This article analyzes the militarization of Sudan's political economy, focusing on the security duopoly of the Sudan Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. It explores their multi-billion-dollar off-budget corporate empires and the integration disputes that triggered the civil war. Finally, it details the proliferation of tribal militias, porous border vulnerabilities, and the active involvement of foreign proxy powers.
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The current civil war in Sudan is the tragic result of a deep-seated militarization of the country’s state apparatus and its national economy. Rather than operating under a unified national defense framework, Sudan has long been dominated by a security duopoly consisting of two competing military forces: the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), the traditional state military, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a powerful paramilitary organization that grew out of western regional militias. These two factions did not merely function as military entities; they established independent, multi-billion-dollar corporate and financial empires that operated completely outside of state oversight, with each force controlling critical economic sectors such as banking, mining, and agriculture.
The outbreak of war in April 2023 was the direct consequence of this security duopoly, as the two factions competed for political dominance and economic control. The resulting conflict has caused unprecedented physical destruction, triggered a severe humanitarian crisis, and shattered the country's national administrative structures. Any potential path to peace and economic recovery will require a deep understanding of the military structures, financial networks, and foreign proxy alliances that sustain this devastating civil war.
The Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) represent the traditional, institutional military of the Sudanese state. Established during the colonial and early independence eras, the SAF has historically functioned as a highly centralized, professional officer corps, dominated by the riverine Arab elite from northern and central Sudan. Throughout Sudan’s post-independence financial history, the SAF has been a primary political actor, staging multiple military coups and ruling the country for the majority of its modern existence. Under the three-decade dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir, the SAF's political influence was institutionalized, and the military leadership was integrated into the highest levels of state administration.
A key feature of the SAF’s power is its massive, opaque economic empire. The military controls the Defense Industrial System (DIS), a vast conglomerate of state-owned and military-run enterprises that began as a munitions manufacturer but expanded into consumer electronics, vehicle assembly, construction, and agricultural processing.
Beyond defense-related industries, SAF-controlled holding companies own major shares in commercial banks, telecommunications networks, real estate developments, and export monopolies. This economic empire operates completely outside the oversight of the Ministry of Finance or the central bank, allowing the SAF leadership, headed by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, to generate off-budget revenues to finance operations and maintain political patronage networks. The SAF’s resistance to economic reforms that would place these military enterprises under civilian control was a major factor in the collapse of the post-2019 transition.
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) represent a unique and highly destructive paramilitary phenomenon. The origins of the RSF lie in the Janjaweed, a loose coalition of armed Arab horsemen and pastoralists mobilized by the Omar al-Bashir regime in the early 2000s to suppress the rebellion in Darfur. The Janjaweed campaigns were marked by systemic human rights abuses and scorched-earth tactics. In 2013, Bashir formalized these militias into the RSF, placing them under the direct command of General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti) and structuring them as an independent border security force under the authority of the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS).
Under Hemedti’s leadership, the RSF transitioned from a local counter-insurgency force into a powerful, independent military and corporate organization. The financial foundation of the RSF’s power is its control over Sudan’s gold mines, particularly the Jebel Amer mines in Darfur, which were seized by RSF forces in 2017. The Dagalo family-owned conglomerate, Al Junaid, manages the extraction, processing, and smuggling of gold from these mines to regional markets, bypassing formal customs controls.
Furthermore, the RSF transformed itself into a highly lucrative mercenary force, deploying thousands of fighters to support the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen and the campaigns of Khalifa Haftar in Libya. The hard currency generated from these foreign deployments and gold exports allowed the RSF to build its own independent financial network. This network is completely separate from the formal Sudanese state, enabling the paramilitary group to recruit, equip, and sustain a force of over 100,000 highly mobile, combat-hardened fighters.
A defining feature of Sudan’s political economy is the extreme opacity of its defense spending and military finance. Historically, official national budgets allocated a massive portion of state revenues—often exceeding 60 to 70 percent—to the security and defense sectors, leaving minimal funding for healthcare, education, or infrastructure development. However, these official figures represent only a fraction of actual military expenditure. Both the SAF and the RSF rely heavily on off-budget, parallel financial systems that are completely insulated from public audit or legislative oversight.
The competition for economic dominance between these two factions created a highly distorted commercial landscape. While the SAF utilized state monopolies, customs exemptions, and favorable central bank credit lines to enrich its military-industrial complex, the RSF leveraged its independent gold revenues and international bank accounts, particularly in the Gulf states, to build a parallel financial empire.
This financial duopoly meant that during the post-2019 transition under the Sovereignty Council, the civilian cabinet led by Prime Minister Hamdok had no control over the country’s security budgets or its most lucrative commercial assets. The military's refusal to integrate these commercial networks into the national treasury starved the civilian administration of funds, leading to chronic budget deficits, high inflation, and economic collapse. This dynamic demonstrate how the militarization of finance directly undermined the potential for stable, democratic governance.
The fragile alliance of convenience between the SAF and the RSF, which had executed the October 2021 military coup, began to unravel in late 2022. Under pressure from domestic civilian coalitions and international diplomats, the two military factions signed a Framework Agreement in December 2022, which envisioned a transition back to civilian rule. However, the agreement’s implementation stalled over a critical security sector reform issue: the timeline and command structure for integrating the RSF into the regular SAF army.
The disagreement was fundamental and highly personal. General al-Burhan and the SAF leadership demanded that the RSF be integrated within a short, two-year timeline, which would effectively dismantle Hemedti’s independent command and financial network. Hemedti and the RSF, conversely, insisted on a ten-year integration period and demanded that the RSF commander report directly to a civilian head of state rather than the SAF leadership.
As negotiations broke down, both factions began mobilizing and deploying forces to key locations, including the national capital. On April 15, 2023, open warfare erupted in Khartoum, with intense urban combat quickly spreading across the city and surrounding areas. The war transformed the capital into a primary battlefield, causing the near-complete destruction of the country's political and administrative core, including the physical infrastructure of the central bank and key state ministries.
The outbreak of the war has triggered a rapid and highly dangerous proliferation of paramilitary groups, ethnic militias, and tribal armed factions across Sudan, destroying the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. As the formal structures of the SAF and the RSF became stretched, both sides began mobilizing and arming civilian populations along ethnic and tribal lines, transforming a political-military rivalry into a fragmented, multi-dimensional civil war.
This militarization of society has been particularly severe in the western region of Darfur. The RSF has successfully mobilized Arab nomadic tribes to conduct campaigns against non-Arab communities, leading to widespread ethnic violence, mass displacement, and accusations of war crimes. In response, several non-Arab armed groups that had signed the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement, including the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) led by Minni Minawi and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) led by Gibril Ibrahim, abandoned their neutrality and allied with the SAF.
In northern and eastern Sudan, the SAF has launched popular mobilization campaigns, arming local tribal militias and civilian defense committees to defend their territories. This rapid proliferation of armed actors has created a highly fragmented security landscape, where localized warlords operate with complete impunity, severely complicating any future peace negotiations or efforts to manage the country's economic future.
Sudan’s internal conflict is deeply intertwined with the geopolitics of its neighboring states, with the country's porous borders serving as conduits for weapons, fighters, and smuggled resources. Sudan shares borders with seven nations—Egypt, Libya, Chad, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea—most of which face their own internal security challenges and are highly vulnerable to regional spillover.
Key regional border dynamics include:
The porous borders ensure that Sudan’s civil war cannot be treated as an isolated domestic crisis, but rather as a regional security threat that could destabilize the entire Horn of Africa and Sahelian zones.
The duration and intensity of the Sudanese civil war have been significantly extended by the active intervention of foreign powers, which have transformed the country into a battleground for regional geopolitical rivalries. Both the SAF and the RSF have secured powerful international sponsors, providing them with a steady stream of advanced weaponry, financial transfers, and diplomatic cover.
Key foreign interventions include:
The involvement of these diverse foreign actors has created a diplomatic stalemate, as regional and international powers pursue conflicting strategic agendas, leaving the Sudanese population to bear the catastrophic human and reconstruction costs of the ongoing conflict.
The militarization of Sudan’s state and economy by the SAF and the RSF has led to the complete destruction of the nation. The competition for economic control and political dominance between these two armed factions created a highly unstable security duopoly that was destined to collapse into open conflict. The resulting civil war has dismantled the state's administrative institutions, destroyed its national capital, and unleashed a dangerous proliferation of ethnic and tribal militias. Rebuilding Sudan will require more than just a ceasefire; it demands a complete dismantling of the military-commercial monopolies, the centralization of all security forces under a unified civilian command, and a comprehensive security sector reform program. Without these fundamental structural changes, Sudan faces a future of permanent fragmentation, where its rich natural resources will continue to be extracted by armed groups to finance the ongoing destruction of the nation.