Much of the research into the relationship between war and natural resources in eastern DRC focuses on conflict financing, or how armed groups and forces profit from extracting and trading natural resources. Additionally, it highlights the environmentally destructive effects of such extraction. However, these dynamics offer only a partial view of how war, the environment and natural resources interrelate. This talk adopts a broader perspective by examining the political, social, and symbolic dimensions of these interrelations through a microdynamics approach. For example, by taxing and governing natural resources, armed groups attempt to establish themselves as political authorities. They also exploit grievances relating to environmentallydestructive and unfair resource extraction to legitimise their power. Furthermore, conflicts over natural resources often have profound identity-related and spiritual dimensions. Initiatives to protect nature and combat illegal resource extraction must consider these broader dimensions. Judith Verweijen is an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University. Her research lies at the intersection of conflict studies, political ecology, and political geography. She focuses her research on militarisation, the dynamics of violence and the interaction between armed and social mobilisation in conflicts over natural resources in areas of protracted violence. She has been conducting intermittent fieldwork in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo since 2010.