Since April 2023, Sudan has been engulfed in a brutal armed conflict that began in Khartoum between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Triggered by disputes over security-sector reform during a stalled democratic transition, the fighting quickly spread nationwide, devastated civilian areas, drew in other armed groups, and crushed the fragile hopes raised by the 2019 overthrow of dictator Omar al-Bashir.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

A soft drink stabilized with gum arabic. Gold refined in Dubai. Meat imported for a holiday feast. These objects appear far removed from Sudan’s war. They are not.

Since April 2023, Sudan has been engulfed in a brutal armed conflict that began in Khartoum between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Triggered by disputes over security-sector reform during a stalled democratic transition, the fighting quickly spread nationwide, devastated civilian areas, drew in other armed groups, and crushed the fragile hopes raised by the 2019 overthrow of dictator Omar al-Bashir.

The war is rooted in Sudan’s post-colonial history of militarized rule, peripheral neglect, and outsourced repression. Since independence, successive regimes have governed through force rather than consent, waging prolonged wars against marginalized regions. The 2011 secession of South Sudan ended one conflict but entrenched a security state reliant on armed proxies instead of civilian institutions.

Under al-Bashir, this system was formalized. Militias used to terrorize Darfur—most notoriously the Janjaweed, accused of genocide—were not dismantled but institutionalized as the RSF, embedding racialized violence and impunity within the state.

The SAF and RSF were not historic enemies but former allies: pillars of al-Bashir’s rule who survived his fall with weapons, wealth, and foreign backing intact. The 2018–2019 revolution briefly exposed another possibility when millions of Sudanese came together to overthrow a dictator once thought immovable. But while protesters dismantled al-Bashir, they inherited a state hollowed out by decades of militarization. Civilian forces entered a transitional process without control over the security apparatus, while the SAF and RSF retained their power and international backing. The transition failed not because of popular apathy, but because armed elites were never removed from power. When security-sector reform threatened these parallel power bases, old allies turned on each other, igniting the war.

The human cost has been catastrophic. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed or injured by airstrikes, artillery, and ground assaults in densely populated areas, while entire neighbourhoods, villages, and displacement camps have been destroyed. Sexual and gender-based violence, including rape and gang rape, has been systematically used to terrorize communities, often in front of victims’ families. Widespread looting and the destruction of essential civilian infrastructure—medical centres, markets, food and water systems, and camps—have further violated economic, social, and cultural rights. Many of these acts amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, including extermination and persecution.

Sudan has become the site of the world’s largest displacement crisis. Over 11 million people are internally displaced, millions more have fled abroad, while famine and mass malnutrition threaten millions, especially children. Human rights organizations warn that genocide and the world’s worst hunger crisis may be unfolding simultaneously.

Crucially, this violence cannot be understood as purely internal. It is produced and sustained through foreign states and corporate actors that provide weapons, funding, and political backing to both sides. Through arms transfers, resource extraction, trade relationships, and migration control, external powers are embedded in Sudan’s war economy and are creating incentives to maintain the violence rather than resolve it. Sudan thus fits a recurring global pattern: violence is localized, responsibility diffused, and profits internationalized, a structure replicated from the Congo to Gaza to West Papua.

Weapons

Sudan’s war is sustained by an extensive international arms network, resulting in an almost unimpeded flow of weapons. Neighbouring countries serve as key transit routes, while both SAF and RSF continue to receive arms despite a long-standing UN embargo on Darfur. This underscores the complicity of the international community, where legality and enforcement are secondary to strategic interests.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is central to arming the RSF. Many investigations document sustained and even intensified transfers since 2023, including Chinese drones, Israeli-made weapons and other equipment. Western states and global arms manufacturers are also implicated: components from the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Bulgaria and the United States have been traced into RSF stockpiles, often diverted from legal exports from the UAE.

Weapons flows are not limited to the RSF. Both sides have received arms from China, Russia, Turkey, Serbia, Yemen and Iran. Chad, South Sudan, Libya, the Central African Republic, Eritrea and Ethiopia have all been identified as supply routes for weapons, fuel and fighters.

Weapons kill in the present as they enable immediate destruction, but they are inseparable from the long-term extraction that sustains the conflict. Taken together, this evidence demonstrates that Sudan’s war is not merely tolerated but actively sustained by international actors. Despite overwhelming documentation of atrocities, arms embargoes are weakly enforced and routinely violated. This raises one central question: why, in the face of mass civilian suffering, displacement and famine, do states continue to permit weapons transfers that predictably enable further violence? For Sudan’s civilians, the answer appears grimly consistent: global profit and geopolitical influence continue to outweigh the value of Sudanese lives. The logic is clear: war becomes a market, and Sudanese lives are collateral within global supply chains of violence.

Resources and extraction

The reluctance of states to meaningfully confront atrocities in Sudan cannot be understood outside the logic of global capitalism, which continues to rely on the extraction of resources from the Global South under conditions of violence. Sudan’s war economy extends far beyond bullets. It is financed through a network of natural resources, livestock, and commodities like gum arabic, linking local violence to global consumption.

Sudan possesses significant oil reserves and vast deposits of gold. Its wealth, in gold and oil, has long attracted foreign powers and armed actors. The RSF’s recent seizure of Sudan’s largest oil field illustrates how control over resources translates directly into military power, while gold revenues sustain both SAF and RSF operations. Gold is especially vital for the RSF since it easily transported and rapidly convertible into cash, making it ideally suited to funding militias, paying fighters, and purchasing weapons.

Foreign actors are deeply embedded. Russia operates gold mines via Africa Corps–linked entities, with an estimated 10% of its reserves sourced from Sudan, often exchanged directly for weapons supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are central players in a broader Horn of Africa influence struggle, importing Sudanese gold, oil, and livestock. Dubai has become a major refining and trading hub, handling nearly all officially recorded gold exports from army-controlled areas in 2024, excluding illicit flows widely believed to exceed legal exports by a substantial margin.

Livestock and food exports reinforce this pattern. Sudan’s large herds supply Gulf markets, particularly Saudi Arabia, whose domestic production cannot meet demand during religious holidays like the Hajj. Armed actors along transport routes impose informal taxes, seize animals, and convert trade into war finance. Global demand transforms these civilian economies into militarized supply chains: profit circulates internationally while violence remains localized.

Less visible commodities also matter. Gum arabic, harvested from acacia trees and used in soft drinks, confectionery, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics, now feeds the war economy. Around 80% of the global supply originates in Sudan, where both SAF and RSF violently fight for control over harvesting areas and exploit informal routes through Chad, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan to reach multinational supply chains. Approximately half is purchased by European companies, putting everyday products—from Coca-Cola to cosmetics—on shelves built through coercion and armed control, implicating consumers far beyond Sudan’s borders.

Sudan’s economic structure mirrors classic colonial extraction: raw materials flow outward, violence is contained locally, and value accumulation occurs elsewhere. Much resource extraction operates informally or illicitly, with minerals, oil, livestock, and gum moving through opaque networks that obscure accountability. While Europe appears to import little directly from Sudan, this framing is very misleading. Trade is extensive with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and China, countries who dominate Sudan’s resource flows. Though formal colonial rule has ended, Sudan functions as a neo-colonial extraction zone: its resources flow outward, its violence is internalized, and its population is excluded from the value it generates.

The implications are stark: Sudanese gold, oil, livestock, and gum Arabic fund armed actors, sustain a globalized war economy, and implicate distant consumers in the violence. Everyday consumption—refined gold, soft drinks, imported meat—is bound to distant death, illustrating the moral cost of a globalized supply chain.

Geographical location

Sudan’s significance extends beyond its natural resources to its strategic geographic location along the Red Sea, providing access to the Suez Canal and serving as a gateway from the Middle East into Africa. Control over Sudanese ports, particularly Port Sudan, offers immense geopolitical and economic leverage, including influence over maritime trade in the Red Sea and access to regional markets.

Gulf states have invested billions to secure footholds: Saudi Arabia backs the SAF and the UAE supports the RSF with financial aid, weapons, and diplomatic support. These investments now intersect directly with military operations and the control of trade routes, ports, and resource flows. By controlling key harbour infrastructure and overland corridors, armed actors can monitor and tax the movement of critical commodities like gold, oil, gum arabic, and livestock, turning Sudan’s strategic geography into a vital node in the war economy. Sudan’s ports and corridors reproduce imperial logics: control the routes, extract the value, localize the violence.

Migration

European engagement is shaped by migration control, revealing how security priorities outweigh human rights. In 2016–2017, the EU paid €160 million to al-Bashir’s government to curb migration toward Europe. While direct cooperation was suspended after the 2019 RSF massacres in Khartoum, the broader Khartoum Process remains. These migration deals contributed to the rise and empowerment of the RSF by legitimizing cooperation with an indicted dictator and his security apparatus, even though arrest warrants for al-Bashir for war crimes and genocide had already been issued by the International Criminal Court at the time.

While the immediate impact of migration funding may be less visible than for example arms transfers, researchers warn of its long-term effects: armed groups have learned that manipulating migration flows can attract European attention, funding and political legitimacy. European border security, like resource extraction, externalizes violence: comfort, stability, and consumption in Europe are preserved at the expense of Sudanese lives.

Sudan’s war is not an anomaly but a concentrated expression of a global system that depends on unequal exchange, violent extraction and moral distance. Armed violence, mass displacement, famine, and systemic exploitation are sustained not only by domestic actors but by regional and international powers that profit from instability. From gold and oil to gum arabic, livestock and migration control, Sudanese lives are rendered expendable within supply chains that sustain global consumption and geopolitical power. A conflict that began with militias created to govern the periphery now feeds a global economy that governs through distance, denial and consumption.

Neutrality is a myth. Global profit and strategic positioning continue to outweigh the value of human life. The war does not end at Sudan’s borders; it ends on supermarket shelves, in refineries, and at ports where violence has been converted into normal consumption. What began as a soft drink, a bar of gold, or imported meat is bound to distant death and to our consumption, returning as a question of responsibility. Until trade and financial lifelines are disrupted through sanctions, trade regulation and political rupture, calls for peace will remain performative. Justice requires confronting not only who kills, but who profits, who consumes, and who looks away.

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