The theatre of armed conflicts for more than twenty years, the Kivu region, in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, abounds with precious minerals which are at the center of the war today because their financial appeal allows the rebellious armed groups fighting the central government to be funded. While Eastern Congo found itself involved in the conflicts of the Great Lakes because of its proximity with the neighboring Rwanda in the middle of the nineties, now, other factors have to be analyzed in order to understand a conflict serving unavowed interests which largely expand beyond the frontiers of the sole DRC – a failed State because of the ongoing violences transforming the Kivu into a grey area, that is to say a lawless area controlled by the militias. The goal of this research is to understand the war economy that has settled into the region through foreign actors, which have taken advantage of the flaws of the state institutions of Kinshasa, and to analyze how the wealth of the congolese subsoil is responsible for new forms of domination over a country which earned its independence in 1960. The source of instability throughout all central Africa, the Kivu is an important geostrategic and geoeconomic space, two elements which explain the struggles of influence and other territorial rivalries to which it is subjected.