The Knot of Destinies at Lake Kivu

A border the danger ignores

Between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, connected to Burundi by the Ruzizi River, Lake Kivu is not merely a body of water shared between two administrative shores. It is one of only three lakes in the world — along with Lakes Nyos and Monoun in Cameroon — subject to the phenomenon of limnic eruption: its deep waters trap massive concentrations of dissolved gas, capable of erupting violently should an earthquake, an underwater landslide, or a volcanic intrusion disturb their balance.

Such a disaster would know no border. The resulting toxic cloud would spread along the ground and simultaneously threaten Goma, on the Congolese side, and Gisenyi/Rubavu, on the Rwandan side. The safety of one is, literally, dependent on that of the other. This is what the doctrine of the Knot of Destinies calls destiny sovereignty: the true autonomy of a state is no longer measured by the impermeability of its borders, but by the solidity of the bonds it weaves with those who share its geography.

Source: Eawag — Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology; Tietze (1974/1978).

From shared risk to shared opportunity

What the Knot of Destinies demonstrates at Lake Kivu is not merely a shared vulnerability: it is that coordinated management of this same resource becomes an opportunity for shared development — the concrete praxis of what the doctrine calls the Economy of Elevated Sharing.

The KivuWatt project

To mitigate the risk of eruption, the industrial KivuWatt project extracts dissolved methane at a depth of 350 metres via an offshore platform, separates the gas from CO₂, reinjects the degassed water to preserve ecological stratification, and channels the purified methane to a coastal thermal power plant. Commissioned in December 2015, its current output reaches 26 MW — roughly 30% of Rwanda's current energy capacity — while progressively reducing the lake's gas pressure.

Source: ContourGlobal and Rwanda Energy Group (REG).

ABAKIR, the cross-border authority

On 4 November 2014, Burundi, the DRC and Rwanda signed an international convention establishing the Lake Kivu and Rusizi/Ruzizi River Basin Authority (ABAKIR), tasked with harmonising environmental protection rules, monitoring water quality and regulating the resource's uses. Despite real obstacles — slow ratification, budgetary constraints — ABAKIR constitutes the institutional architecture of a destiny sovereignty under construction.

The Ruzizi hydroelectric cascade

The outlet of Lake Kivu into Lake Tanganyika, the Ruzizi River offers hydroelectric potential exploited sequentially by three successive power plants — none of which can operate without accounting for the flow required by neighbouring installations, both upstream and downstream.

Source: SINELAC; Ruzizi III technical documentation; Rwandan Ministry of Infrastructure, June 2025.

The industrial reality of these three plants demonstrates this without ambiguity: none of the three nations can unilaterally exploit the river's hydraulic force without affecting its neighbours. Interdependence is not a diplomatic choice — it is a physical constraint that horizontal alliance turns into shared prosperity rather than a source of conflict.

Current update (Q1 2026)

This case study must be read with factual honesty: as of the first quarter of 2026, the Ruzizi III project remains pending the final closing of its financing, originally announced for September 2025, while the advance of the March 23 Movement (M23) in eastern DRC directly undermines the stability of South Kivu, the epicentre of the construction site. On 12 March 2026, a TotalEnergies delegation nonetheless met with the Congolese deputy prime minister in charge of the national economy to review the project's progress — a sign that trilateral cooperation, though delayed, has not been broken by the security crisis.

Far from weakening the demonstration of the Knot of Destinies, this situation illustrates it almost experimentally: the basin's geophysical interdependence alone was not enough to shield the project from tensions between the parties; only the persistence of institutional dialogue, despite the crisis, kept the prospect alive. It is precisely for this reason that destiny sovereignty cannot be decreed once and for all — it must be practised, negotiated and defended continuously.

Source: ACP, 12 March 2026.

Three strategic truths

The case of Lake Kivu concretely illustrates the three rules of action that the Knot of Destinies prescribes for any zone of shared destiny:

• The indivisibility of peace — the security of Goma and that of Gisenyi cannot be thought of separately.
• Co-development rather than shared shipwreck — KivuWatt and the Ruzizi cascade turn a dangerous resource into infrastructure for shared prosperity.
• The realism of forgiveness — building a shared destiny in a region marked by painful memories requires freeing the future from resentment alone, without ever forgetting.

“The administrative border drawn across the water loses all ontological meaning. The toxic cloud ignores customs controls and exclusive sovereignties. The safety of Goma is biologically dependent on that of Gisenyi.”

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