Key points
- Hemedti’s war machine is predicated on continual expansion. Since the RSF offers its recruits licence to loot and raid in lieu of wages, absent fresh targets, its forces have a tendency to disperse. In every city it captures, the RSF has employed the same playbook: destroy state institutions, plunder humanitarian resources, raze civilian property. Its assaults have functioned as an enormous engine of primitive accumulation that has destroyed agricultural land, displaced millions of people, and effected a wealth transfer from Sudan’s poorest to a class of militia leaders backed by Emirati capital…
- The paramilitaries have generalized the predatory political economy of Bashir’s regime. While Bashir exploited the peripheries to enrich the centre, the RSF has turned the entire country into a periphery to be plundered.
- The RSF’s mode of warfare has ultimately proved its undoing.
- The Sudanese army’s resurgence is partly due to its successful solicitation of foreign support. Qatar – keen to block its Emirati rival – bankrolled the army’s purchase of Chinese and Russian fighter jets, while Egyptian military intelligence has overseen targeting operations for drones newly arrived from both Iran and Turkey.
- The conflict has afforded the Islamists the opportunity to reconstitute their military forces and expand into the upper echelons of the Sudanese army.
- Emirati petrodollars grease the wheels of business networks: every country in its sphere of influence benefits from the gold leaving Sudan, almost all of which flows to the UAE.
- Despite their conflict on the battlefield, much unites the two belligerent parties.
- The Sudanese civil war is at once too local and too international to be addressed by a diplomatic process that focuses on the two belligerents, which have a shaky hold over the militias they have enlisted, and whose businesses profit from the war.
- In the Horn of Africa at least, the epoch of the nation-state seems to be closing, and the contours of a new 19th century are emerging, in which sovereignty gives way to disarticulated countries controlled by external interests, and fragmented by local dynamics.
- In such a transactional Global War Regime, the space for resistance is fissiparous. Sudan’s resistance committees – the horizontally organized local activists that brought down Bashir – have been targeted by both the army and the paramilitaries. Some have taken up arms and fight next to the Islamists whom they pushed out of power.
- The forces pulling Sudan apart have little interest in ending this war, which has created the sort of enclave capitalism that will likely be characteristic of the Horn of Africa in decades to come.
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