them had been convicted of serious crimes, including murder. Announcing the flight to Eswatini, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for D.H.S., had called the five deportees “so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back,” a claim that at least one of the countries disavowed. Arguably the most surprising part of these early removals was also the least understood. It wasn’t just that these men were being sent to nations where they had no ties, and to places that were not safe. It was also that, in many cases, men who had completed their sentences in the U.S. years ago were now being subjected to indefinite detention abroad.

The wider strategy of forced third-country transfers had clear policy roots. On January 20th, the first day of Donald Trump’s second term, Trump issued an executive order called “Securing Our Borders,” which, among other things, declared an intention to expand the use of third-country deportations. On February 18th, D.H.S. issued an internal guidance memo, instructing immigration officers to “review for removal” all cases “on the non-detained docket”—meaning anyone with an immigration case who was not in ICE custody. As part of this review, D.H.S. officials would “determine the viability of removal to a third country”—and, if they found that third-country removal was viable, attempt to detain the person. The first large-scale third-country removals occurred that month and targeted newly arrived asylum seekers. Between February 12th and 15th, the U.S. sent two hundred and ninety-nine people—from countries such as Afghanistan, Cameroon, Somalia, and Iran—to Panama. On February 20th and 25th, the U.S. sent an additional two hundred people, including eighty-one children, to Costa Rica. Soon afterward came third-country-deportation flights to Uzbekistan and El Salvador, where more than two hundred and fifty non-Salvadoran immigrants were detained in the brutal Terrorism Confinement Center, also known by its Spanish acronym, CECOT. Some of the men held at CECOT were transferred there as part of another third-country-removal experiment: the President declared that the U.S. had been “invaded” by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, authorizing the removal of supposed gang members. (In June, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg found that the government had violated the rights of those men by not giving them an opportunity to challenge their deportations.)

In late March, a young, gay Guatemalan asylum seeker, known to the court as O.C.G., filed a class-action lawsuit with several other plaintiffs, challenging the new policy of deporting people to third countries without meaningful notice or a chance to contest their removal. According to the complaint, O.C.G. had fled Guatemala because of “multiple death threats on account of his sexuality.” An immigration judge barred his deportation to Guatemala. The Department of Homeland Security then placed him on a bus with some twenty other men and, without issuing a new removal order, deported the group to Mexico. O.C.G. was not able to protest that he also feared persecution and torture in Mexico, where he’d been held hostage and raped while on his journey to the U.S. The lawsuit, known in the courts as D.V.D. v. D.H.S., became the primary legal battlefront for an urgent question: Can the government deport people to third countries without giving them an opportunity to claim that they could be tortured or killed there?

In April, a Massachusetts federal judge, Brian E. Murphy, issued a preliminary injunction, saying that the government must grant people at least fifteen days to challenge third-country deportations. But two months later the Supreme Court granted a stay, reversing Murphy’s order. (Using the so-called shadow docket, the Court offered no public explanation of its reasoning.) The result is that, for now, D.H.S. can deport people to countries not listed on their removal orders without giving them any notice. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, decrying the government’s “flagrantly unlawful conduct.” Sotomayor wrote, “In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution.”

McLaughlin, the D.H.S. spokesperson, had a different response: “Fire up the deportation planes.” Shortly after the ruling came down, ICE deported the South Sudan Eight and the Eswatini Five. Among those sent to Eswatini was Orville Etoria, a sixty-two-year-old man who’d lived in New York for nearly fifty years.

In late August, I met with Etoria’s aunt Margaret McKen at her home in Canarsie, Brooklyn. A professor at Hunter College’s School of Education, McKen confessed that she was reluctant to talk with me. (I agreed to use her maiden name.) “I’ve been a naturalized citizen for thirty years, and I don’t even have a parking ticket, but you never know what they can do to you,” she said. “I’ve started to have a phobia that ICE will come and break down my door.”

Still, McKen felt that the public ought to know what had happened to her nephew, and who he was. Born in Jamaica, Etoria came to Brooklyn at the age of twelve, in 1976. He lived with his mother in Crown Heights, where she worked at a day-care center. As a young adult, Etoria suffered from psychiatric problems. In 1997, he was convicted of second-degree murder, for shooting a man in a leather-goods store, and received a sentence of twenty-five years to life. Eventually, an immigration judge issued an order of removal against him, meaning that he could be deported once he got out of prison.

Etoria had been convicted of a serious crime, but, McKen said, he had evolved as a person. While incarcerated, Etoria had earned a bachelor’s degree in behavioral science and worked toward a master’s in divinity. After his release, in 2021, he got a job at a homeless shelter in Queens, helping to get health care and housing for men who needed support, as he once had. He lived in a three-story brownstone, which he shared with his mother and one of his two adult sons.

They were a close-knit family, McKen told me, noting that, upon his release, Etoria had cared for his mother through a terminal illness. “When Orville was in prison, his mom was like the mailman—rain, sleet, or snow, she’d always travel to see him,” McKen said. “When he came home, he eased his mother’s burden, cleaning the house, buying groceries, and cooking her oxtail and salmon.” More recently, McKen recalled, “He got a car, and he told me, ‘I’m paying my own water bill!’ ”

At a routine ICE check-in this past spring, an agent told Etoria that he had ninety days to prepare his Jamaican passport. Shortly after he reported back to ICE, in June, McKen got a call from one of Etoria’s sons, saying, “They detained him and he’s not coming home!” She tracked Etoria’s whereabouts, using ICE’s online locator, as he was transferred from Manhattan’s Federal Plaza to Orange County, New York, and then back to Manhattan. She arranged for relatives in Jamaica to prepare a place for him to stay, in case he was sent back there.

Then Etoria vanished from the ICE tracker. McKen panicked. “God, are you going to send us a message?” she asked. He had been missing for more than two weeks when, one morning, McKen looked at her phone and saw an image that made her jump: Etoria’s face, in an online news dispatch. McKen clicked on the story. She found her way to McLaughlin’s announcement that Orville and four other “barbaric” men had been deported to Eswatini.

“Orville isn’t a monster,” McKen told me. “We get it—we know what he did was wrong. We raised our children to respect that there are consequences. But, if you paid for those consequences once already, why a second time? It’s a political ploy, to keep us in line. It’s them saying, ‘I have the power to destroy you.’ ”

McKen called the office of Jamaica’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade and learned that the country had not declined to take Etoria back. The minister implied online that the government had not even been asked. McKen couldn’t reach Etoria in Eswatini. “We are wondering if we will ever see him alive again,” she said.

McKen wondered, too, who else the Trump Administration might deport this way. It had started off its third-country removals with men like Etoria, who had served out criminal sentences. But soon she saw more third-country removals unfolding in the news, affecting a broader group. Less than a week after our conversation, news broke about the third-country deportations to Ghana, which included men and women who’d never been charged with any crime.

On September 12th, Meredyth Yoon and her colleagues filed their lawsuit on behalf of five of the people who’d been sent to Ghana. The attorneys pleaded that their clients were “now in immediate danger of being sent on, within hours, to their countries of origin,” despite the fact that immigration judges acknowledged that they would likely face persecution or torture there.

Late that night, I spoke to Yoon. She told me, “It’s absolutely shocking and illegal. And it fits this Administration’s general pattern—draconian, cruel processes that create a spectacle and coerce people into leaving of their own accord.” She added, “I hope we can do something. I hope we can stop this train.”

The next morning, I received the call from Yoon’s clients in the Ghanaian military camp. “Here, it’s all bushes and forest,” Jim told me. He wanted to start his story back in Louisiana, where a violent removal operation had taken place in the dark on September 5th. “They came to our cell,” he said, “and woke us in the middle of the night.”

Jim had asked the agents where they were taking him. They refused to answer. “I need to talk to my attorney,” Jim said, adding, as Yoon had advised, “I fear for my life if sent back to Liberia.” An agent called over a group of colleagues. “They punched me—I have bruises right now from it—and they kicked me,” Jim told me. “Then they put me on the ground, handcuffed me, and put me in a straitjacket.” He’d wept as they dragged him through the dark onto a tarmac. Other men in full-body restraints and chains were also being forced onto the flight, screaming and crying.

“Sir, all I asked is to speak to an attorney because I fear for my life,” Jim repeated. At that point, he told me, the agents carried him “like cargo” onto the military plane. “That’s what you get for not coöperating,” one of the agents said, according to Jim.

As Jim spoke, other men crowded around the phone, calling out similar stories. A heavyset Chicago resident, T.L., confirmed the violence of ICE’s initial removal. “They beat me up and punched me to the ground,” T.L. told me. He’d come to the U.S. years ago, fleeing political persecution in Nigeria. He made a good life for himself in Chicago, and had children; he found work as a cleaner in a hospital and at UPS. But, in 2022, he was sentenced to two and a half years in federal prison, for bank fraud. When he got out, he said, ICE agents instantly detained him.

T.L. fought his deportation, and a judge granted him relief under the Convention Against Torture (CAT), agreeing that T.L. was “more likely than not” to face torture in Nigeria and barring the government from sending him back there. Protection by way of CAT—and a similar status known as “withholding of removal”—doesn’t include the full benefits of asylum, such as a path to citizenship. But typically, under both Republican and Democratic Administrations, people granted these forms of relief have been allowed to keep living in the U.S. Technically, they could be deported to a country where they did not have credible fears of torture or persecution, but that rarely happened, and, when it did, it required a series of careful steps. (The American Immigration Council has attested that a mere 1.6 per cent of people who were granted withholding of removal in 2017 were deported to a third country that year.) Clear due-process rights governed such removals. “But then, when the ICE agents came for me,” T.L. said, “no laws worked.”

Orville Etoria, who’d lived in New York for nearly fifty years, was deported to a prison in Eswatini before being returned to his home country of Jamaica.Photograph by Destinee Condison for The New Yorker

T.L. told me that he refused to board the ICE flight on September 5th without speaking to his attorney. He said that he’d also been placed in full-body restraints and dragged onto the plane by ICE agents. T.L. and Jim both told me that the agents had said, “Either you go the easy way or you go the hard way.” Trump used similar phrasing earlier this year, in a promotional video for a new Customs and Border Protection app that allows immigrants to declare their intent to self-deport, saying, “People in our country illegally can self-deport the easy way or they can get deported the hard way, and that’s not pleasant.”

In a statement to The New Yorker, McLaughlin, the D.H.S. spokesperson, said, “Any claim that ICE personnel ‘beat,’ ‘kick,’ or ‘drag’ detainees or use ‘straitjackets’ is categorically false.” She also wrote, “Every single detainee receives due process. Get a grip.” Of the people who were sent to Ghana, she added, “Many of these were heinous criminals with rap sheets that included injury to a child, robbery, aggravated assault, and fraud.”

But the group in Bundase Training Camp also included people such as D.A., a Nigerian human-rights advocate who’d never been convicted of a crime. In Nigeria, his work on behalf of tribal groups facing displacement by the government had led to death threats. Eventually, he’d sought asylum in the U.S., and an immigration judge granted D.A. protection from deportation to Nigeria through CAT, affirming his fear of torture. But, on September 5th, he said, he was beaten and forced onto the flight. D.A. recalled an ICE agent telling him, “Your ass is getting on the plane.” He responded, “You’re abusing your badge.”

As we spoke, D.A. looked terrified. “I did everything possible to try to do the right thing,” he told me, emphasizing that he’d followed U.S. asylum law. He is married to a U.S. citizen from Texas. “Today, they brought a Nigerian officer from the consulate to see me!” he said. “I want the people of the United States to know my life is in danger—not just back home in Nigeria but also in Ghana.”

As D.A. and others panned the camera across the camp, I noticed several women standing in the group. I asked if they, too, wished to speak. A woman whom I’ll call Miriam stepped forward. She had lived in Lomé, the capital city of Togo, where, she explained, in a warm, gentle voice, she’d studied marketing, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and hoped for a career in the import-export business.

But, when Miriam was in her twenties, her life took a turn. Her relatives expected her to return to her father’s ancestral village, to submit to ritual genital mutilation. She refused and escaped to Ghana, where, she said, an uncle offered her protection but raped her instead. She tried hiding in another city in Togo, she recounted, but relatives found her there and tortured her for days. Finally, Miriam fled to the U.S., taking a flight to Brazil and trekking across more than a dozen borders to reach Texas. “I fought as best I could,” she told me. An immigration judge in Arizona granted her withholding of removal. She assumed this meant safety. “But instead they just deported us,” she said.

Miriam ushered forward the youngest person in the group, a slender woman with braids who stood there putting on a brave face. “She’s only twenty-one years old,” Miriam said, of the woman, who was also from Togo.

The twenty-one-year-old waved. She did not speak English, but others interpreted. She’d arrived in the U.S. seeking asylum last November. An immigration judge granted her withholding of removal. I later obtained her account in writing, translated by another detainee. “I was forced to go through female genital mutilation for them to give me to an old man for a marriage which I refused,” it read. “I ran to the U.S. to save my life.”

One result of the surge in third-country deportations has been the creation of a detective agency of sorts, comprising attorneys, human-rights groups, and flight-tracking experts. Together, they’ve been trying to solve the mystery of who is being deported, and to where, and when.

The flight trackers are often the first to warn that a deportation is afoot. Their digging originated with the work of a retired JPMorgan Chase executive named Tom Cartwright, who, in 2020, took up a new volunteer effort: using publicly available aviation data to track ICE flights. Human Rights First has formalized and expanded Cartwright’s log, tallying more than seventeen hundred deportation flights in the first nine months of the second Trump Administration. “Just keeping up has been a monumental effort,” Savitri Arvey, a refugee-protection expert working on the project, told me.

Arvey gave me an example. “Late Wednesday night, there was a flight out of J.F.K. with all the characteristics of a third-country removal to Uzbekistan,” she told me. “It wasn’t the normal flight number for flights to Uzbekistan, and we saw that the plane was parked on the tarmac, not at the gate, and it left six hours late,” she said. “The stars align with a repatriation, but we’re digging to get confirmation, since it’s all been a mystery.” Unless a person on a deportation flight calls someone in the U.S., Arvey said, that person’s fate remains “a total black hole.”

The State Department declined to comment on the details of its diplomatic communications with other governments. But the U.S. has reportedly sought third-country-deportation agreements with nations including Ukraine, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Uganda, and Kosovo, sometimes threatening countries with economic or diplomatic consequences if they don’t oblige. In court, ICE has invoked agreements for which no records were apparent. I obtained a sworn declaration from an ICE officer which stated that “the U.S. Department of State currently has a valid agreement with Bolivia to accept third country removals.” The officer attested that ICE had served a young Colombian woman with “notice of removal to Bolivia” and that D.H.S. had scheduled her flight. But the woman’s lawyer told me that she could find no public reports or evidence of such a deal. The lawyer won her client’s release after an ICE official admitted in court that the woman could not, in fact, be sent to Bolivia.

The financial incentives driving these agreements have also been hidden from public view. Last March, the Trump Administration paid El Salvador more than four million dollars to imprison non-Salvadoran deportees. But in most places the numbers remain undisclosed. I obtained a copy of the “memorandum of understanding” that the U.S. government signed with Eswatini, revealing that the U.S. had agreed to pay the country more than five million dollars in exchange for accepting up to a hundred and sixty foreign-national deportees. I also reviewed a copy of the deal struck with Rwanda: in that instance, the U.S. pledged $7.5 million in exchange for taking up to two hundred and fifty deportees. Both Eswatini and Rwanda made a commitment to “prevention of refoulement.” In June, two activist groups, the National Immigration Litigation Alliance and Refugees International, sued the State Department, seeking the release of deportation agreements with a half-dozen countries. In the lawsuit, which is ongoing, the groups argue that the government shirked its duty to fulfill their Freedom of Information Act requests, leaving critical information “shrouded from public view.”

In Eswatini, where Orville Etoria and four other men had been detained, Etoria’s family and a group of U.S. advocates found a local lawyer named Sibusiso Magnificent Nhlabatsi to take up their cause. “These men haven’t committed any crime in Swaziland, and they finished their sentence in the U.S., so under what circumstances are they being detained without access to counsel?” Nhlabatsi asked me in September. “It’s a textbook case of kidnapping and human trafficking, at the center of which is the United States, with Swaziland as an active accomplice.”

When Nhlabatsi first went to visit the men, he told me, “I thought I’d walk into the prison, see these men, help out, and that would be the end of the matter.” But the prison deputy denied him access to them, saying that they hadn’t yet had a chance to reach their families. Nhlabatsi returned the following week, and was told to come back the next day. When he returned again, he was informed that the men had refused to see him. Later in the day, Etoria and the others called home, and all said that they had not been told of such a visit.

On July 31st, Nhlabatsi filed a habeas petition in a court in Eswatini, asserting the men’s right to legal counsel. “The right to legal representation is not a privilege to be granted at the convenience of the correctional services, but a non-negotiable right that attaches from the moment of detention,” he wrote. But, on multiple occasions, the government ignored its legal deadline to respond to the case. When Nhlabatsi was slated to appear in court in mid-September, the court went into recess without informing him. “These men have a right to a fair hearing, and the right to be presumed innocent, and the right to a speedy trial,” Nhlabatsi told me. “I cannot let this injustice go unchallenged.”

Nhlabatsi was frustrated. He knew, too, that he was risking his life to stand up for these men. In 2023, his mentor, a prominent human-rights lawyer and pro-democracy activist named Thulani Maseko, was shot dead in front of his wife and children, after years of advocating for an end to Eswatini’s monarchy. Now that Nhlabatsi was in the local press defending the U.S. deportees’ basic right to counsel, he was getting regular calls from friends. “They weren’t encouraging me,” Nhlabatsi told me. “They were saying, ‘Are you sure you’re safe?’ ”

Then, in late September, I got an update from Etoria’s lawyer in Brooklyn, Mia Unger, of the Legal Aid Society. He had just been released, and was the first person to make it out of Eswatini’s black site. He was nervous about speaking out—the Trump Administration had described him to the public as “barbaric,” and he worried about the repercussions for his family. But, eventually, he decided that he would talk to a journalist for the first time.

When I reached Etoria, I learned that he had been my near-neighbor in Brooklyn. We spent our weekends in the same parts of Prospect Park, enjoying the people-watching. “I love Eastern Parkway—just sitting on the benches under the trees in the summertime, watching kids go by on their bikes and families hanging out,” he told me. “New York is what I know.”

When Etoria showed up to his ICE check-in last June, he knew immediately that things had changed. “I gave my passport to the officer, and he said, ‘Step to the back wall,’ ” he told me. At 26 Federal Plaza, in lower Manhattan, he slept on the floor. “That place was too filthy for any human being to live,” he said. From there, he was punted between ICE facilities and finally taken to the El Paso Service Processing Center, in Texas.

The true shock came soon after. On July 14th, Etoria was called down to intake with a group of men of diverse nationalities. He assumed that they’d be deported to their respective countries. They walked onto the tarmac. “For real, I thought I was going to Jamaica,” Etoria told me. “Why would I think I was going anywhere else?”

The men boarded the ICE flight in shackles. The idea of returning to Jamaica felt, to Etoria, like “an unimaginable loss.” Someone asked, “Where are we going?” An agent replied, “The first flight is six hours, and then the second flight is eight hours.” Etoria felt his stomach drop. They stopped in Djibouti, where the men were transferred onto a military cargo plane. “It was like something you’d see in a movie, as if we were some notorious gangsters,” Etoria said. Roughly a half hour before that flight landed, the men learned their true destination. “The officer came around wanting us to sign a paper saying we agreed to go to Eswatini,” he told me. “I’d never even heard of Eswatini!” Panicked, he refused to sign.

“We all expressed the same disconnect from reality in that moment,” Etoria said. He told me that an ICE official had snapped paparazzi-style photographs as he stepped off the plane, still wearing chains. He felt like an unwilling prop in an ad for the Trump Administration. “You could tell it was a charade, all for show, so that they could use it and say, ‘Look what we did,’ ” he said.

“To be honest,” Etoria added, “it helped me imagine how the slaves might have felt, going to another land in shackles and chains—that loneliness, that disconnect, that sense of loss.”

Local guards shuttled the group to Matsapha Correctional Complex, a maximum-security prison. No one explained the grounds on which the men were being held. At first, Etoria said, the guards treated the U.S. deportees with suspicion. “They’d seen a military plane come onto their land—the kind of plane that drops bombs on people and takes troops to war—and they were told, ‘These five men are people to be afraid of.’ But, over time, we conversed with the guards, and they could see that they’d been lied to about who we really were.” Soon, the guards gave the men a chessboard. They fielded Etoria’s complaints about the food, although it hardly improved. “For the first three days, we ate only porridge, and I raised my hand real quick and said, ‘No more!’ ” Etoria told me.

The Eswatini Five had only occasional monitored calls to their families and little to no access to their lawyers in the U.S. Mostly, they spent time in their cells. “We looked up at the ceiling a lot, and we talked about our families,” Etoria said. “We tried to help each other release the thoughts that were inside of us that were screaming to come out, the things that meant the most to us, and family was the No. 1 thing. The second-biggest thing was realizing that our lives had meaning—that we weren’t the bad, bad people that society had told us we were.”

“Everything we’re eating was trapped by Rufus.”

Cartoon by Michael Maslin

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Weeks passed. One day in late summer, officials from the International Organization for Migration visited the group. They brought “mental-health” provisions: badminton equipment, a basketball, Ping-Pong paddles, and five novels. Etoria stressed that what he really needed for his mental health was freedom. Soon after, he said, I.O.M. informed him that he would soon be able to return to Jamaica. On September 21st, he boarded the first in a series of four commercial flights that brought him to the island. No one knows how much money the U.S. government spent on this elaborate detention detour to Africa.

In Jamaica, Etoria has wondered about the men left behind: the Eswatini Four. They remain imprisoned without explanation, and without clear paths to repatriation. Ten more people have been added to the group. “There is something sinister going on here, and something has been taken from my spirit that I might never get back,” Etoria said. In mid-October, his Cuban cellmate, Roberto Mosquera del Peral, began a monthlong hunger strike. “Roberto is an unbelievably kind dude, who likes to analyze stuff with a critical mind,” Etoria said. Mosquera del Peral’s attorney, Alma David, of Novo Legal Group, told me during the strike, “I’m very worried—he has been in pain and looks very thin.”

Eswatini has continued to rebuff Nhlabatsi’s attempts to meet with the detained people. He finally won his habeas case in front of a judge, only to have the government file an appeal. In response to Mosquera del Peral’s hunger strike, Eswatini issued a press release. “The third country national was found to be in good health and spirits,” it read. “He did, however, mention that he was currently fasting and praying because he was missing his family.”

When we spoke recently, Etoria was hunkered down without electricity in the home where he’s been living in Jamaica. His phone was dying, and Hurricane Melissa—a Category 5 storm—was headed toward the island. He worried about not having stocked up on groceries. “I’ll just rough it out,” he told me. Since landing in Jamaica, he said, he has felt completely lost. “I’m trying to catch up, trying to fit in, but, at my age, it’s not easy to get a job here,” he said.

Etoria hopes that, at some point, he can confront the U.S. government about his treatment. But, even more so, he wishes that he could speak to African leaders, as a Black man who feels he was sent across the Middle Passage in reverse. “I want to say, to all the African nations who are taking people into their country in chains and shackles, it’s not a good picture,” he said. “You’re hurting these people, spiritually and emotionally. I don’t just want Eswatini to hear it. I want Ghana to hear it. I want South Sudan to hear it. I want Rwanda and Uganda to hear it.” He paused. “Please,” Etoria said, “let the Trump Administration take care of its own dirty work.”

On a recent evening, I spoke again to Meredyth Yoon, who told me that another deportation flight from the U.S. to Ghana—she believed it to be the fourth—had just landed. Among the latest deportees was a Maryland nurse named Rabbiatu Kuyateh, who’d lived in the U.S. for roughly thirty years and has never faced criminal charges. Kuyateh had won withholding of removal, convincing an immigration judge that she’d likely face serious harm in her native Sierra Leone. Even so, she was shackled and sent to Ghana, where she and others were held under armed guard at a hotel near Accra. Yoon had been on the phone with Kuyateh and other detainees, she said, when Ghanaian officials came to the hotel and dragged Kuyateh away. They put her on a flight to Sierra Leone.

Since we’d first spoken, Yoon had been trying to defend the rights of dozens of people who’d been deported to Ghana. In mid-September, she and her colleagues had appeared in U.S. district court, where they argued that members of the first group of deportees should be returned, swiftly, to America. At the time, eleven men and women were still held at Bundase Training Camp; they were hearing rumors that at any moment they could be sent back to their home countries, from which the U.S. government had promised them protection. “There is still time to act,” Lee Gelernt, who had joined the case from the American Civil Liberties Union, had pleaded. “We would implore you to do some kind of relief now.”

The Justice Department attorney, Elianis Perez, did not contest the basic fact of the removals. Instead, she insisted that the U.S. had obtained “diplomatic assurances” that Ghana would comply with the Convention Against Torture and other safeguards. Yet one member of the group—a bisexual Gambian man who had been granted protection under CAT by a U.S. immigration judge—had already been returned to his home country.

“How is that O.K.?” the judge, Tanya Chutkan, asked.

“Your Honor, the United States is not saying that this is O.K.,” Perez replied. “What the government has been trying to explain to the court is that the United States does not have the power to tell Ghana what to do.”

Two days later, Chutkan issued her decision. The deportations “appear to be part of a pattern and widespread effort to evade the government’s legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly,” she wrote. Even so, she concluded, her “hands are tied.” The court lacked the jurisdiction to prevent Yoon and Gelernt’s clients from being deported by Ghana to their home countries. The resulting policy, Gelernt told me, is “unprecedented and wholly at odds with the humane discretion exercised by past Administrations of both parties.”

I wondered what would become of the terrified men and women I’d talked to in Bundase Training Camp. I soon found out. When I got hold of Jim, in early October, he and nine of the other people I’d spoken with had been placed in vehicles and driven out of the camp, to the border of Togo. Among them was Miriam, who feared torture or death if she was forced to return there, and the twenty-one-year-old Togolese woman who had also fled genital mutilation.

“Right now, we’re in Togo illegally!” Jim told me. He explained that Ghanaian immigration officials had left the group with Togolese officials who, rather than affording them proper documentation, had pushed them quietly across the border. “They passed us through the back door into Togo, but we aren’t invisible, and we’re an easy target for the cops,” he said. “We don’t speak the language here, and we have no money.” His family had tried to send him funds through Western Union. But he couldn’t easily obtain them, he said, because the U.S. government had confiscated his I.D. He and others in the group had to beg strangers to get the funds, for a cut of the cash.

Jim told me that he was trying to stay indoors, for fear of being detained or extorted by officials in Togo. But, on occasion, he’d been sneaking out to the ocean, to listen to the waves. He worried most about the Togolese women in their group. “They cried so helplessly, and they were scrambling and running for their lives,” Jim told me. “They’ve gone underground.”

A few days later, I spoke to Miriam, who was hiding in a boarding room. A local journalist had learned Miriam’s real name and published it on social media. Soon afterward, her cousin began receiving ominous calls from strangers, asking, “Where is Miriam?” She sobbed as we spoke.

“This morning, I drank a porridge, and it’s the only food I’ve had,” she told me. In her hiding place, she’d been rehashing her trajectory. She’d been shipped like cargo “from Arizona to Louisiana, and then Louisiana to Ghana, and then Ghana to Togo,” she said. “ICE treated us like animals, handcuffed us, and wouldn’t let us eat—just bread and water.”

At Bundase Training Camp, “they didn’t tell us that they would take us to Togo,” Miriam continued. She had tried to confront the Ghanaian officials as they shoved her group across the border. “Why are you doing this? You’re supposed to protect us, as a third country!” Miriam pleaded. An officer, she told me, said, “Shut up. We have to respect the orders we were given.” Some of the detained men were told they’d be shot if they tried to escape.

Back in May, Miriam told me, she’d been elated to receive protection from a U.S. immigration judge. She thought that this offer of refuge was what defined the United States. It was true, I told her. After the last British ship left New York Harbor in 1783, George Washington and his officers famously made a toast: “May America be an Asylum to the persecuted of the earth!”

“As I’m talking to you right now, I don’t know what will happen to me,” Miriam said. But, for the moment, she had one wish: “I need other people to know that this is my true condition. I am not free.” ♦

In September, 1639, John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, recorded in his journal a dreadful tale of Puritan true crime. One Robert Keayne had prospered as a London merchant before his immigration to Boston, where he did brisk custom as a shopkeeper and maintained a pious reputation as an “ancient professor of the gospel.” Now he stood trial for the “very evil” sale of “foreign commodities” at prices that exceeded the sum he had paid for them. For the sin of a standard retail markup, he faced excommunication.

A tearful Keayne bewailed his “covetous and corrupt heart” but claimed to have been misled. The situation, the magistrates conceded, was tricky. Profit-taking was not technically illegal, and the just appraisal of goods remained a redoubtable challenge despite the best efforts of wise men. Keayne’s sentence was commuted to a two-hundred-pound fine and a remedial sermon: Scripture showed that it was a “false principle” to believe “that a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he can.” Fourteen years later, Keayne devoted his final testament to a hundred-and-fifty-eight-page justification of his commercial activities as a service to his community and to God. He wanted his two hundred pounds back, to be pledged as a donation to Harvard.

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Sven Beckert, a prize-winning professor of history at Harvard, opens his colossal “Capitalism: A Global History” (Penguin Press) with the observation that Keayne’s penchant for arbitrage now “appears unexceptional, even natural.” In the grand scheme of things, he continues, this attitude has only recently come into vogue, and he was motivated to inquire after its provenance by an “urgent sense that we need to understand this almost geological force shaping our lives.” There isn’t much of a market, Beckert has noticed, for the extended reconsideration of feudalism or of hunting and gathering, but “capitalism provokes visceral reactions.”

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Beckert identifies “two diametrically opposed stories”: capitalism either deserves credit for the rise in living standards and longevity or stands condemned as an “insatiable demon.” His book addresses “a deep frustration that so many of the stories we tell about capitalism are incomplete and sometimes just plain wrong.” He invites readers to study capitalism “with a sense of wonder, surprise, and astonishment—not because it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but because of its world-shaping power, and because understanding it is crucial to navigating our shared future.”

In the course of the next eleven hundred pages, this sales pitch starts to seem a little disingenuous. By the time Beckert arrives at our “neoliberal” era, he has given himself over to open lamentation: everything has been ruthlessly priced, “even human reproduction.” Dating apps have transformed love and sex into marketable goods; he resurrects “hookup culture,” a moral panic one no longer hears much about, as “a perfect supplement to the neoliberal age.” But for Beckert there’s a slippery slope between Keayne’s shop and the emerging market the historian sees for “recordings of our brain waves.” Capitalism “draws its energy,” he concludes, “by drilling ever deeper into our bodies, our minds, and our most intimate social relations—our very humanity.”

The endgame of capitalism, in his account, is a world where “almost nothing escaped commodification.” Beckert here refers to commodities in the loose, colloquial sense of “products that can be bought and sold,” but for the most part he uses the word as the technical term for a tradable good, like grain or copper, that is standardized, fungible, and divisible into arbitrary quantities. “Capitalism: A Global History” is both a history of the commodity and an example of one. Its substance is homogenous, uniform, and interchangeable, as if it had been extruded page by page to meet the needs of procurers at any scale. Beckert has evidently assessed the consumer landscape—a sluggish demand for exegeses of feudalism, a frothy bubble for tracts that put capitalism in its place—and banked on product-market fit. He explicitly frames his own enterprise as a speculative “wager,” a bet that capitalism’s “history—all of it—might be understood, if not wholly contained, between two book covers.”

If his competitors’ merchandise is defective, it is because the attempt to tie capitalism to “any monocausal explanation, any fragment—an institution, a technology, a nation—does not explain much.” Beckert believes that capitalism cannot be reduced to a discrete essence. It has neither a fixed origin nor a fixed trajectory. It is compatible with a variety of forms of political and social life, and it is never the same from place to place or moment to moment. It is not the work of single actors but the nexus of all human action.

One might wonder, Beckert allows, whether it’s worth retaining a concept subject to so much drift. And yet he takes the fact that the word “capitalism” exists as an indication that it must refer to something. But how to provide a working definition while “eschewing static, essentializing, excessively abstract, or presentist approaches”? His solution is to return with one hand what he has taken away with the other. Capitalism has no transhistorical direction, but it nevertheless embodies a “unique logic”: the “tendency to grow, flow, and permeate all areas of activity was age-old, an essential, irreducible quality of capitalism.” Capitalism has no essence, except, actually, its “essence was a globe-spanning creep that produced a connected diversity.” It is the manifestation of ravenous appetite. What Beckert exemplifies here is how “capitalism” very often functions in the academic humanities: as a way to show that the world’s evils—imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, inequality, exploitation, extraction, climate change, social media, dating apps, insomnia, a general feeling of unremitting pressure—are not only evil in their own right but the franchises of a singularly evil phenomenon.

Social-media sophisticates who offhandedly blame capitalism—or, more urbanely, “late capitalism”—for all that ails us might nevertheless hesitate to take their experience as a part of a story that runs through nineteen-eighties Japan, nineteen-seventies Sweden, nineteen-fifties Detroit, nineteenth-century Manchester, eighteenth-century Barbados, and seventeenth-century Java. That’s a challenge Beckert takes up. When he speaks of capitalism’s “connected diversity,” he is suggesting that any apparent differences are merely the local epiphenomena of capitalist cunning.

The book’s colonial-era prelude, he notes, precedes the coinage of “capitalism” by a few hundred years, but his story properly begins even earlier, with the twelfth-century Yemeni port of Aden. It was, he writes, “quite literally, a fortified node of capital, an island of capitalists” where Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu merchants linked the medieval Arab world with India. Their métier was neither production nor cultivation but acquisition and exchange.

Although trade itself, Beckert grants, was ancient, it had long been reined in by the norms and customs of local participants. In pre-capitalist societies, he continues, decent folk were apparently content to reap what they had sown—he reckons that “producing for one’s own use was timeless”—and it was the birthright of élites to expropriate any surplus. Considerable wealth may have accrued to these chieftains and warlords, but Beckert argues that, in contrast with the workings of capitalism, their “reshuffling of resources” was candid and legible. Even genocidal larceny, in his account, was carried out in harmony with the prevailing ethos of use: the nomadic conqueror Timur ransacked Central Asia, but he devoted his plunder to the construction of “magnificent mosques and madrassas,” making his methods “essentially different from capital owners.” For Beckert, merchants like those of Aden, who used their resources only as a means to capture further resources, were a “categorically different” breed.

In the next few hundred years, these merchant communities expanded around the globe. Unlike earlier traders, who undertook arduous journeys to far-flung depots, such merchants stayed home and put “flexible, fungible capital” to work in the marketplace. Without ties to land or custom, they “embodied the logic of ever-continuing expansion,” guided by the “truly exotic principle” of accumulation for its own sake. These alien values entrenched themselves, Beckert writes, because capital wielded “a truly extraordinary development of self-mystification,” a power he compares to “rogue artificial intelligence.”

Long-distance traders exposed themselves to considerable risk; where neighbors might be bound by reciprocal obligations, foreigners weren’t. And so this burgeoning merchant class formed “tight-knit communities out of business necessity.” Some of them were able to leverage existing social infrastructure: the letters of Aden’s Jewish traders, Beckert reports, “show a sophisticated system for extending credit and sharing risk that was predicated largely on ties of kinship and personal repute.” Such professional strangers, whose primary loyalty was to the incorporeal realm of pure commerce, aroused “suspicion by commoners and elites alike.” Certainly there’s a long and distinguished tradition of associating Jewish arrivistes with entrepreneurialism, avarice, and clannishness. The “Jewish Question” was a preoccupation of Karl Marx’s (“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money”), and Jewry played an important role in the opening volume of the German scholar Werner Sombart’s vast study “Modern Capitalism,” which appeared in 1902 and was the first major book to grapple with something called “capitalism” as such. Sombart, who saw a “racial predisposition” at work, would also coin the term “late capitalism.”

In Beckert’s view, the “arguably parasitical activity” of capital-rich traders in the quantitative service of “unprecedented accumulation” made them “seedlings of a qualitatively different world.” This new dawn arrived around the sixteenth century, when “economic life was on the verge of its most dramatic shape-shift since the advent of sedentary agriculture.” He dubs this period—when it became plausible to describe economic activity in planetary terms—the “great connecting.” What he sees emerging is what Immanuel Wallerstein, in the nineteen-seventies, called the “world system.” In Wallerstein’s scheme, a globalized economy, with a division of labor between a productive “core” and an exploited “periphery,” wasn’t just capitalism’s hothouse; it was capitalism.

World-systems theory was controversial. The institutional and economic structures of the “great connecting” era—colonial monopolies, charter operations, fiscal-military states, protectionism—have conventionally been gathered under the banner of mercantilism. Capitalism, in contrast, was thought to be about free markets. Beckert, following Wallerstein and the French historian Fernand Braudel, thinks otherwise. Markets had long been a durable feature of a variety of regimes. Capitalism, by contrast, is to be seen as a collusive, state-sponsored attempt to bring markets under control. Capitalists may have congratulated themselves on their ability to predict and hedge against uncertainty, but what they really did was insure that systemic risk was off-loaded to those at the margins.

As he did in his 2014 book, “Empire of Cotton,” Beckert calls this post-feudalist turn “war capitalism,” using Barbados as a primary exhibit. The Caribbean island had “no family-centered subsistence production, no systems of mutual dependence”—nothing to prevent its transformation into “one giant sugar plantation” wholly administered by the planter class. The trade between the periphery and the core was jury-rigged to favor the latter. In zones like Barbados, laborers were conscripted or enslaved to produce raw materials (sugar, cotton, silver) for export to the core at artificially suppressed prices. In zones like Britain, labor was relatively uncoerced, and stronger institutions protected higher-margin activities such as manufacturing and finance. For Wallerstein, these were the necessary and sufficient conditions to render capitalism a self-perpetuating machine.

Beckert has taken up the terms of analysis Wallerstein favored, and he is right to point out that the Caribbean was long neglected by Eurocentric historians. But mechanistic accounts, which leave no room for human agency, have gone out of fashion, and so Beckert distances himself from Wallerstein’s model. Capitalism, for Beckert, is not “a process whose internal logic determines its eventual outcome”; instead, like “everything with a history, capitalism is made by people.”

“He looks guilty.”

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As a social historian, Beckert has political and narrative commitments to “actor-centered” chronicles. He’s helped by his sometimes slippery definition of commodities. Where Wallerstein used the word literally, to refer to sugar, say, or iron, Beckert takes the plantation economy as ground zero for the grand aspiration “to commodify everything.” This certainly sounds actor-centered, but it mostly functions as a cosmetic gloss on a story of structural inevitability. What happened in Barbados, he proposes, “prototyped the coming capitalist utopia of markets becoming the sole arbiter of human affairs.” And so the immense brutality of the Barbadian plantation, in his telling, prefigures contemporary “hookup culture.”

The desire to have it both ways—to genuflect to agency while casting structure as the man behind the curtain—extends to the way Beckert plays with the schemes of historical continuity and rupture. He uses variants of the words “radical” or “unprecedented” around two hundred times. It’s all part of his attempt to “denaturalize” capitalism, to insist that its persistence was not foreordained. Yet his metaphors for capitalism are drawn almost exclusively from the natural world: before it “broke through the canopy” as a tree, with “root, trunk, and leaves,” it appeared as a “sprout” and a “taproot”; when it is not a “predatory cuckoo,” depositing its eggs in the nests of other birds, it is an “almost geological force” of “tectonic” strength, not to mention a “riverbed,” a “torrent,” a “tsunami.”

Beckert tries to tame the sense of a conceptual free-for-all by partitioning the evolution of capitalism into periods of punctuated equilibrium. The effect is to reduce capitalism to the manic reinvention of the wheel. In the eighteenth century, for example, merchants pressed the peasantry of the Silesian countryside to increase linen production. This labor-mobilization strategy, Beckert observes, was at once “old”—in fact, “at the very heart of European feudalism”—and, by dint of its “scale, intensity, and focus,” a “radical innovation.” Beckert’s shape-shifting capitalism is relentlessly dynamic. As it exhausts the possibilities of one stage, it reëngineers itself for the next. By the middle of the eighteenth century, “a perfect storm gathered, and that unlikely convergence threw human history onto a fundamentally new course,” with the “unprecedented” growth of “industrial capitalism.” This process is rinsed and repeated for “reconstructed capitalism,” and then “neoliberalism.” Capitalism is rendered as a prisoner of samsara, trapped in an endlessly destructive cycle of death and rebirth.

Treating capitalism in general, and industrialization in particular, as a political project obligates Beckert to minimize the role of technology. The Röchling family, a Saarland dynasty with diversified holdings in what Beckert calls the “abyss” of heavy industry, is mentioned more than a hundred times. James Watt, a pioneer of the steam engine, appears, in passing, on three occasions, introduced not as a successful inventor but as a tinkerer “funded by his sugar-trading family.”

The explosive growth of British cotton mills is customarily attributed to labor-saving innovation driven by high wages, but Beckert argues that “at its heart, the industry’s expansion was an example of import-substitution industrialization,” or the policy of using tariffs and subsidies to protect domestic industries from foreign competition. Britain did enforce aggressive textile tariffs starting in the seventeen-twenties. Yet it really was the arrival of technologies like the spinning jenny and the water frame, half a century later, that drove its dominance in textile manufacturing. The mid-twentieth-century strategy of “import-substitution industrialization” was a means for a developing country to try to compensate for a foreign competitor’s first-mover advantage. Britain was the first mover, however, and the fact that what happened in Lancashire happened in Lancashire and not in Guangdong is precisely the sort of thing books like this are supposed to explain.

Beckert’s habit of downplaying technology leads to some claims that are dubious on their face. How is it that the nineteenth century saw a nearly threefold increase in the number of clock-making workshops in the Black Forest? According to Beckert, “such intensification of manufacturing” arose “without significant technical or organizational change.” This would have come as a surprise to the German manufacturer Erhard Junghans, who founded an eponymous clock-making firm in 1861 in his home town of Schramberg. With help from his brother, who had spent time working in modernized American workshops, he set out to use new methods of precision processing and design tooling to produce interchangeable parts. The firm steadily expanded into alarm clocks and pocket watches, and by the start of the next century it had become the world’s largest producer of timepieces.

But Beckert doesn’t want to acknowledge that the clock-making story had much to do with standardization, evidently because he wants to reserve that phenomenon for the twentieth century’s “new, and yet uncharted, age” of “radically reconstructed capitalism.” In his view, a version of capitalism in which an alliance of private enterprise and state power protected the interests of its titans was superseded by a regime that, for the first time, really protected the interests of its titans. The crucial difference was the ascent of the administrative class, which he considers “the most monumental turning point in the global history of capitalism.”

Once more, the conceit that capitalism owes its endurance to its flexibility—to what Selina Meyer, the pandering politician in the TV series “Veep,” advertised with the campaign slogan “Continuity with Change”—devolves into a shell game. The entrepreneurs of industrial capitalism, Beckert claims, had “very little sense of the cost and profit structures of their businesses.” They didn’t need to fixate on such numbers, because productivity “was not yet an important consideration.” That would wait for a new specimen of calculating supervisors, conjured up by “reconstructed capitalism,” who were suddenly “empowered with their newfangled statistics.” In reality, major enterprises in the early nineteenth century kept exacting records on input prices, waste rates, and output rates. The culture of industrial measurement and efficiency that you find in Charles Dickens novels from the eighteen-forties and fifties wasn’t just something the writer dreamed up.

Beckert treats the state with the same schematic looseness. In his book, the state is either nefarious or passive, complicit or compliant. John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil is mentioned as a “particularly radical example” of capital consolidation; tellingly, Beckert fails to mention that it was broken up by the vigorous antitrust movement. His pinhole view of both markets and states leaves little room for the more complicated, sometimes antagonistic interplay between them.

The same century that saw Standard Oil’s dissolution also saw the emergence of modern regulatory institutions and, later, state-managed experiments in growth whose outcomes he barely mentions. In 1990, Beckert notes, almost thirty-eight per cent of the world’s population lived on less than about two dollars per day; in 2022, only nine per cent did. One might have thought that China’s stewardship of its country’s hybrid economy, which lifted approximately eight hundred million people out of hardscrabble subsistence, had something to do with it. Beckert hastens to assure us that this development was mainly the result of the country’s “anti-poverty measures.”

Any effort to distill capitalism to a fixed essence, Beckert warns, will not explain very much. But to make the concept coextensive with dynamism itself—to depict capitalism, as he does, as an airborne toxic event, shapeless and ever expanding—is to explain nothing at all. The result is a work that is at once boundless in scope and dully inert. For Beckert, capitalism is an artificial realm constituted by coercion, where autonomy belongs solely to “age-old technologies and age-old knowledge.” For all his talk of complexity, his “actor-centered history” allows for only two kinds of actor: those who obey the logic of accumulation and those who refuse it. Child labor in a Manchester factory is diabolical; child labor on a subsistence farm is helping out around the house. Outside capitalism, there is only “resistance,” a term he wields with the subtlety of a hashtag. He scarcely distinguishes between a feudal lord’s resistance to merchant rivals and an Indigenous community’s resistance to plantation slavery. When French investors tried to set up plantations in Senegal, native potentates rejected wage labor as a threat to their own system of hereditary servitude; a few pages later the episode proves among the moments Beckert hails as showing how people in the countryside “still exercised some control over their economic, and often political, lives.”

This muddle stems from a deeper conceptual problem. “Capitalism subsumes other logics into its reproduction (for example, a deeply gendered organization of economic life), feeds on them, and at times even reinvigorates them,” Beckert writes. “Capitalism rests on, and continuously produces, spaces of non-accumulation.” The claim seems designed to defy refutation. So long as capitalism both draws upon and generates non-capitalist relations, the distinction between capitalist and non-capitalist forms of life collapses; any space of non-accumulation is just growing room for more capitalism. And if capitalism thrives on accumulation and non-accumulation, stability and crisis, the suspicion grows that we’ve been sold a story without a subject.

Beckert seems not unaware of the problem, which might explain his decision to open with the textbook figure of the devout Puritan. This is the familiar terrain of Max Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism,” written in the wake of Werner Sombart’s foray into modern capitalism. Sombart took capitalism as not merely a mode of production but a presiding spiritual temper. He appealed to an innate acquisitive instinct, or Erwerbstrieb, that he saw reflected in the entrepreneurial vigor of the Jewish diaspora—prompting Weber’s complaint that Sombart was accounting for a historical variable by invoking a human constant.

Weber instead drafted the Calvinist community as a case study in how the “logic of accumulation” was internalized and spread. (The historian Yuri Slezkine dryly remarked that Weber’s Protestants “discovered a humorless, dignified way to be Jewish.”) Calvinists, who had once condemned the pursuit of profit, eventually embraced a vocation as rational actors driven by thrifty self-interest. Their faith in predestination left them in a state of chronic existential dread; although one’s fate was fixed, worldly success could be taken as a sign of divine favor. Robert Keayne, by the time he died, had already taken the first steps in this direction.

In 1911, Sombart returned with an even more categorical case for ethnic determinism. He now identified Jews as the natural vector of capitalist accumulation itself. Whereas the settled cultivator grew only what his family required, the ancient Hebrews—nomadic herders who had to count their flocks—had a perverse value system that elevated greed to the level of principle. As he put it, “Only in the shepherd’s calling could the view have become dominant that in economic activities the abstract quantity of commodities matters, not whether they are fit or sufficient for use.”

Beckert, not otherwise inclined to lavish praise on canonical European theorists, has unusually appreciative things to say about Sombart’s perceptiveness and prescience. In a paragraph about the “all-encompassing” bureaucracy of the technological state, Beckert is at pains to note that I.B.M. machinery helped Germany deport its Jews, and yet over the half-dozen times that Beckert approvingly quotes Sombart, it somehow never comes up that he threw in his lot with the Nazis. But, then, “Capitalism: A Global History” is effectively a planetary remake of Sombart’s own mammoth work, with the “acquisitive instinct” reformulated as a sort of Spirit, an omnipresent vibe responsible for everything, and thus for nothing. Beckert’s basic opposition, between those who are content with what they have and those who are not, floats free of time and history, issuing in a metaphysical vacuum. He can count on his reader to fill it in. ♦

Hello! I am the weak female lead in this dystopian Y.A. action movie, and I really just need to lie down. Ever since we ran away from Society six days ago, my ankle’s been acting weird. Not, like, broken-weird, but every time I step down it kind of makes this clicking noise? Wait, it just did it again. Did you hear that?

Our ragtag group of renegades knows that there’s no turning back, now that the stakes are life or death. I’ve grown to trust many of them, except Chris. Maybe I’m reading into things, but he’s never asked me a single question about myself, even though he’s made an effort to talk to literally everyone else. Also, yesterday, I offered him a bite of my roasted rat and he didn’t even say thank you. I just feel like he hates me. Do you think he hates me? . . .

Society’s Guard has almost discovered us several times, and when we hid in that moldy basement—not the first one but the second one—I think I inhaled something bad. My face was close to the exposed wall and now my throat is scratchy? I’m a hypochondriac so it could totally be nothing, but it could also be cancer. . . .

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Last night, we were captured by Society’s Guard and betrayed by Chris, who gave up our safe-house coördinates in exchange for immunity and six cans of beans. Literally, why does he hate me?!

Now we are all in prison, waiting for the Pr0gRaM, which is a serum Society injects into our brains, to rid us of any freethinking, critical, individualistic impulses until we are all mindless, loyal drones. I jokingly asked one of the guards if he could just re- Pr0gRaM my brain to get rid of my A.D.H.D., and he laughed. Maybe I should try standup comedy? . . .

Huzzah! A resistance of misfits within Society’s walls has broken us out of prison and now we have regrouped to fight another day. However, the two men I have been embroiled in a love triangle with this whole time have forced me to choose between them. Stressful! One is someone I’ve known my entire life. The other is someone I’ve known for five days and talked to twice. This choice is a hard one, and I am paralyzed with anxiety! Especially because one is blond and I don’t do blonds. I will most likely date both men for as long as I can and then, ultimately, either take a cyanide pill or marry the one I like less.

Also, I haven’t taken a shower in two weeks and I feel like I have a U.T.I. . . .

For some strange reason, I have been voted to be the leader of this final uprising against Society. I believe they have mistaken me for another brunette named Rebecca who is good at stuff like this. Regardless, I had to make a big speech in front of the entire resistance to fire them up for battle, but public speaking is my greatest fear and I feel like I said some weird stuff! Like, I kept calling people “girlies,” and I feel like I shouldn’t have mentioned how scary Society’s new laser-your-eyeballs-out-of-your-head guns are. Morale is low, and I am spiralling that this is all my fault! . . .

The battle against Society is over and the resistance has won! We lost many men, even Chris, but their deaths, his especially, were necessary sacrifices for the greater movement. The evil leader of Society has surrendered, and, in a symbolic act, I shot and killed him in front of all of Society. I had never shot a gun before, so I first shot his knee, and then I shot his arm, and then I shot that same knee a couple more times by accident. He died very slowly and publicly and it was so awkward! . . .

It’s been a few months since the big battle, and life is peaceful, at last. There is no more war, no more repression, and no more poverty. Everything is great, and I have completely moved through the trauma of all the death I experienced. Even my love-triangle situation has been resolved. I married the one I like less! Do you think I made the wrong decision? ♦