Gold continues to glimmer. The value of a troy ounce gained 27% in 2024, capping a decade in which it has more than doubled in value. Between Trump’s inauguration and the end of June 2025, gold’s value increased a further 24%.[1]
For gold-bugs, the substance is the perfect container of value. It doesn’t corrode, it’s easy to melt down, and unlike the fiat currencies abhorred by the bugs, it’s thought less amenable to pernicious interventions of the state. Many of these properties also make gold cherished by belligerent parties across the Horn of Africa, albeit for somewhat different reasons.[2] If, for the bugs, gold appears material and substantial—unlike dollars putatively guaranteed by the Federal Reserve—for the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a militia currently contesting control of Sudan, it is a material that dissolves into air. Where dollars are fastidiously tracked by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control, gold slips borders, changes hands, and is converted into other asset forms without tripping any alarms.[3] Indeed, gold’s materiality is exceedingly amenable to the political economy of militia rule. The dispersed conditions of production that underlie artisanal gold mining allow for multiple points of value extraction via taxation and predation. Gold is also relatively easy to move—in carry-on luggage or via small private planes—and easily remelted, which enable its origins to be disguised.
The particularity of gold tends to be effaced by policy proposals that call for it to be treated as a conflict mineral, whose illicit circulation can be curtailed through the application of better regulatory frameworks. The problems with such approaches are considerable, as Christoph Vogel sets out in Conflict Minerals Inc. When employed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Vogel reveals how such frameworks relied on colonial assumptions about the status of African countries as raw goods’ producers. Consequentially, policy interventions did not fundamentally change the logic of predatory extraction on the ground, even while perniciously transforming the political economy of eastern Congo.[4]
This essay considers the political economy of gold in Sudan. Over the last fifteen years, gold has become an increasingly important revenue source for Sudanese actors. Gold’s rise has been contemporaneous with the collapse of oil income and the enclave capitalism it once lubricated.[5] The latter had required the Sudanese state to exert control over sites of production and the pipelines through which oil was brought to market. While established, at least in part, through granting concessions to local elites, the disbursement of oil revenues into government accounts enabled state capture of flows of foreign exchange. With artisanal gold mining, neither the assertion of infrastructural control nor the capture and concentration of revenues is as easy: Alternative political economies have been needed to manage the industry’s particularities.
In Sudan and South Sudan, the ascent of artisanal gold mining has produced radically different configurations of power. In Sudan, the RSF’s domination of mining in Darfur enabled it to strengthen its autonomy from the state, and ultimately allowed it to contest control of the country. In South Sudan, in contrast, artisanal gold mining has constituted part of a system of predatory state control that has consolidated the power of the incumbent President Salva Kiir.[6] As this variance in outcome suggests, artisanal gold mining might necessitate particular forms of extraction, but it does not determine a particular relation to state power.
One cannot understand gold’s place in the war economies of the Horn of Africa without understanding the networks of value extraction and circulation through which gold is produced and moved. The dispersed nature of artisanal gold mining has enabled a form of predation that is not about seizing hold of a mode of production, but proliferating points of extraction via checkpoints and taxation. Such a mode of predation is part of a political economy of conflict that has, through displacement and destruction, created a surplus population that can be pressed into service as either artisanal gold miners or militia fighters. [7] Grasping the dynamics of such a system requires comprehending histories of migration and political contestation that exceed the material determinants of gold’s properties.[8] Once produced, gold flows into systems of circulation that rely not only on gold’s lubricity, but the opaqueness of financial markets and illicit cross-border traffic. Gold controlled by the RSF, for instance, is partly moved through Kenya and Uganda before ending up in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where its origin is disguised.[9]
These flows tie these countries—and others—into a broader regional war economy, but not in a simple fashion. Hardly a backer of the RSF alone, the UAE also has interests in gold mining in territory controlled by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). If happy to do business, it is furthermore the case that neither Kenya nor Uganda has officially come out in support of the RSF. What is observed, then, is an emergent configuration in which the conflict in Sudan reveals itself not as a war for gold, in which countries align on one side or the other: but rather a configuration in which war is a necessary condition for the maintenance of a regional political economy partly predicated on gold. In this configuration, the predatory and extractive nature of the Sudanese state is increasingly generalized, both geographically, insofar as there is no longer a centre which extracts from a periphery but rather a country that has become a periphery, and regionally, insofar as the state’s predatory apparatus is now distributed between a wide number of participants, including non-state actors and regional powers.
Last Lives of the Petrostates
In retrospect, Sudan’s oil industry and the form of enclave capitalism it enabled may be seen as an interstitial stage. It enabled a decisive break with colonial forms of production, but contained within it the seeds of its own undoing, inasmuch as it created a system of rule-by-militia that was to break open monopolistic state control of export flows.
At the beginning of the 1990s, cotton still made up to half of Sudan’s exports—partly a legacy of the British colonial period. Within a decade, though, outbound flows of oil, largely from southern Sudan, would commence, transforming the economy.[10] By 2008, oil loomed over all Sudan’s other exported commodities, constituting approximately 95% of exports.
As mentioned, management of the country’s oil industry corresponded to a form of enclave capitalism.[11] Site security at oil fields was overseen by militia forces. Control over oil production was centralized in Khartoum and excluded subnational authorities. Flows of foreign exchange enabled Omar al Bashir, who came to power in a coup in 1989, to build up patronage networks extended through a state-sponsored bourgeoisie. Often aligned to Islamist groups, the class fraction in question had rode to prominence thanks to its control of remittances from the Gulf in the 1970s and 80s. Bashir also created rivalrous security services, which he pitted against each other to coup-proof his regime. In addition to the army, there was the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) and sundry others. Each of these services had their own empire: the army used its control of state-owned enterprises and privately-held companies to shore up its position as one of the principal economic actors in the country. The government’s policy of Tamkeen (empowerment) turned out to be for a select few.
Yet even at its height, oil production only constituted a fraction of Sudan’s GDP. What made its contributions so crucial to a Sudanese economy straining under the weight of US sanctions was that it provided a much needed source of foreign exchange (Forex). Hard currency receipts enabled two socioeconomic shifts of note. First, they funded development projects. Undertaken according to a clientelist logic, roads, housing, and commercial real estate were constructed in the centre of Sudan, far from the sites of oil production, but close to the home constituencies of Bashir and his associates. Second, forex enabled a rapid growth in Sudan’s commodity imports, which sustained a rising desire for wheat in central Sudan’s riparian cities.[12] Imports purchased with oil revenues became a central part of Bashir’s political-economic machine: the quiescence of the middle class in the centre was purchased with subsidized imported commodities, while the peripheries were subject to violent counterinsurgency campaigns, partly designed to ensure the security of Sudan’s oil sector.[13]
The need to control Sudan’s oil fields spurred the development of Bashir’s signature ruling practice: A form of rule-by militia that exploited and intensified ethnic cleavages.[14] Rather than have the army fight Sudan’s second civil war (1983-2005), Bashir would largely outsource the counterinsurgency to militia groups.[15] National military objectives were to be achieved by instrumentalizing local, largely ethnic forces, with their own more limited objectives. Initially, these groups were composed of Baggara nomads from northern Sudan. As the war persisted, however, Bashir turned to Nuer fighters from southern Sudan’s second largest ethnic group. These groups of fighters, including Paulino Matip’s South Sudan Defence Forces (SSDF), displaced the population from around southern Sudan’s oil fields. Their emergence as allies of Bashir commenced an era of conflict that saw southern groups pitted against one another.
If the oil economy was central to the development of southern Sudan’s militias, the militia economy was nonetheless distinct from it. Apart from loyalty payments from Khartoum, the advantages of state-sponsorship for leaders like Matiep rested on the affordances that state-backing gave them within their local strongholds.[16] Men like Matiep amassed fortunes through predating on local populations and controlling the trade in cattle and sorghum. Establishing fiefdoms in the areas under their control, they executed what amounted to an enormous wealth transfer from Sudan’s poorest to an emergent class of military leaders, many of whom based their authority upon inherited ties to relatives in positions of customary authority.[17]
By the end of the 2000s, rule-by-militia spread into Darfur. An insurgency against the government had begun in 2003. Bashir chose to empower Arab militias to fight against the insurgents, following his playbook for southern Sudan.[18] Come 2010, the upshot was that Sudan had two very different political economies superimposed upon each other. Control of the oil economy was centralized in Khartoum, feeding both Bashir’s patrimonial machine and the demand for imports in Sudan’s cities. In the periphery, little of the oil revenue circulated, and the political economy was instead organized around a militia-dominated system in which pastoralism and agriculture increasingly came under the sway of military actors who predated and extorted those who lived under their control. The centralization of the petrostate led to the fragmentation and exploitation of the peripheries.
This durable form of disorder was shattered by South Sudan’s secession from Sudan in 2011. From oil exports of $9.69 billion in 2010, the Sudanese government’s oil earning plunged to $627 million just five years later.[19] The shock created a crisis in Khartoum. Foreign companies pulled out, inflation soared, and the government struggled, with little in the way of Forex, to deal with a growing demand for imports. A wave of brutally austere cuts to subsidies followed. This led to a wave of protests in 2013, an uprising which portended the revolution that ultimately toppled Bashir in 2019.
Gold as the fix
South Sudan’s independence, of course, was hardly a shock to the regime. Since 2005, and the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that had guaranteed southern Sudan a vote on secession, Sudan had anticipated a possible separation. The government had hoped to diversify its exports, including precious metals, agricultural products, and most importantly: gold.[20]
Sudan’s aspirations were buoyed by the dramatic rise in gold prices that occurred during the 2000s. A troy ounce priced at $290 in January 2000 was worth $1,360 by 2011.[21] Bashir’s regime hoped that gold would allow for another form of enclave capitalism, with Sudan becoming an industrial producer on the scale of South Africa.[22] Such dreams were never realized. From the start, industrial schemes were hampered by US sanctions. Instead, Sudan became the site of an artisanal gold rush, prefiguring a regional intensification of artisanal gold mining that was to occur in subsequent years.[23] Until 2012, artisanal gold mining was largely a way for rural populations to supplement their incomes. The gold rush saw hundreds of thousands of migrants cross into Sudan to work large mining sites spread over dozens of kilometres.
Given that the vast majority of Sudan’s gold is moved illicitly across borders, national production figures are only indicative. They nevertheless stand testament to the size of the increase in gold production seen in the second decade of the 2000s. Between 2010 and 2017, official government figures report gold production rocketing from 10 tons to 100 tons, while gold sales rose to constitute 70% of Sudan’s exports. By the end of the 2010s, more than a million workers were employed in the industry. Semi-industrial production also gained a foothold. The semi-industrial production that did occur was intertwined with artisanal production and focused on the refining of ‘tailings’—the residues of artisanal production, which could be bought cheaply and were still rich in gold.[24] Artisanal gold mining itself accounted for as much as 80% of total production.
Controlling artisanal gold production entailed different challenges to oil fields. Vast numbers of labourers were involved, in diffuse sites, and gold was easy to smuggle. For Bashir, recourse to militias and his security forces presented a potential fix. Unlike in the case of oil, though, managing gold production demanded that security partners became directly involved in the mode of production. In what is now North Kordofan, the Desert Shield militias of the Kababish were allowed to control gold mining activities. So were private companies linked to the SAF and the National Intelligence Service (NISS), who operated mines alongside foreign investors, including Russian companies, such as Meroe Gold (connected to Russia’s Wagner network).[25]
As he had been forced to turn over production itself, Bashir hoped to reassert regime control of gold at the point of exit. This led him to make the state the sole official exporter of Sudanese gold: From 2012, the Central Bank of Sudan (CBOS) was granted the exclusive right to purchase artisanal gold and sell it abroad. Amid sanctions and economic collapse, however, the CBOS struggled to assert its legal claims to monopsony and monopoly. As much as 90% of Sudanese gold ended up being smuggled abroad, largely to the UAE, the major destination for gold from the broader Sahelian gold rush.[26] Unable to secure the gains immanent to the dramatic rise in global gold prices, the central bank ended up printing currency at an increasing clip to cover the state’s expenditures. Inflation accentuated as a result. Far from becoming another form of enclave capitalism, artisanal gold mining ended up strengthening militia actors, weakening state control of the economy, and failing to solve the economic crisis into which Bashir’s regime was tumbling.
Saliently, the growth of artisanal gold mining shifted the geography of resource extraction in Sudan. Cotton production during the colonial period had relied on areas close to Khartoum. Oil production sites were largely in southern Sudan, but as discussed, they were relatively easily controlled. Gold mining, contrarily, posed complex and varied challenges. Mining sites in northern Sudan were based in fairly remote areas and proved amenable to state control. The most productive seams, however—located in the west of the country, around Jebel Amer in North Darfur—were far less easily managed.
There, some 100,000 migrant workers had gathered from across the Sahel, along with many different Sudanese groups, all hoping to profit from the gold rush.[27] While Bashir initially lent on customary authorities to control these mines, their capacity to maintain control of such a diverse population was limited, and they frequently resisted the encroachments of the centralized state. As a result, Bashir pivoted, charging Riziegat militias under the command of Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal to violently seize control of the mining sites from the local Beni Hussein community. At the time, the Riziegat were also waging a counterinsurgency in Darfur. The two activities—controlling the mining sites and fighting largely non-Arab insurgents—quickly became conjoined. Both involved leveraging violence as a tool to displace and predate upon populations while maximizing territorial control.[28]
Fighting via militia, what Alex de Waal has called ‘counterinsurgency on the cheap,’ turned out to be very expensive for Bashir.[29] Militias would sometimes fight each other, competing for control of territory and resources, and just as often clash with the government. Hilal’s control of gold mining operations strengthened his autonomy, and he was soon making demands for ranks and resources from Bashir’s regime. Simultaneously, Bashir feared that his security services, emboldened by gold mining revenues, might mount a coup d’état.
Enter the RSF
The creation of the RSF in 2013 was designed to solve these problems. Initially placed under the control of the NSS, the RSF was designed to be a counterinsurgency force that would continue the work of the Janjaweed, attacking and displacing non-Arab populations in Darfur.[30] From the beginning, however, the RSF brought Darfur’s violence to the centre, violently repressing demonstrations in Khartoum on the regime’s behalf. Indeed, soon after its formation, the RSF began functioning as Bashir’s Praetorian Guard. Institutionalizing the relation, in 2017, the RSF’s command was placed directly under the Office of the President. Formally speaking, the move rendered interlopers from the periphery on an equal footing with the NISS and the SAF. In the same year, moreover, the RSF also consecrated its control of the Jebel Amer mines, as Hilal fell from power and was imprisoned by the SAF. Once in control, the RSF excluded other competing security agencies from Jebel Amer, and via the Al Junaid holding company and its subsidiaries, also took control of the processing of tailings.
The RSF managed to exist in multiple forms: as a largely Arab militia force in Darfur, continuing the counterinsurgent work of the Janjaweed; as a security service for Bashir; and as an international business, exporting both mercenaries—it fought on the Emirati and Saudi payroll in Yemen—and gold.[31]
Much of the media coverage of the RSF has emphasized the profits it obtained from gold mining. A 2016 report from the UN Panel of Experts estimated that from 2010 to 2014, mines in Darfur annually brought in $123 million for the militias that controlled them. These numbers are almost certainly an overestimate.[32] Revenues from artisanal gold mining are notoriously difficult to calculate due to the dispersed conditions of production, illicit sales, and the fact that hundreds of prospectors, miners, and middle men take their respective cuts (not to mention the taxes levied at checkpoints by security services). Moreover, by the time that the RSF seized full control of Jebel Amer, production was already precipitously declining. By 2018, it is plausible that revenues from the mine failed to even cover annual production costs. As evidence of the hard times, in 2019, after Bashir’s fall, Hemedti used his position as the deputy chairperson on the Sovereign Council to sell the RSF’s concession in Jebel Amer back to the government for a cut-price $250 million. (Worth noting, he also secured tax exemptions for other RSF ventures in the deal.)[33]
For the RSF, the primary advantages of gold mining were derived from shifts in Sudan’s political economy, rather than simply being a matter of profit. Specifically, Bashir’s need to control artisanal production had afforded the RSF the possibility to entrench its control of Darfur, displacing other militia forces. It also allowed the RSF to become the principal actor on the western border. Simultaneously serving as the dominant security force and the immigration police, the RSF could control labour flows to both its own militia forces and the gold mines. Leveraging these sovereign-like powers, it captured and sold migrants to Libyan traffickers. The RSF also extended its commercial interests in gold mining to Jebel Aweinat—between Libya, Chad, Sudan, and Egypt—and into southern Libya itself. Another boon was obtained through smuggling across the borders the RSF was supposed to be securing. Through all of these channels, the authorities that Bashir vested in the RSF as he looked to shore up the Jebel Amer mine served to the latter’s immense economic advantage, even allowing the RSF’s expansion beyond Sudan itself.[34]
RSF autonomy from the Sudanese state, however, was only ever partial. The RSF was a child of Bashir’s regime, after all, which paid its wage bills, trained its officers, and legally enabled its control of the border-zone: Fundamentally, the emboldening of the RSF was a doomed state strategy designed to shore up Bashir’s regime.
The War Economy
The Sudanese state (1989-2019), must be understood as both a petrostate that aimed to consolidate control of Forex and dispense it to loyalists, in the manner of a typical rentier state, and one that was constitutively lacking in political legitimacy in much of the country, where it instead ruled through instrumentalizing militia violence.[35] Since the beginning of the Sudanese war in April 2023, it is the militia state that has come to the foreground.[36] For those in Darfur and the Nuba Mountains, however, the Sudanese state has largely been a militia state since its inception in 1956, when Sudan became an independent nation. It ruled the peripheries through violence, and treated these regions as mere depots for resources extraction. During the current war, the Sudanese army (SAF) has attempted to portray the RSF as a group of mercenaries intent on looting—but such predation is simply the actuality of one part of the Sudanese state, and the current war has revealed its lineaments very clearly.
A common theorization of the state in Sudan is as a centralized elite that has dominated the peripheries of the country. Since 1989 however, it is more instructive to think of the security services as having captured the state. Using their positions within the state apparatus, security actors diverted flows of state revenue—including from oil and gold—towards private ends. In order to maintain these flows, the state militarized the peripheries, suppressing armed revolt, and pacified the centre, using subsidy-carrots and security-sticks to produce quiescent cities. If, during the petro-state period, such strategies relied on centralization of state power, since the shift of Sudan’s principal export markets towards artisanal gold production, they have increasingly come to resemble the forms of militia rule against which the SAF is putatively fighting. The current war has hastened this transformation.
Sudan’s geography of exploitation has shifted considerably over the past few years to encompass the entire country. The damage inflicted on the Sudanese people is incalculable, and has not been restricted to the traditional zones of war in Darfur, Blue Nile, and South Kordofan. Sudan is the world’s worst displacement crisis, nearly 25 million people face acute hunger, and somewhere between 20,000-150,000 people have been killed (estimates vary wildly). The institutions of the state, meanwhile, lie in ruin. Yet if one understands the project of Sudan’s security services as one of state capture, then the war can be seen less as a crisis than as a boon. Indeed, the legitimacy of the current military regime, much contested during the period that followed the coup in October 2021, has been shored up, both nationally (by groups that support the army against the encroachment of the RSF), and internationally (questions of civilian government have been suspended by diplomats focused on achieving a ceasefire). Moreover, almost the entire budget of the Sudanese state is now devoted to military expenditure, its allocations controlled by the security services.[37]
Materially speaking, there is little that separates the army and the RSF in terms of how they source funding. Though the former benefits from the imprimatur of an official state budget, each actor ultimately relies directly on predation—via taxes and custom duties—and revenue from the gold mining sector, What is more, the two adversaries actually collaborate in squeezing poorer communities for money. Much of Sudan’s export of livestock—along with Gum Arabic and agricultural products—involve the RSF and the Sudanese army working together to facilitate cross-border trade in what constitutes an enormous primary expropriation of resources from Sudan’s needy poor.[38] Though the two belligerent parties fight each other on the battleground, they do so while co-managing a single political economy. The real war being waged by the Sudanese security services is against the Sudanese people.
Sudan’s gold mining industry is largely divided up between the two principal belligerents, though here, as elsewhere, more unites than divides.[39] Substantively, what distinguishes gold mining in SAF from gold mining in RSF areas is the greater degree of formal and legal transparency around territories controlled by the Sudanese army. Correlatively, mining in SAF areas also evinces more publicly acknowledged partnerships with foreign firms. (While the RSF has a number of deals with foreign companies, they are opaque, given the extensive sanctions placed on the RSF). Regardless, both actors move gold in the much the same way: via smuggling.
After an interruption at the outset of the war attributable to a lack of cyanide and other supplies, gold production was properly restored in areas controlled by the Sudanese army starting in 2024. According to claims put forth by the SAF administration in Port Sudan, that year saw producing increase by 41 tons year-over-year, reaching a total of 64 tons. Operations were often run through companies linked to foreign states including Canada, the UAE, Morocco, and Russia. In terms of dollar yields, official statistics reported gold earnings of $1.6 billion.
A closer look at the numbers, however, reveals that the state only officially received some $183,000 from gold exports in 2024, which means that the vast majority of the gold produced in Sudan was smuggled out of the country. Of course, that the gold was smuggled outside of official state sanction does not mean that state officials were not involved. The collapse of state institutions, along with the formal economy, has allowed for a much more direct capture of revenue sources by the security actors that have come to dominate the war economy.
If one believes RSF propaganda, their wholesaling looting of captured cities represents the inversion of 1956 state: Positioning themselves as modern day Robin Hoods, the RSF asserts that it is merely returning wealth once extracted from Darfur by Sudan’s centralized state when it pillages Khartoum and other core cities. The self-styling is absurd. That the RSF also pillages cities along the periphery, especially urban sites in Darfur, affirms as much. Indeed, the reality is that the RSF has actually generalized the structure of Bashir’s rule. While the former dictator, following in a long tradition of Nilotic elites, exploited the peripheries of the country to enrich the centre, the RSF has treated the entire country as a periphery to be ransacked. The initial looting of Khartoum included both the currency printing house and the Sudan Gold Refinery—which held some 1.3 tonnes of unrefined gold. Residential buildings and state institutions were also plundered. Pillage became a constitutive part of the RSF war plan. Rather than pay new recruits wages, the paramilitaries shifted to community-based recruitment, in which commanders and customary authorities were issued one-off payments to be distributed amongst their forces as they saw fit. Keeping this coalition together after the initial bonus required that those conscripted were given the promise of future rewards derived from looting. The wholesaling looting of territory during the first eighteen months of the war was, as such, a consequence of the RSF’s military constitution. Since September 2024 and the beginning of a Sudanese army counteroffensive which recaptured Khartoum and Al-Jazira state, amongst other areas, RSF income flows from looting have slowed, and the core RSF personnel in places like West Kordofan and East Darfur states have come to rely on alternative forms of predation. Checkpoints and taxation on extant business enterprises are now increasingly essential to RSF finances, forms of revenue extraction traditionally practiced by a centralized state.
Until the outbreak of war in 2023, the RSF was parasitic, extracting resources through its relation with the Sudanese state. Since then, the RSF’s parasitism has endured, though the host organism it latches on to has shifted from Khartoum to Abu Dhabi. The particulars of the relationship with the al-Nahyan family remain unclear. While the RSF has received flows of weapons and other supplies from the UAE (and though Hemedti and members of his family have resided in the Emirati capital), the level of financial support that the paramilitary organization receives from Abu Dhabi can only be guessed at. Anecdotal reports from RSF members indicate a financial crisis in the paramilitary organization, partly caused by the army’s control of Sudanese banking instruments in Dubai. (Also contributing to the crisis are the consequences of Sudan’s currency devaluation in 2024 and the drying up of looting sources).
In this context, revenue from artisanal gold mining has assumed even more importance for the RSF. What is known is that the RSF retook control of Jebel Amer at the outset of the fighting and that it is overseeing gold mining elsewhere in Darfur. The amount of money produced by these mines, though, remains a matter of controversy. Experts have claimed that the RSF produced 32 tons of gold per year from 2015-2022, an output worth approximately $1.82 billion in total.[40] At the end of 2024, a confidential UN Panel of Experts report also suggested that for the year, the RSF ‘produced’ 10 tonnes of gold, the market value of which is $860 million. All these numbers are disputed.
Given the opaqueness of the RSF’s finances, it is perhaps more salutary to focus on the political economic system to which RSF gold mining has given rise during the current conflict. Mining has focused on two sites: Um Dafuk, on the border with the Central African Republic (CAR), and Songo, in the Radom area of South Darfur close to the South Sudanese border. The RSF sensu stricto, does not mine at these sites, though individual soldiers have been known to supplement their income by mining. Rather, at Songo, some 100,000 local miners pay security fees—often to multiple different actors within the paramilitary organization—and much of the gold is then bought by the RSF in a form of coercive capture in which the value of labour is extracted without the paramilitary organization seizing hold of gold production itself.[41] In addition to seizing control of artisanal gold production, a processing factory in Songo, operated by Russian and RSF personnel for the Al Junaid holding company, takes control of tailings, which is the primary source of RSF gold from South Darfur.
Gold mining is sufficiently important to the RSF that the SAF bombed the mining site on at least two occasions in 2024.[42] The facility is presently under the control of the RSF South Darfur state commander, Saleh al Futi.[43] Songo is defended by both RSF personnel and Wagner operatives, whose mercenaries man the anti-aircraft facilities at the Al Junaid site—apparently the best anti-aircraft defences that the RSF currently possess.[44] It is likely that the RSF has also received weaponry, including surface-to-air missiles, from Wagner, channelled via its forces in CAR.[45] As in CAR, Wagner are interesting in leveraging military equipment and training for access to lucrative mining sites for gold and other minerals.[46]
The RSF’s control of gold mining enable its control of a surplus population of youth, whose limited livelihood possibilities have been further eroded by the war. Gold mining at once proves a source of revenue and part of a system of labor control that enables the RSF’s war machine. In this, it resembles the force it is putatively opposed against: both are reliant on raising militias in order to wage a war that enables capital accumulations for two sets of elites uniformly predating on the Sudanese people.
Regional networks
Gold mining is also one of the principal means through which regional powers have become bound up in Sudan’s war. There are now a dizzying number of countries involved in Sudan’s civil war. The SAF has received weaponry and financial support from Russia, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Qatar, amongst others. In addition to support from its principal patron, the UAE, the RSF has received support from any number of countries—and quasi-state actors—pulled into the Emirati sphere of influence, including Kenya, Uganda, Libya—via the figure of Khalifa Haftar—and Ethiopia.
It would be a mistake, however, to view these agglomerations as two competing blocs, backing opposing sides. To do so would leave one struggling to understand why Turkey, which has provided drones to the SAF, is also courting Haftar, whose forces have actively fought against SAF in North Darfur, or why Russia is simultaneously collaborating on gold mining with the RSF, and attempting to secure a deal with the SAF for a port on the Red Sea. How does one explain this bouleversement?
The regional powers currently intervening in Sudan do view the country as the site for national interests, but in the manner that 19th century colonial powers viewed Africa: In their eyes, Sudan is a mere means for resource extraction, and a territory on which geopolitically important areas are located. The consequences of such rationales would be considered politically incoherent if one were to assume that peace in Sudan, with a stable polity, was these powers’ horizon of political action. The evidence, however, suggests that for many, maintaining Sudan in a condition of weakness—a condition where a unified state cannot assert sovereignty to any meaningful degree—is the preference. The logic at play is obvious enough. In circumstance defined by weakness and war, extraction requires that foreign parties manage clients on transactional terms. This is a much simpler task than navigating a constellation of bureaucrats, judges, businessmen, politicians, and civil society, as would be the case were Sudan made whole again.
The UAE’s example is instructive in this regard. While the SAF has consistently criticized the UAE’s role in supporting the RSF, the truth is that it too remains dependent on the Gulf emirate. The UAE-based Dubai Islamic bank—inter alia.—has a significant stake in the Bank of Khartoum, whose Bankak digital platform is the prime means of conveying remittances and electronics transfers into Sudan today. The Bank of Khartoum is also based in Dubai, while the state-owned El-Nilein Bank is dependent on its Abu Dhabi branch to manage international transactions. Despite attempts to diversify its export economy—via, for instance, the establishment of gold refining factories in Qatar—Sudan-cum-the SAF is also dependent on the UAE for 96.8% of its official gold exports. UAE-backed companies also own gold refining sites in northern Sudan, and the UAE has quietly provided financial backing for some northern Sudanese politicians aligned to the SAF.
All of these business dealings represent lucrative opportunities for the UAE, just as various dealings with the RSF do. Put simply, for the Emirates, there is no conflict in conflict: War and the attendant fracturing of states can open up and streamline multiple sites for accumulation. The same conditions also allow influence to be more easily exerted. And with 47% of all exported African gold finding its way to Dubai in 2022, it would be hard to say such influence isn’t on the rise.
The UAE’s Global Political Economy of Gold
Seen in a certain light, the UAE can be appreciated as an artificial Leviathan, not merely in the sense that Hobbes intended the term (a contingent association of individuals), but in that it has to outsource basic state functions to external parties. Agricultural land, at a premium in the Gulf, is sourced from countries like Tanzania. With only a small army, the UAE needs grab hold of entities like the RSF to buttress its martial capacity, too. And the country must also acquire trade infrastructure externally in order to secure an economy highly exposed to volatile supply chains and foreign commerce. (Sudan has itself offered the UAE the possibility of ports on the Red Sea, though more recently, given the downturn in relations between the SAF and the UAE, the Emirates has found it more productive to concentrate its energies on the Puntland port of Bosaso, where it deployed Israeli radar earlier this year.)
For the UAE, gold represents not only a financial asset, but a valuable geopolitical commodity. As Alex de Waal has argued in a number of recent publications, the politicization of the dollar following the beginning of the war in Ukraine has led the UAE, amongst other countries, to look for means of relative dedollarization in order to avoid the threat of sanctions. Gold thus plays multiple roles for the UAE: its central role as the world’s gold depot allows it to bind together a number of gold-producing countries within its sphere of influence. Gold’s accumulation also allows the UAE to build itself up as a relatively independent geopolitical player. (Such independence must of course be qualified by the UAE’s deep military dependence on the US).
In this context, the RSF and other militias exploiting artisanal gold miners on the ground are but bit players in a much larger and more white-collar game: While the gold businesses of the Hemedti’s of the world attract lots of attention, the reality is that markets for global commodities like gold have a lack of transparency built into them. Insofar as it is this lack of transparency which allows militia economies such as the RSF’s to take off in the first place, history’s real protagonists in this space are the governments and businesses in the north which make sure many commodity trades stays dark. For scale, consider that a US Government Accountability Office review of conflict minerals (which include tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold) from 2022 determined that half the companies surveyed couldn’t determine where they minerals they used came from, at all.
Enabling RSF gold flows—as part of a broader regional gold economy—has created a network of countries dependent on the UAE. Libya has become an increasingly important vector in this trade. With Emirati backing, the Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF) have turned eastern Libya into a gold hub, both for fields like Ezri (on the Chad-Libya border) and in the al-Muthaleth tri-border area between Libya, Egypt, and Sudan (which was recently taken over by the RSF). LAAF gold also goes to CAR via connections to Russian AfricaCorps personnel, and to Chad, thanks to the RSF’s close connections to the ruling family. Recent clashes in North Darfur between the RSF and SAF-aligned groups are partly about controlling flows of gold and other important cross-border trades, including fuel.
From Songo, the RSF’s main mining site, the vast majority of the gold is exported to Chad by motorcycle. However, there are two additional routes. Some gold is taken to Nyala and flown directly to the UAE. The other route is through Raga County by land, and onto Wau, the capital of Western Bahr el Ghazal state. From Wau, the gold is flown to Juba in commercial planes, which are rented by personnel from South Sudan’s National Security Service (NSS), who also fly with the gold for security.[47] This operation is run in coordination with Ugandan military personnel and UAE operatives, with the NSS receiving lucrative payments in return for its efforts. Indeed, all along the gold’s route out of East Africa, high-ranking security personnel take a cut in an exemplary case of the mode of predation, in which violence—or the potential threat of violence—is leveraged to obtain a portion of a circulatory flow of capital or resources. From Juba, gold goes by plane either direct to the UAE or first to Uganda. These flights are facilitated by Ugandan military intelligence and high-ranking members of the RSF, who fly with the gold out of Juba, according to flight manifests viewed by the author.[48]
The entire process is illicit rather than formal: according to the national ministry of mining, only one kilo of gold was exported from South Sudan in 2024—a vast underestimate. Given that gold mining on both sides of the border is almost entirely unregulated and the selling of artisanal gold occurs outside of formal state sanctioned institutions, it should not come as a surprise that the real substantive links between commercial and military partners across a national border are more concrete than the line of national sovereignty putatively dividing them.
Conclusion
Gold does not move on its own, nor does its physical properties require and/or produce a certain form of political economy. The commodity’s salience to Sudan at our present juncture emerges at the interstices of a number of developments. It derives from the opaqueness of global commodity flows. From a regional political economy in which the traditional great powers have taken a back seat and countries like the UAE are increasingly attempting to make a claim. From a mode of production and circulation predicated on predatory and dispersed conditions of labor. And from a militia economy in which the line between non-state and state actors is increasingly blurred.
Within the international order, the return of 19th century logics looks to be upon us, with countries of the world sorted into two classes. In one, countries act as sovereign nations. Even if dependent on illicit flows of resources—as is the UAE, for instance—countries in this class see their affairs orderly managed by a state, whose powers over violence and law within designated borders are incontestable. For those in the other class, sovereignty has been reduced to chat and aspiration. Materially, states of the second class are fractured both internally—by a form of rule-by-militia that intensifies ethnic differences and leads to the collapse of broader forms of social contract—and externally. In the latter case, fracturing occurs by way of regional powers from the first world taking hold of privileged sites of resource extraction in order to accumulate capital and geopolitical power.
Looking forward, all indications suggest that the geopolitical and local forces tearing apart Sudan—along with Somalia, South Sudan, CAR, and DRC—are here to stay. They will leave behind fragmented polities with little hope of stitching themselves back together in the medium-term. In political economic form, this will be a new era of enclave capitalism, in which resource extraction is not tied to centralized control, but in which countries become conduits for forms of 19th century pillage. In the Horn of Africa, this process is predicated on gold mining: both for the forms of regional network it enables, and the types of militarization on the ground that it necessitates.
This publication has been supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. The positions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
Photo Credit: Jerome Tubiana
[1] Data calculated from gold.org and goldprice.org, accessed 25 June 2025.
[2] This comparison was suggested by Michael Gibb, of the UN Panel of Experts for South Sudan, personal correspondence, June 2025.
[3] The Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) is the agency within the US Treasury that administers economic sanctions—the RSF has been extensively sanctioned since the beginning of the Sudanese civil war in April 2023.
[4] See Christoph Vogel. Conflict Minerals: War, Profit and White Saviorism in Eastern Congo. London: Hurst. 2022.
[5] See Michael Watts. ‘Empire of oil: capitalist dispossession and the scramble for Africa.’ Monthly Review, 2006.
[6] A full consideration of South Sudan exceeds the scope of this paper. See, inter alia, Small Arms Survey. Living with Lobong: Power, Gold, and the UPDF in Eastern Equatoria. November 2024.
[7] For the ‘mode of predation,’ see Joshua Craze. ‘Rule by Militia,’ Boston Review, Spring 2024.
[8] For South Sudan, see, inter alia, Nicki Kindersley and Joseph Diing Majok, Breaking Out of the Borderlands: Understanding Migrant Pathways from Northern Bahr el Ghazal, South Sudan. Rift Valley Institute, 2020. For Darfur, in particular, see Jérôme Tubiana, Clotilde Warin, and Gaffar Mohammud Saeneen, Multilateral Damage: The Impact of EU migration policies on central Saharan routes. Clingendael, 2018.
[9] See SwissAid. On The Trail of African Gold. 2024.
[10] The 1990s had already seen a shift in production, with a global decline in cotton prices coming in the context of rising demand for livestock from Saudi Arabia, and an increasing emphasis on sesame production.
[11] See Luke Patey, The New Kings of Crude: China, India, and the Global Struggle for Oil in Sudan and South Sudan. Hurst, 2014.
[12] See Edward Thomas and Magdi El Gizouli. Sudan’s Grain Divide: A Revolution of Bread and Sorghum. Rift Valley Institute, 2020.
[13] See Edward Thomas and Alex de Waal. Hunger in Sudan’s Political Marketplace. World Peace Foundation, 2022.
[14] Jok Madut Jok and Sharon Hutchinson. ‘Sudan’s Prolonged Second Civil War and the Militarization of Nuer and Dinka Ethnic Identities,’ African Studies Review, 1999.
[15] See Joshua Craze. ‘Prelude to a Coup.’ n+1, 2023.
[16] See Joshua Craze and Jérôme Tubiana. A State of Disunity: Conflict Dynamics in Unity State, 2013-2015, 2016.
[17] See Clémence Pinaud, ‘Civil war, predation and the making of a military aristocracy,’ African Affairs, 2014.
[18] See Jérôme Tubiana and Joshua Craze. ‘Darfur: The New Massacres,’ New York Review of Books, 2024.
[19] IMF, Sudan’s Oil Sector: Histories, Policies, Outlook, 2020.
[20] See Raphaelle Chevrillon-Guibert. The Gold Boom in Sudan: challenges and opportunities for national players. Revue Internationale de Politique de Développement, 2016
[21] Data calculated from gold.org and goldprice.org, accessed 25 June 2025.
[22] For more details on the plans of Bashir’s regime see the excellent article by Raphaëlle Chevrillon-Guibert, Enrico Ille and Mohamed Salah, ‘Power practices, mining conflicts and the gold economy in the Sudan under the Al-Inqaz regime.’ Politique Africaine, 2020.
[23] See International Crisis Group. Getting a Grip on Central Sahel’s Gold Rush. 2019.
[24] Artisanal mining extracts a maximum of approximately 30% of the gold in ore, leaving the rest in the residue. The processing of tailings, known as karta in Sudanese Arabic, primarily uses cyanide and immersion in open-air ponds to extract the remnants.
[25] Ahmed Soliman and Suliman Baldo. Gold and the war in Sudan. Chatham House, 2025.
[26] See SwissAid. On The Trail of African Gold, 2024.
[27] Jérôme Tubiana, ‘Out for Gold and Blood in Sudan: Letter from Jebel Amir,’ Foreign Affairs,, 2014.
[28] Jérôme Tubiana, Darfur After Bashir. USIP, 2022.
[29] Alex de Waal, ‘Counterinsurgency on the Cheap,’ London Review of Books, 2004.
[30] For a more extended treatment of the RSF’s history see Joshua Craze and Raga Makawi. The Republic of Kadamol: A Portrait of the Rapid Support Forces at War. Small Arms Survey, 2025.
[31] See the interview with Magdi El Gizouli. ‘Marketing war,’ Phenomenal World, 2023.
[32] UNSC. Letter from the Panel of Experts. 2016, p.5.
[33] Soliman & Baldo, 2025.
[34] As Janet Roitman argues with regard to illicit activities in Chad: “such activities are fundamentally linked to the state and are even essential to the very re-composition of the state in conditions of extreme austerity.” See: Janet Roitman. “Productivity in the margins: the reconstitution of state power in the Chad Basin.” In n D. Poole and V. Das, eds. Anthropology at the Margins of the State, Santa Fe, School of American Research Press, 2004, p.43.
[35] See Hazam Beblawi. The Rentier State in the Arab World, London: Routledge, 1990.
[36] See Joshua Craze, ‘Gunshots in Khartoum,’ Sidecar, New Left Review, April 2023, ‘Sudan’s World War,’ Sidecar, New Left Review, April 2025.
[37] See Ayin. ‘Leaked budget boosts military spending, cuts critical services further.’ 2025.
[38] See Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton, ‘How capitalism is destroying the Horn of Africa: sheep and the crises in Somalia and Sudan.’ Review of African Political Economy, 2024. See David Keen’s The Benefits of Famine for a longer history of such transfers during the second Sudanese civil war.
[39] In Darfur, the Sudan Liberation Army under the command of Abdul Wahid al-Nur also mines goals in Jebel Mbarra. However, these resources—and in particular tailings from these mines—are reliant on RSF refining stations, and utilize the same cross-border routes as RSF gold, in particular into Nairobi, Kenya, where Abdul Wahid is resident. Gold mining also occurs in territory controlled by other armed groups, notably the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North, under the control of Abelaziz Al-Hilu.
[40] Ayin/Darfur 24. ‘The Sungu Mines—gold that fuels RSF’s war. 2025.
[41] In December 2024, the price of gold in Songo rocketed due to RSF officers and traders purchasing gold in response to the new currency introduced by the administration in Port Sudan, given the uncertainty of fiat currency, and the relatively stability of gold. See Ayin. 2025. ‘El Fasher: Eight months of war to control the city, the region.’
[42] Al Rakoba. 13 October 2024. مناجم الذهب..حرب أخرى أعنف بين الجيش السوداني والدعم السريع
[43] A Misseriya from Southern Kas, al-Fouti was originally a member of the SLA-AW, before joining SAF following the Doha agreement. In 2019, he joined the RSF, deploying to South Darfur in 2023.
[44] Key informant interviews, names withheld, Nyala, November 2024.
[45] Telephone interviews, miners and local residents, Songo, South Darfur, September 2024. Al Jazeera. 2023. ‘Sudan residents describe raids, evictions by RSF soldiers.’ 7 May 2023.
[46] Pogue, James. 2024. Wagner in Africa. Granta.
[47] Researcher observations at Wau airstrip, name withheld, date withheld.
[48] Flight manifests for April-March 2024 on file with the author.