By Munzoul A. M. Assal
The war in Sudan is often described through its humanitarian
consequences that include, among others, mass displacement, famine,
disease, and the collapse of state institutions. These tragedies are
painfully true, devastating, and demand urgent attention. Yet,
focusing only on human suffering obscures a deeper reality: the
conflict persists not only because of political rivalries or military
ambitions, but because war has become an economic system.
It appears that competition for control over Sudan’s resources is a
key reason that the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support
Forces (RSF) went to war in April 2023. Since then, Sudan has
witnessed the consolidation of a war economy built on gold, smuggling,
predatory taxation, illicit trade, asset capture, and the manipulation
of humanitarian and commercial networks. As state authority has
fragmented, the belligerents have seized these revenue streams and
used them to not only sustain the fighting, but profit.
This is not unique to Sudan. From Liberia and Sierra Leone to the
Democratic Republic of Congo, modern conflicts have often evolved into
self-financing systems in which violence generates economic rewards
for armed actors and their allies. Sudan is increasingly becoming a
textbook example of this phenomenon. The uncomfortable truth is that
wars do not necessarily end when their economic costs and human toll
become too high. They end when the incentives that sustain them are
disrupted. Over the last three years, STPT(Sudan Transparancy and Policy Tracker)has worked to document andunderstand these systems, with a view to identifying mechanisms to
combat them.
War as an economic system
At one level, Sudan’s conflict is a struggle over political power and
state control. At another, it is a contest over economic assets and
revenue streams. Long before the war, Sudan’s military and security
institutions had become deeply involved in commercial activities,
controlling businesses, natural resources, land, infrastructure, and
strategic sectors of the economy. The overthrow of Omar al-Bashir in
2019 did little to dismantle these economic networks. Instead,
competing centers of power sought to preserve and expand them.
Gold lies at the heart of this competition. Following South Sudan’s
secession in 2011 and the loss of most oil revenues, gold emerged as
Sudan’s most valuable export commodity. Mining expanded and control
over mining sites, transportation routes, export channels, and trading
networks became a major source of wealth and political influence. Both
SAF and RSF have significant interest in the sector.
At the same time, the SAF and military-linked business networks
retained influence over state enterprises, agricultural assets,
customs revenues, real estate, and strategic infrastructure. By the
time war broke out in 2023, political and economic rivalry had become
inseparable. The war has accelerated these trends. Across much of
Sudan, formal economic institutions have weakened or collapsed,
creating opportunities for armed actors to establish alternative
systems of extraction. Territory is valuable not only for military
reasons but because it translates into revenue. Checkpoints generate
income. Border crossings produce rents. Resource-rich areas provide
access to gold, livestock, fuel, and agricultural commodities.
In effect, parts of Sudan now operate through what might be called a
“marketplace of coercion,” where armed groups derive income from their
capacity to control people, territory, and economic activity. Violence
has become self-financing. This helps explain why military setbacks
rarely produce meaningful moves toward peace. As long as armed actors
can finance themselves through resource extraction, taxation, and
illicit trade, they retain the means to continue fighting. For
participants in the conflict, war remains economically rational even
as it is socially catastrophic.
Gold, smuggling, and the internationalization of conflict
Gold is the most significant pillar of Sudan’s war economy, but it is
part of a much broader system of illicit and semi-licit economic
activity. As STPT and Chatham House laid out in Gold and War in Sudan,
gold generates foreign currency, facilitates access to weapons and
military supplies, and allows armed groups to reward fighters and
maintain patronage networks. Competition over gold was already
intensifying before the war and contributed to tensions among Sudan’s
power centers. Since the outbreak of conflict, however, gold has
become even more important as formal economic activity contracts and
other revenue streams collapse.
Yet, gold is only one component of a diversified conflict economy.
Armed actors increasingly profit from livestock exports, agricultural
commodities, fuel supplies, transportation networks, and products such
as gum arabic. Control over trade routes is often more valuable than
control over production itself. Every movement of goods creates
opportunities for taxation, extortion, or protection payments.
The war economy also incorporates what might be called checkpoint
capitalism. Across areas controlled by different actors, traders,
transporters, farmers, and ordinary civilians frequently encounter
multiple informal taxation points. Payments are extracted, at
gunpoint, at roadblocks, border crossings, markets, and transport
hubs. These revenues rarely enter public budgets. Instead, they
finance military operations and sustain networks of patronage. This
system generates powerful incentives for local commanders and armed
groups to maintain territorial fragmentation. Peace would require the
restoration of centralized fiscal authority and legal economic
regulation. War allows numerous actors to profit from economic
disorder. Anecdotal accounts reveal that there seem to be unwritten
agreements between RSF and the SAF across lines of control when it
comes to facilitating trade and smuggling of goods.
The conflict has also become increasingly internationalized. Sudan’s
war economy is integrated into regional and global commercial networks
involving traders, financiers, transport operators, arms suppliers,
and business interests across the Horn of Africa, North Africa, the
Sahel, and the Gulf. Cross-border smuggling routes facilitate the
movement of gold, fuel, livestock, and weapons. Revenues are often
laundered through commercial entities and financial channels operating
beyond Sudan’s borders.
The result is that many actors with no direct military role
nonetheless acquire material interests in the continuation of
instability. What emerged initially as a power struggle between rival
military forces has evolved into a political economy of networks that
profit from conflict at the expense of the Sudanese population.
Economic activity has contracted dramatically, productive capacity has
been destroyed, millions have been displaced, and essential services
have collapsed. While ordinary citizens face economic ruin, the
networks that benefit from war continue to function. This is the
central paradox of war economies: the destruction of society often
coincides with the enrichment of conflict entrepreneurs.
Making peace more profitable than war
If war persists in part because it is economically rewarding, then
peacemaking and peacebuilding must address the economic foundations of
the conflict rather than focusing exclusively on military and
political arrangements. The first priority is to target conflict
financing more effectively. Existing sanctions have often focused on
individuals while leaving broader commercial networks largely intact,
although recent moves by the EU to target the gold sector may be
evidence that this is shifting. Greater attention should be directed
toward the business ecosystems that facilitate conflict gold exports,
weapons procurement, money laundering, asset transfers, and smuggling
operations. The objective should not be symbolic punishment but the
disruption of revenue streams that sustain armed actors. Care should
be taken to do this in a way that minimizes harming ordinary Sudanese
people such as those wrought by the Bashir era general sanctions.
Second, transparency in global gold supply chains must be
strengthened. International markets continue to absorb Sudanese gold
in part because of limited visibility regarding its origins.
Governments, refiners, financial institutions, and trading centers
should apply more rigorous due diligence and traceability
requirements. As long as conflict gold can enter global markets with
minimal scrutiny, external demand will continue to subsidize violence.
Third, regional diplomacy must move beyond narrow geopolitical
competition. Sudan’s economic lifelines run through neighboring
countries and regional trading networks. Any serious attempt to weaken
the war economy requires cooperation on financial oversight, customs
enforcement, border management, anti-smuggling measures, and sanctions
implementation. A transnational war economy requires a transnational
response. Cooperation on financial oversight, border management, and
anti-smuggling measures are obviously difficult to enforce given the
fact that neighboring countries benefit from war and are recipients of
looted resources.
Fourth, economic issues should be placed at the center of peace
negotiations rather than treated as secondary concerns. Too many peace
processes focus on power-sharing formulas while avoiding difficult
questions about who controls resources, companies, revenues, and
economic institutions. Yet, these are often the issues over which
conflicts are actually fought. Future negotiations should explicitly
address the status of military-owned businesses, control of strategic
resources, revenue-sharing arrangements, economic governance, and
mechanisms for accountability. Without tackling these questions,
political agreements risk becoming temporary pauses rather than
durable settlements.
Fifth, reconstruction planning should begin before the war ends. In
fact, it already is, as armed actors are positioning themselves to
profit from the substantial flows of international funding and
investment that are likely to follow the end of the war. Without
strong safeguards, these resources could simply reinforce the same
networks that have benefited from war. We have seen this in all
previous peace agreements, which lacked such safeguards.
Reconstruction assistance should therefore be linked to transparency,
civilian oversight, institutional reform, and accountability
mechanisms.
Finally, Sudanese civilian actors must play a central role in shaping
the country’s economic future. Sustainable peace requires more than
ending armed confrontation; it requires rebuilding institutions
capable of managing national resources in the public interest rather
than for military or factional gain. Trade unions, professional
associations, civil society organizations, local communities, and
independent economic actors must have a voice in determining how
resources are governed in a post-war Sudan.
Conclusion
Sudan’s tragedy cannot be understood solely through the language of
military confrontation, ethnic polarization, or humanitarian crisis.
It is also a story of economic loot and capture. The conflict endures
because powerful networks derive benefits from instability. Gold
mines, smuggling routes, military-owned businesses, illicit taxation
systems, and transnational commercial connections have created a
self-reinforcing economy of violence. The longer the war continues,
the deeper these structures become embedded.
For this reason, peace will not emerge through ceasefires alone. Nor
will humanitarian assistance, indispensable as it is, address the
underlying drivers of conflict. Lasting peace requires dismantling the
business model that sustains war. The central challenge facing Sudan
and the international community is therefore straightforward but
difficult: make war less profitable and peace more rewarding. Until
the economic incentives that fuel violence are disrupted, military
victories will remain elusive, political agreements fragile, and
humanitarian crises recurrent.
Sudan’s people deserve more than survival within a permanent war
economy. They deserve a state whose resources serve public welfare
rather than private militias, and a future in which economic life is
organized around production, citizenship, and opportunity rather than
the barrel of a gun. Ending the war ultimately requires ending the
business of ruin.
The story was first published by Sudan Transparancy and Policy Tracker:
https://sudantransparency.org/the-business-of-ruin-how-sudans-war-economy-fuels-an-endless-conflict-and-what-to-do-about-it/