Jason Stearns, an author, former U.N. investigator and close observer of the region's Byzantine politics, has written that the framework could mark the beginning of a broader, consensus-based effort at solving the country's myriad problems. But those problems include the near-total non-existence of functioning Congolese institutions, the proliferation and splintering of dozens of armed groups, long-simmering disputes over land rights and citizenship, and interference from neighboring countries -- only some of which are solvable at the negotiating table alone. With the framework, governments and regional organizations from across Africa, including the powerful Southern African Development Community, kicked off a broad-based effort to end a conflict that's raged since the mid-90s, and killed between 1 and 5.4 million people. Stearns rightly argues that it's too early to judge what this commitment will actually be worth.

"It will take a lot of political clout to make the Framework Agreement more than just words," Stearns wrote in an email.

Laura Seay of Morehouse College says there is plenty of cause of skepticism. The declaration includes no benchmarks for success. There are no provisions for funding the framework's potentially-expensive goal of rehabilitating the DRC's security sector.

"The reason that everybody signed it is that it's so lacking specifics that it's going to be very difficult to implement its provisions," says Seay.

More fundamentally, the M23 isn't a party to the framework, even if both of its alleged state sponsors (Uganda and Rwanda) are. Their participation might not have even mattered -- as if in deliberate rebuke to a peace process that is barely a few days old, M23 was in the course of violently fracturing just as the Addis Ababa meeting was underway. Earlier this week, eight militia members will killed during violent clashes between supporters of M23 leader Bosco Ntaganda, and his rival, Sultani Makenga . Even if M23 could maintain its organizational integrity, the leading diplomatic attempt at dealing with the group's grievances have gone nowhere.

"They have failed," Seay says of the ongoing negotiations between the DRC government and M23 in Kampala, a process sponsored by a coalition of central African states. "M23 wants to go back to being able to exist as an autonomous unit within the Congolese army. And [DRC president Joseph] Kabila is not willing to allow that state of affairs to continue. It's kind of an intractable argument. There is no way forward in that kind of situation except for one side to eliminate the other."

The multiplication of armed groups -- and schisms within the one militia capable of putting the Congo crisis back in international headlines -- makes peace an even more distant proposition.

But the framework agreement could prefigure another, even more important development in the international community's relationship to the Eastern DRC. Right now, the U.N. is considering sweeping changes to the mandate of MONUSCO, the U.N.'s peacekeeping mission in the eastern DRC and the largest U.N. peacekeeping force on earth. Last week's agreement could help clear the way for a risky humanitarian military intervention -- but one whose success would have broad ramifications.