As news media across the United States generally urged calm and patience as votes were counted in last week’s presidential election, the Russian government-funded RT, a multi-platform media organization which claims to be the most popular news network on YouTube, instead amplified voices of chaos.

The Irregular Warfare Podcast is a collaboration between the Modern War Institute and Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project. You can listen to the full episode below, and you can find it and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, TuneIn, or your favorite podcast app. And be sure to follow the podcast on Twitter!

The problem of “conflict minerals” has received widespread attention from the public and researchers alike. Studies highlight that countries with high-value resources such as diamonds are more likely to experience civil war. The “conflict minerals” narrative is generally understood as the use of funds from minerals to support and perpetuate violence by non-state armed groups. Although armed groups may extort industrial mining companies, artisanal miners are thought to be particularly vulnerable to predation, and therefore involuntarily prolonging this cycle of violence. But this isn’t quite what’s happening...