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 has worked to document and understand 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.
Munzoul A. M. Assal is Senior Researcher at the Chr Michelsen Institute, Norway.
The opinions in this piece are attributable to the author only.
