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 –...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51