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Middle East & North Africa
Scarcity by Design: The Political Economy of Water in Jordan
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Middle East & North Africa
Black Gold, Liquid Metal: The Political Economy of Gold in Sudan
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Noria Research
Sacred Lands and Secular Tensions: Religious Economy and Agropastoral Conflicts in Southern Chad
Introduction
Water scarcity is perhaps the most enduring feature attached to Jordan. From policy reports to media coverage, the framing is familiar: Jordan is one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, with renewable freshwater supplies far below the threshold of absolute scarcity.[i]
This description is factually correct, but it risks reducing a complex reality to an environmental inevitability. Scarcity in Jordan is not simply the result of climate, geography, or demography. It is equally the product of political choices, institutional arrangements, and economic structures.[ii] To understand why Jordanian households still receive water only once or twice a week, why agriculture consumes such a disproportionate share of national resources (almost 50%), and why desalination projects dominate policy agendas and the suggested solutions, we must examine the political economy of water.
This essay traces how water has been governed in Jordan since statehood, situating today’s crisis within a longer trajectory of allocation bargains, donor dependence, and regional geopolitics. It argues that water scarcity in Jordan has been shaped—sometimes even manufactured—by political decisions that privilege stability and patronage over efficiency and equity. The result is what might be called “scarcity by design”: a system in which scarcity is managed and distributed in ways that reinforce existing power structures.
Scarcity and the State
Jordan became independent in 1946. Thereafter, the state emerged and consolidated under conditions of chronic water scarcity. From its earliest years, water played a dual role: as a material necessity for survival and as a political resource for buttressing authority.[iii]
Development projects in the 1950s and 1960s centred on irrigation schemes in the Jordan Valley, which were justified as engines of modernisation but also functioned as instruments of state control.[iv] By providing access to water and land, the Jordanian leadership bound key tribal and rural constituencies to the Jordanian project, reinforcing loyalty through patronage.[v] The licensing of highland wells further reinforced water as a political currency.[vi] As agriculture expanded into the uplands, often with heavy subsidies and weak enforcement of groundwater abstraction limits, politically connected families and landowners secured enduring entitlements. These entitlements created structural imbalances that persist until today: agriculture consumes more than half of Jordan’s freshwater while contributing only a small fraction of GDP and employment (even when considering the whole supply chain of the agricultural sector).[vii]
Urbanisation, which accelerated at pace across the 1970s, brought a different form of water politics. As Amman and other cities expanded, municipal networks were extended but operated under a rationing model. By the 1980s, the practice of intermittent supply had become institutionalised. Piped water would reach households only once or twice a week, requiring families to store water in rooftop tanks and cisterns.[viii] This system normalised scarcity in everyday life, while shifting the burden of coping on to households themselves. It also generated new markets: tanker deliveries, private filtration systems, and storage technologies became integral parts of the urban water economy. Scarcity, in other words, not only endured but was commodified.
Throughout, refugee flows have reinforced these dynamics. The arrival of successive waves – Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, Iraqis in the 1990s and 2000s, Syrians after 2011 – magnified demand pressures and accentuated the language of crisis. Refugees were often provided with donor-financed infrastructure, especially in camps, but their presence strained municipal systems and deepened perceptions of scarcity. Water thus became a site where questions of national identity, fairness, and resource allocation intersected.[ix] The refugees / water scarcity link was expressly emphasised at COP27, when King Abdullah II launched the Climate/Refugees Nexus Initiative, which highlighted the interconnected challenges of climate change and refugees, especially for countries like Jordan which host a large amount of refugees and displaced people.[x]
The Politics of Allocation
At the heart of Jordan’s water economy lies a fundamental allocation dilemma: how to divide the water supply among competing sectors?
Agriculture has historically enjoyed privileged access to water, even as its economic contribution has declined. Irrigation in the Jordan Valley and the highlands remains politically sensitive; attempts to reallocate water to cities often encounter resistance from farmers who invoke both economic necessity and historical entitlement. Likewise, enforcement against illegal wells has repeatedly faltered when it confronts politically influential constituencies.[xi] Urban consumers, by contrast, have had few successes in contesting rationing. Intermittent supply has become part of the social contract, producing a peculiar form of collective adaptation. Wealthier households mitigate scarcity through private investments in storage and tanker purchases, while lower-income families bear disproportionate burdens, spending a larger share of their income on coping strategies: For instance, in Amman, wealthier households often install large rooftop tanks and can afford tanker deliveries costing 25–40 JOD each, while poorer families with only small 1,000-liter tanks may exhaust their supply within days and end up spending as much as a fifth of their monthly income just to secure water. The very persistence of intermittency reflects a political compromise: it allows the state to stretch limited supplies without confronting powerful irrigation interests or raising tariffs to cost-recovery levels.[xii]
Non-revenue water (NRW) illustrates the political (and economic) character of scarcity. Officially defined as water lost through leakage, metering errors, or theft, NRW represents around half of the total water supply. While often portrayed as a technical issue, high NRW is in fact sustained by political realities—fear of antagonising particular communities most of all. Indeed, illegal connections are in many cases tolerated because they offer a mechanism for avoiding social unrest. So long as political costs outweigh prospective gains, failures to reduce NRW should be expected to continue.[xiii]
Zooming out, then, it can be appreciated that baked into the political economy of water in Jordan is increasing inequality amongst the population. Farmers with access to subsidised irrigation water enjoy privileges unavailable to urban households. Wealthier families can purchase tanker water to bridge supply gaps, while poorer households cannot. Refugees often find themselves caught between humanitarian provision and municipal rationing, amplifying tensions in host communities. Scarcity, in short, is not distributed evenly; it is mediated through power relations.
Regional Dependence and the Diplomacy of Water
Naturally, Jordan’s water economy cannot be understood without reference to the regional environment. The kingdom’s rivers and aquifers are shared with neighbouring countries, making transboundary politics a central aspect of domestic water supply.
The 1994 peace treaty with Israel institutionalised water sharing arrangements between the two countries, granting Jordan fixed allocations from the Jordan (Photo 1) and Yarmouk Rivers and committing Israel to transfer specified volumes annually.[xiv] Over time, Jordan has also purchased additional water from Israel, particularly during drought years. These transactions underscore Jordan’s dependence on its neighbour, tying domestic water security to the state of bilateral relations. While technically successful, this arrangement is politically fragile, as water cooperation is often unpopular among the Jordanian public.
Comparatively speaking, Jordan’s water relations with Syria have been less stable than those with Israel. The 1987 Syria-Jordan agreement on the Yarmouk River envisioned cooperative arrangements. However, the river has long since been heavily dammed and diverted upstream, reducing flows into Jordan.[xv] Moreover, political tensions and conflict in Syria has limited until recently possible prospects for cooperative management.[xvi]
In recent decades, megaprojects have embodied the kingdom’s search for sovereign solutions. The Red Sea–Dead Sea conveyance plan, once promoted as a trilateral cooperation scheme linking Jordan, Israel, and Palestine, was ultimately abandoned due to financial, technical, and political obstacles. Its successor, the Aqaba-Amman desalination and conveyance project – commonly known as the National Carrier – represented a more unilateral strategy. By desalinating Red Sea water and pumping it hundreds of kilometres north to Amman, Jordan aimed to secure a large, independent supply. However, the project relies on external financing and international contractors, reminding us that sovereignty in water is always partial. Moreover, due to political reasons, this project too is yet to advance beyond the drawing board.[xvii]
In 2021, a UAE-brokered water-for-energy deal was announced between Israel and Jordan. Per the terms of the deal, Jordan was to export renewable electricity (solar energy) to Israel in exchange for desalinated water: a classic example of the ways water and climate diplomacy can come together. Alas, this venture too has stumbled under the weight of a fraught geopolitical moment. In late 2023, amid regional conflict and domestic backlash, Amman paused discussions altogether. The episode illustrates how regional turbulence can upend the development of critical infrastructure. It also shows that matters of justice, equity, and public opinion cannot be sidestepped forever, even where policymakers consider themselves traversing technical and apolitical domains.[xviii]
Donors, Finance, and Structural Dependence
If regional geopolitics shape Jordan’s water supplies, donor politics shape its water governance. Indeed, the sector has long been relying on international aid, with bilateral donors, multilateral development banks, and UN agencies financing infrastructures, reform programs, and emergency responses.[xix]
Donor presence reflects both humanitarian concern and geopolitical interest: supporting Jordan is seen as a way of ensuring the stability of an ally in a conflict region.[xx] Aid has been key in financing building wastewater treatment plants (like the As-Samra Plant), rehabilitating networks, and subsidising emergency supply during refugee influxes. Yet reliance on aid also constrains domestic autonomy. Donor priorities – whether promoting privatisation, cost-recovery tariffs, or digital metering – often set the reform agenda. National strategies are written with donor audiences in mind, ensuring continued flows of finance.[xxi]
The fiscal fragility of Jordan’s water utilities reinforces this dependence. Tariffs are set below cost-recovery levels for both political and social reasons. Raising prices risks unrest, especially when service quality is poor. As a result, utilities accumulate debts, and the government must step in with subsidies. This cycle leaves little room for independent investment, making major projects dependent on loans and grants. In this sense, water governance in Jordan is donor-governed: local actors often have to operate within parameters set by international financiers.[xxii]
Reform, Resistance, and the Politics of Efficiency
When it comes to reforms, policies, and strategies, Jordan has been quite successful in drafting and approving strong and comprehensive documents.[xxiii] National water strategies and master plans have regularly outlined ambitious goals and furnished well-conceived operational plans. Recently, the focus has been on reducing non-revenue water, modernising metering, expanding wastewater reuse, and improving institutional performance. The latest strategies also incorporate and discuss issues around the Water-Energy-Food Nexus, climate change, and gender. On paper, these reforms promise efficiency and sustainability. The challenge, however, is in implementation. And here again it is politics rather than technical feasibility which abides.
Shutting down illegal wells or prosecuting water theft means undermining and challenging existing interests, risking social backlash. Reallocating water from agriculture may result in opposition from farmers and their allies. Moreover, tariff reforms would result in public discontent, especially when framed as donor-imposed austerity. In each of these cases, the state has to balance the need for reform against the priority of maintaining stability.[xxiv]
As mentioned, NRW exemplifies these dynamics. Engineers often emphasise that reducing NRW is the cheapest way to create new water supply. Nevertheless, every attempt at sharp enforcement runs into obstacles: metering fraud, collusion between officials and offenders, and the political calculus of tolerating illegal connections in marginalised areas or where influential people live. As a result, targets are rarely met.
The persistence of intermittent supply also reflects these politics. Technically, continuous water supply could be achieved in parts of the network if losses were reduced and tariffs adjusted. But the political risks of imposing stricter enforcement and higher prices outweigh the potential benefits. Thus, intermittent supply continues as a mechanism of managed scarcity.
Conclusion
Jordan’s water crisis is real, but it is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is also the outcome of decades of political and economic decisions which have structured scarcity in ways that serve certain interests while disadvantaging others. By protecting irrigation entitlements, tolerating over-abstraction, under-pricing water, and relying heavily on donor finance, successive governments have created a system where scarcity is inevitable and its effects unevenly distributed.
Looking forward, the National Carrier project offers the promise of a more secure and sovereign water supply. The technical merits of the project, however, do not offer a workaround for deeper political economy dilemmas. Desalination will raise costs, posing new challenges for tariff design and social equity. Donor dependence will persist, as external financing remains important. Regional geopolitics will continue to shape flows and options, reminding Jordan of the limits of water sovereignty.
True water security for Jordan therefore requires more than new infrastructure. It demands confronting the political bargains that underpin allocation: focusing on reducing NRW, prioritising demand side solutions, balancing urban and agricultural demands, enforcing rules on groundwater use, reforming tariffs while protecting vulnerable households, and managing donor relationships without surrendering autonomy. These are not technical challenges but political ones.
Water scarcity in Jordan is best conceived as scarcity by design. It is a condition sustained by political choices as much as by hydrological constraints. Recognising this fact is the first step toward imagining solutions that go beyond managing shortages to addressing the deeper structures that produce them.
This publication has been supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. The positions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
[i]https://www.mwi.gov.jo/EBV4.0/Root_Storage/AR/EB_Ticker/National_Water_Strategy_2023-2040_Summary-English_-ver2.pdf
[ii] Hussein, H. (2018). Lifting the veil: Unpacking the discourse of water scarcity in Jordan. Environmental science & policy, 89, 385-392; Hussein, H. (2018). Tomatoes, tribes, bananas, and businessmen: An analysis of the shadow state and of the politics of water in Jordan. Environmental Science & Policy, 84, 170-176; Yorke, V. (2016). Jordan’s shadow state and water management: prospects for water security will depend on politics and regional cooperation. In Society-Water-Technology: A Critical Appraisal of Major Water Engineering Projects (pp. 227-251). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
[iii] Massad, J. A. (2001). Colonial effects: The making of national identity in Jordan. Columbia Univ. Press.
[iv] Molle, F. (2005). Historical transformations of the Lower Jordan River Basin in Jordan: changes in water use and projections (1950-2025). IWMI Books, Reports
[v] Massad, J. A. (2001). Colonial effects: The making of national identity in Jordan. Columbia University Press; Hussein, H. (2018). Tomatoes, tribes, bananas, and businessmen: An analysis of the shadow state and of the politics of water in Jordan. Environmental Science & Policy, 84, 170-176
[vi] Wojnarowski, F. (2025). Contested flows: An ethnographic contribution to narratives of groundwater over abstraction in the central Jordanian highlands. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 25148486251321331; Al Naber, M., & Molle, F. (2017). Controlling groundwater over abstraction: state policies vs local practices in the Jordan highlands. Water policy, 19(4), 692-708.
[vii] Hussein, H. (2018). Lifting the veil: Unpacking the discourse of water scarcity in Jordan. Environmental science & policy, 89, 385-392; Hussein, H. (2018). Tomatoes, tribes, bananas, and businessmen: An analysis of the shadow state and of the politics of water in Jordan. Environmental Science & Policy, 84, 170-176; Yorke, V. (2016). Jordan’s shadow state and water management: prospects for water security will depend on politics and regional cooperation. In Society-Water-Technology: A Critical Appraisal of Major Water Engineering Projects (pp. 227-251). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
[viii] Rosenberg, D. E., Talozi, S., & Lund, J. R. (2016). Intermittent water supplies: Challenges and opportunities for residential water users in Jordan. The Private Sector and Water Pricing in Efficient Urban Water Management, 166-182; Sigel, K., Klassert, C., Zozmann, H., Talozi, S., Klauer, B., & Gawel, E. (2017). Urban water supply through private tanker water markets: An empirical market analysis of Amman, Jordan (No. 02/2017). UFZ-Bericht; Mustafa, D., & Talozi, S. (2018). Tankers, Wells, Pipes and Pumps: Agents and Mediators of Water Geographies in Amman, Jordan. Water Alternatives, 11(3).
[ix] Hussein, H., Natta, A., Yehya, A. A. K., & Hamadna, B. (2020). Syrian refugees, water scarcity, and dynamic policies: how do the new refugee discourses impact water governance debates in Lebanon and Jordan?. Water, 12(2), 325; Farishta, A. (2014). The impact of Syrian refugees on Jordan’s water resources and water management planning (Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University); Alshoubaki, W. E., & Harris, M. (2018). The impact of Syrian refugees on Jordan: A framework for analysis. Journal of International Studies (2071-8330), 11(2).
[x] https://jordantimes.com/news/local/kingdom-takes-‘holistic-approach’-climate-refugee-nexus-initiative
[xi] Hussein, H. (2016). An analysis of the discourse of water scarcity and hydropolitical dynamics in the case of Jordan (Doctoral dissertation, University of East Anglia).
[xii] Rosenberg, D. E., Talozi, S., & Lund, J. R. (2016). Intermittent water supplies: Challenges and opportunities for residential water users in Jordan. The Private Sector and Water Pricing in Efficient Urban Water Management, 166-182.
[xiii] Al-Addous, M., Bdour, M., Alnaief, M., Rabaiah, S., & Schweimanns, N. (2023). Water resources in Jordan: A review of current challenges and future opportunities. Water, 15(21), 3729; Hussein, H. (2016). An analysis of the discourse of water scarcity and hydropolitical dynamics in the case of Jordan (Doctoral dissertation, University of East Anglia).
[xiv] Haddadin. (2000). Negotiated resolution of the Jordan-Israel water conflict. International Negotiation, 5(2), 263-288; Haddadin, M. J. (2012). Diplomacy on the Jordan: International conflict and negotiated resolution (Vol. 21). Springer Science & Business Media.
[xv] Haddadin, M. (2009). Cooperation and lack thereof on management of the Yarmouk River. Water International, 34(4), 420-431; Hussein, H. (2017). Whose ‘reality’? Discourses and hydropolitics along the Yarmouk River. Contemporary Levant, 2(2), 103-115; Zeitoun, M., Abdallah, C., Dajani, M., Khresat, S. E., Elaydi, H., & Alfarra, A. (2019). The Yarmouk tributary to the Jordan River I: Agreements impeding equitable transboundary water arrangements; Zeitoun, M., Dajani, M., Abdallah, C., Khresat, S. E., & Elaydi, H. (2019). The Yarmouk tributary to the Jordan River II: Infrastructure impeding the transformation of equitable transboundary water arrangements. Water Alternatives, 12(3), 1095-1122.
[xvi] Hussein, H. (2025). Yarmouk Treaty could ease Jordan’s water crisis. Science, 389(6762), 789-789.
[xvii] Hussein, H. (2017). Politics of the Dead Sea Canal: A historical review of the evolving discourses, interests, and plans. Water International, 42(5), 527-542; Mansour, H., & Reiffenstuel, A. (2022). The Jordan, Israel, and UAE Water-for-energy Deal: Potential and Pitfalls of Energy and Water Sharing-Agreements in the Middle East. Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.
[xviii] Abu Zreig, M. et al., (forthcoming).
[xix] AbuHussein, R. (2024). The impact of donor support on public financial management and fiscal reform in developing countries: the case of Jordan (Doctoral dissertation, Heriot-Watt University).
[xx] McBride, M. (2023). Motives Behind US Foreign Aid Projects: The Case of Jordan (Doctoral dissertation, Master’s thesis. Central European University—Private University, Department of International Relations. Vienna, Austria); Schuetze, B. (2019). Promoting democracy, reinforcing authoritarianism: US and European policy in Jordan (Vol. 57). Cambridge University Press.
[xxi] Bonn, T. (2013). On the political sideline? The institutional isolation of donor organizations in Jordanian hydropolitics. Water Policy, 15(5), 728-737.
[xxii] Abdel-Hadi, G. (2024). The Impacts of Corporatisation on the Efficiency of Water Utilities: An Analysis of Water Supply in Jordan (Doctoral dissertation, University of London).
[xxiii] Hussein, H. (2019). An analysis of the framings of water scarcity in the Jordanian national water strategy. Water international, 44(1), 6-13.
[xxiv] Hussein, H. (2018). Tomatoes, tribes, bananas, and businessmen: An analysis of the shadow state and of the politics of water in Jordan. Environmental Science & Policy, 84, 170-176
‘, ‘post_title’ => ‘Scarcity by Design: The Political Economy of Water in Jordan’, ‘post_excerpt’ => ”, ‘post_status’ => ‘publish’, ‘comment_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘ping_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘post_password’ => ”, ‘post_name’ => ‘scarcity-by-design-the-political-economy-of-water-in-jordan’, ‘to_ping’ => ”, ‘pinged’ => ”, ‘post_modified’ => ‘2025-09-03 13:28:41’, ‘post_modified_gmt’ => ‘2025-09-03 11:28:41’, ‘post_content_filtered’ => ”, ‘post_parent’ => 0, ‘guid’ => ‘https://noria-research.com/mena/?p=797’, ‘menu_order’ => 0, ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ”, ‘comment_count’ => ‘0’, ‘filter’ => ‘raw’, )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.
‘, ‘post_title’ => ‘Black Gold, Liquid Metal: The Political Economy of Gold in Sudan’, ‘post_excerpt’ => ”, ‘post_status’ => ‘publish’, ‘comment_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘ping_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘post_password’ => ”, ‘post_name’ => ‘black-gold-liquid-metal-the-political-economy-of-gold-in-sudan’, ‘to_ping’ => ”, ‘pinged’ => ”, ‘post_modified’ => ‘2025-07-21 10:05:20’, ‘post_modified_gmt’ => ‘2025-07-21 08:05:20’, ‘post_content_filtered’ => ”, ‘post_parent’ => 0, ‘guid’ => ‘https://noria-research.com/mena/?p=793’, ‘menu_order’ => 0, ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ”, ‘comment_count’ => ‘0’, ‘filter’ => ‘raw’, )So-called “farmer-herder conflicts” dominate the Chadian media landscape to such an extent that they reinforce the perception of their temporal and spatial permanence. In September 2022, the newspaper Le Pays sounded the alarm over the severity of the situation in the South of the country: “Farmers and herders […] are clashing… some villages have been burned down, more than 15 people killed and dozens injured. The situation is alarming”1. Headlines of this kind are common for anyone familiar with current events in this vast Central African country2. According to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), these “farmer-herder conflicts” alone accounted for 42% of violent incidents reported in the first half of 2024, with a strong concentration in the South, where approximately 77% of the confrontations occurred3. While such conflicts are highly mediatised, they also form part of a much longer historical trajectory.
It is important to emphasise that agropastoral conflicts are by no means a new phenomenon, whether in southern Chad or across the wider Lake Chad Basin. They are embedded in a long history of often fragile coexistence between farmers and herders, marked by constantly shifting balances of power. Recent academic literature broadly agrees that these tensions cannot be reduced to a traditional antagonism; rather, they should be understood as manifestations of deeper transformations in land tenure, access to natural resources, and political authority. Two major positions emerge from recent research. The first interprets this violence as a symptom of a land governance crisis, catalysed by structural factors such as demographic pressure, agricultural extensification, and climate change4. The second – now gaining ground as the dominant framework – seeks to move beyond surface-level analysis and interrogate the historical, political and symbolic logics that underpin these confrontations5, along with their instrumentalisation for the purposes of control or clientelist redistribution6.
This article aligns with the latter perspective, exploring an angle that remains underexamined: the role of the religious economy in the dynamics of rural tensions. By “religious economy”, we refer to all activities involving the production, distribution, and consumption of spiritual goods, which mobilise religious solidarity as a form of both symbolic and material capital. In Chad, this economy is rooted in a “collective interpretive framework” shaped by the memory of past conflicts and institutionalised through mechanisms such as Quranic schools. From this perspective, the religious entrepreneur – exemplified here by the promoters of Quranic schools – is an individual who leverages religious expertise and symbolic capital to shape a socio-economic model. This model involves mediating conflicts, legitimising one\’s position through public acts of peacemaking, mobilising philanthropic support, and transforming religious influence into institutional resources.
Although the promoters of Quranic schools are emblematic of the religious and social dynamics under study, they represent only one category among several actors. The intention is not to portray them as the sole agents of this religious economy. As this article is being written, clashes between farmers and herders continue to stir deep sensitivities in Chad, in a context where religious affiliation remains a delicate issue – often avoided due to its symbolic weight and its potential for conflict. The aim here is therefore not to assign blame, but to offer a different lens through which to understand these conflicts, at a time when classical explanatory models appear increasingly inadequate.
This article demonstrates that the promotion of Arabic-Islamic education has today become a promising sector, actively invested in by religious entrepreneurs who see in it opportunities for social integration and legitimation. These actors play an active role in reshaping social relations linked to agropastoral conflicts by drawing on a religious economy that combines educational practices, pastoral mobility, and land negotiation. The analysis is based on fieldwork conducted between September and December 2023, as part of a doctoral thesis on the financing of Arabic-Islamic education in Chad. Particular attention is given here to a southern province that has been especially affected by agropastoral conflicts, both in terms of their intensity and recurrence. Due to the sensitivity of the topic and the security risks for those involved, the name of the province has been anonymised, as have the identities of the individuals interviewed during the research. This ethical choice aims to preserve the confidentiality of the exchanges while ensuring the sociological rigour of the analysis. The methodological approach combines semi-structured interviews with promoters of Quranic schools, local leaders, agricultural producers, and pastoralists, along with direct observation of the concrete functioning of this religious economy. The collected data show that religious entrepreneurs engage in a complex process of legitimation, seeking to build social recognition through their role as mediators between conflicting groups. In this way, they establish themselves as key intermediaries between nomadic pastoralists and farming communities in the South, in exchange for resources – constituting the core of their economic model.
This mediating role is not without consequences. It generates tensions surrounding land use and fuels competition among local actors. This article thus seeks to shift the analytical lens, showing that violence does not always originate in the fields or along transhumance routes, but rather takes root in imaginaries and regimes of legitimacy. The objective is therefore to move beyond the obvious explanations, to uncover the interplay of actors at the heart of these conflicts and to better understand the social logics underlying rural violence.
The article is structured in three parts. The first section revisits the historical and symbolic foundations of agropastoral conflicts, demonstrating that a structural matrix exists, rooted in the historicity of a Chadian social field shaped by religious, territorial, and political dynamics. The second part explores the emergence of a religious economy, focusing on its actors, their relationships, and interactions. The third section examines the ambivalent effects of this economy on tensions over land access in general, and agropastoral conflicts in particular.
I. Religion, Land and Livestock: A Social Field in Crisis
In Chad, religious identity is far from a purely private matter. It is omnipresent in the public sphere and, as a structuring matrix of the social field, it plays a central role in shaping social relations, access to resources, positions, and spaces. Islam currently holds demographic predominance. According to the U.S. State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, nearly 58% of Chadians are Muslims, compared to approximately 34% Christians and 4% adherents of so-called traditional religions7. These figures, however, obscure the fluidity of religious affiliation, which in practice varies according to context, alliances, and constraints, and intertwines with ethnic, linguistic, and economic dimensions.
The Chadian social field – whose religious foundations have been highlighted by Jean-Pierre Magnant – has historically formed around a tension between two contrasting relationships to space, mobility, production, and the sacred8. One, associated with the Sahelian North, is rooted in Islam, pastoralism, and trade; the other, the South, is grounded in sedentary agriculture and a form of religiosity, both Christian and traditional, centred on earth-based cults. As early as the precolonial period, the North saw the development of Islamised kingdoms where sultans combined political power with religious legitimacy. There, Islam became not only a faith, but also a legal framework, a form of diplomacy, an economy, and a vehicle for social regulation. As Jean-Claude Zeltner noted, the North did not identify with Central Africa but oriented itself “organically” towards the East, “the Nile Valley, Cairo, Mecca”9. It was also through Islam that a local variant of Arabic spread, which became a language of economic exchange – particularly in the South.
In contrast, while the North viewed land as a space for movement and economic enhancement, the South sacralised it. Among the Sara – the largest ethnic group in the South – land is a site of interaction between the living and invisible forces. Access to land is mediated by land chiefs (chefs de terre), who act as both spiritual and social regulators. Even with the arrival of the first Christian missions, conversion to Christianity did not erase this conception. Agriculture is more than an economic activity; it is a collective, ritual, and political vocation.
In the South, the figure of the nomadic herder is not merely that of a livestock keeper in search of pasture. It embodies a plural identity – economic, religious, linguistic, and regional. The herder does not travel only with his herds; he carries with him an imaginary, a territorial memory, and a social order that give structure to his mobility and meaning to his temporary presence. This mobility often comes into tension with the sedentary logic of ritual agriculture, which is founded on a very different relationship to space and time. As a result, conflicts between herders and farmers go far beyond local contingencies. They reactivate deeper structural and symbolic oppositions embedded in the historical cleavages of the Chadian social field – cleavages that were further reinforced by colonisation.
French colonisation at the beginning of the 20th century, while administratively unifying the North and South, ultimately served to reinforce pre-existing fractures. The South was integrated into the colonial economy as the so-called “useful Chad”, transformed into a centre of cotton production and a land of Francophone elites, fostered by Christian missions and the expansion of schooling. In contrast, the North remained peripheral. It continued to develop Quranic schools and to culturally resist the colonial school system, which was seen as incompatible with Islamic traditions and perceived by the colonial administration as a potential political threat, subject to monitoring and even repression.
After independence in 1960, these asymmetrical dynamics translated into unequal access to the state and its resources. Southern elites quickly took over administrative positions, exposing the fact that the postcolonial Chadian state had emerged from a foundational exclusion of the Muslim North. This exclusion gave rise to a widespread sense of resentment that soon evolved into organised rejection. The regime of François Tombalbaye deepened this divide. Through the establishment of a one-party system in 1964 and the targeted repression of northern militants, southern authority was imposed abruptly, often through abusive measures. In 1965, the Mangalmé uprising against administrative violence in central Chad paved the way for the formation of the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale, FROLINAT), a rebel movement with national ambitions and an Arab-Muslim orientation, laying the foundations for decades of sociopolitical instability, culminating in the civil war of 1979.
The “events of 1979,” as they are commonly referred to in popular discourse, gradually became the structuring matrix of current agropastoral tensions, rooted in political, religious, and territorial divisions. This historical turning point marked not only the end but also the failure of a unified national project. Religious and regional affiliations re-emerged as primary sources of rival identities. Pastoralism became a lever of political power and economic rent, through which relations of domination were exercised. This new configuration gradually eroded the traditional modes of coexistence between farmers and herders, giving rise to relations of mistrust and competition. Religious and symbolic cleavages, once primarily cultural, were converted into instruments of identity-based mobilisation, becoming inseparable from agropastoral dynamics.
Thus emerged a latent but structural conflictuality, further exacerbated from the 1990s onward by the instrumentalisation of territorial control and herd mobility in pursuit of power. Even today, this architecture of conflict endures. Tensions between farmers and herders are the manifestation of a historical system in which land, livestock, and religious, geographic, and linguistic affiliations are entangled, structuring contemporary violence. This interpretive framework helps explain why agropastoral clashes cannot be reduced to isolated local incidents but are instead deeply rooted in a long-standing geopolitical logic.
II. Religious Economy in Practice
In Chad, a country officially secular, students at Quranic schools – traditional institutions of Arabic-Islamic education – remain largely marginalised by public policy and excluded from formal employment opportunities. Lacking integration into conventional employment pathways, many former students, who have become Islamic scholars to a greater or lesser extent, are now self-employed. Since the 1990s, this educational space has gradually been transformed into a genuine arena for socio-economic integration. Former students now find in the promotion of Quranic schools a form of religious entrepreneurship that articulates religious capital with economic rationality. This economy mobilises the memory of the “events of 1979” to legitimise their role as unique actors in national reconciliation. In a sense, these religious entrepreneurs shape pastoral dynamics in the South, where land resources – although more abundant than in the North – remain difficult to access due to intensified competition driven by both climate change and demographic pressure.
Memory of War and the Market for Reconciliation
To establish their legitimacy, religious entrepreneurs invest in a strategic positioning based on their role as social mediators and agents of peace, local development, and national dialogue. They rely on narratives of collective resilience and demonstrate their capacity to mobilise both symbolic and material resources in order to consolidate their presence in the public sphere.
One founder of a Quranic school, referring to the 1979 crisis and the divisions it caused, described it as “a dangerous illness that destroys everything, wherever it settles”i. He added that “if my school had existed before 1979, perhaps we could have avoided the divisions that continue to tear us apart”. He presents his Quranic school as a space for communal living that brings together Chadians “from Aouzou to Sido”, the country’s northernmost and southernmost points. The school is presented as a bastion of “living together” (vivre ensemble), where more than twenty ethnic groups from both the North and South coexistii. Like other cheikhs who promote Quranic schools, he cultivates the image of an inclusive, tolerant, and hospitable Islam. His discourse explicitly opposes what he calls a “counterfeit Islam” – a distorted, hierarchical version of the faith that perpetuates the social fractures inherited from the crisis of the 1970s.
This posture – at once pacifying, critical, and reconciliatory – functions as a strategic resource for these religious entrepreneurs. It enables them to assume the role of intermediaries able to transcend religious and territorial divides. Another Quranic school leader, for instance, stated that his means allowed him to intervene “up to 100 kilometres from here” to resolve intra-Muslim conflicts before the state was even informediii. This visible effectiveness reflects a strong anchoring in local dynamics, where they act as pragmatic agents of peacemaking. By transforming the memory of conflict into a unifying narrative, these cheikhs reinforce their legitimacy in the public space. They are also deeply involved in the organisation of the National Peace Days, initiated by the authorities in 2011 as part of a broader national reconciliation project. Their active participation in these events institutionalises their role in sociopolitical mediation and strengthens their position as key actors in managing and preventing local conflicts.
At once spiritual guides and educational entrepreneurs, the founders of Quranic schools also build their legitimacy on asceticism, humility, and collective achievement. They emphasise the modest origins of their schools, highlighting their establishment in remote, infrastructure-poor areas as evidence of faith and perseverance. The initial absence of comfort is framed as proof of sincerity. Such narratives establish symbolic distinction. Schools that started “with nothing at all, with only the shade of a mango tree as shelter”iv are perceived as more legitimate.
In addition, they engage their congregations in a form of social marketing. The story of success becomes a resource to attract new supporters. One parent explained: “When wealthy people come and leave their children in a school deep in the bush, it enhances the image of Islam”v. Through this register of justification, the promoters build a space of religious prescription whose benefits are also economic.
All the symbolic capital thus accumulated is converted into material capital. This is evident in the regular flow of donations – both modest and substantial – received by these educational entrepreneurs: mats, food supplies, religious texts, motorbikes, fuel, and even the contact lists of high-ranking officials in the public administration. One cheikh, founder of a Quranic school, reported that in 2010, President Idriss Déby visited his school, praised his commitment to peaceful coexistence, and pledged his support. This presidential recognition granted him reinforced moral authority, which proved essential to his capacity to mobilise resources. In the aftermath, the school received financial backing, notably for the construction of a perimeter wall funded by a senior figure in the ruling party, a Christian from the South. Costing several tens of millions of CFA francs (more than €15,000), this wall stands as a concrete symbol of the school’s public legitimisation and its integration into politico-religious redistribution circuits.
In short, the most influential cheikhs at the local level become privileged interlocutors for political elites seeking visibility. They participate in the legitimisation of political power, revealing a deep entanglement between religious and political spheres – what may be seen as a form of co-construction.
Territories of Peace and Politics of Land
Religious entrepreneurs invest so fervently in the promotion of peace and intercommunal coexistence because it lies at the heart of a material economy rooted in a relationship between actor and system – one that enables access to both tangible and intangible resources. From this perspective, the peace they preach is not merely a moral imperative but also a tool of economic accumulation. By mobilising the religious discourse of reconciliation, they embed their actions within a moral economy that transforms solidarity into a lever for influence and the consolidation of acquired positions. Southern Chad lies at the core of this strategy.
Perceived as both a place of refuge and a breadbasket rich in natural resources, the South has, since the 1990s, become a privileged anchor point for religious entrepreneurs seeking material autonomy. The establishment of the largest Quranic school in the country within this region illustrates a broader movement of territorial appropriation for educational, economic, and symbolic purposes. The choice of location is not incidental: the school is situated in a village on the right bank of a perennial river, in an ecosystem marked by fertile soil, abundant pastureland, and reliable water reserves. This favourable ecological setting rekindles a longstanding tradition of attraction to southern territories – already noted by French explorer Casimir Maistre in 1902, who described in his notebooks a “land where water is never scarce, and where, even in the absence of flowing rivers, animals can always find small ponds”10. This village has thus become a resource territory, chosen to host an expanding religious economy built on the ability to mobilise, redistribute, and secure wealth.
By strengthening their local foothold, religious entrepreneurs establish themselves in the South by constructing a dynamic community economy. In doing so, they transform Quranic schools into real-life “open sesame” mechanisms, granting access to southern lands in a context of intensifying land competition. Herders, traders, and farmers affiliate themselves with these institutions to gain access to land, water, and local social networks. In areas where such institutions are established, local residents describe the students as “great farmers who have come to teach the natives new ways of working the land”vi. One Quranic school founder explains: “In our school, all are brothers, for Allah says that all Muslims are brothers”vii, thereby sacralising social relations and conferring upon them religious legitimacy. Through this discourse, he establishes a gift economy in which contributing is equated with believing, and generosity becomes performative. The logic corresponds to one of ritualized gift giving – a configuration in which solidarity is translated into symbolic recognition and social capital. In practical terms, wealth circulates in various forms: a merchant entrusts his herd to “a brother”, profits are shared, and reinvested into other sectors such as trade or mechanised farmingviii. As in Senegalese Mouridism, this religious economy weaves together spirituality, labour, and prosperity11.
However, religious entrepreneurs do not merely accumulate: they also invest in securing their institutions’ positions through targeted redistribution mechanisms. One Quranic school has initiated a microfinance system reportedly operating “24 hours a day, 7 days a week”ix, offering interest-free loans to local farmers. This mechanism eases economic constraints, especially during the agricultural season. Giving becomes a calculated act – a means of asserting symbolic dominance through a moral economy12. It is as though the goal were to penetrate social imaginaries and neutralise, through carefully timed offerings, any latent mistrust. These entrepreneurs remain highly attuned to opportunities for public visibility as legitimate actors, often participating in the enthronement ceremonies of chefs de terre, during which they present gifts, boubous, cattle and ensure their physical presence is noted. Among other outcomes, these entrepreneurs consolidate local alliances and transform solidarity into a tool for regulation. These relational practices, which shape interactions between local cheikhs and customary authorities, contrast sharply with the often-circulated image of a conquering Islam hostile to traditional religions or Christianity13. On the contrary, they illustrate a form of pragmatic and peaceful coexistence between Islam and other local faiths.
III. Quranic Schools: Actors of a Divisive Peace?
The emergence of Quranic schools’ founders as local mediators must be understood within a broader context of legitimacy crisis affecting public institutions and their regulatory capacities. In this weakened space, these religious figures appear as credible alternatives, drawing upon their authority as moral leaders endowed with the capacity to arbitrate agropastoral and land-related conflicts. However, this posture conceals a shift in the function of these institutions.
While they do contribute to the resolution of local disputes, their role is also evolving in ways that feed into the very dynamics of conflict they claim to address. In other words, the religious economy that underpins the business model of these religious entrepreneurs may simultaneously reproduce or even exacerbate the same tensions it seeks to resolve. By attracting nomadic herders in search of pasture, Quranic schools are increasingly transformed into incubators for the sedentarisation of pastoralists. Over time, these schools have become hubs of settlement for transhumant herders, around which infrastructure develops – such as mechanical boreholes and electrified dwellings – surrounded by the thatched-roof homes of local farming communities. These signs of sedentarisation, absent just a decade ago, now fuel frustration among farmers, who perceive them as a form of encroachment under the guise of religion. Often supported by local administrative authorities, Quranic schools are granted facilitated access to land and authorisations to establish additional schools based on the same model14,15,16. The involvement of administrative figures – frequently local elites who have embraced Islam – fuels the perception that the state, whether consciously or not, is enabling the expansion of Islamic structures into regions historically dominated by Christian or animist populations. For many farmers, this presence is interpreted as a form of religious entrenchment, economic colonisation, and land dispossession.
From 2022 onwards, this latent conflict took on more radical overtones. In one southern province, violent clashes between herders and farmers led to the creation of a “crisis committee” composed of urban elites and university students, which publicly accused Quranic schools of harbouring weapons and acting as support bases for violent herders17. Widely circulated on social media, this narrative adopted the tone of an existential threat: the Quranic school was no longer merely a religious institution but had become a potentially destabilising actor. This polarisation has also seeped into the educational spaces. Students, depending on their family and regional backgrounds, reproduce the same divisions. Some identify with the farmers, others with the herders – calling into question the very ideal of religious unity that the schools promote on a daily basis. In this sense, the Quranic school becomes a microcosm of national tensions, structured by dynamics of class, ethnicity, territory, and geographic belonging. Rather than overcoming these divisions, it often reproduces them – sometimes even amplifying them through internal rivalries over access to resources and recognition.
A similar tone resonates in Christian places of worship. In one province, a bishop – speaking with the caution required of his role as spiritual leader of the “Family of God Church” – delivered a sermon filled with compassion for farmers, the majority of whom are Christian. He proclaimed that “blood has been shed on our land,” that “innocents have died,” and that “the farmers’ fields” had been ravaged18. Though he did not directly name Quranic schools, his sermon evoked them through accusatory spiritual language. His speech reproduced key identity markers of sedentary communities – farming, land, Christianity – and reflected a veiled yet clear stance within the public debate. In doing so, it reinforced the idea of growing religious polarisation surrounding agropastoral conflict.
****
Understanding agropastoral conflicts in southern Chad requires moving beyond simplistic interpretations that reduce these antagonisms to a clash between “peanut fields” and “cattle hooves”. The sociological approach adopted here has sought to interrogate the categories of “herder” and “farmer”, which are often essentialised, by showing how they are socially constructed – shaped by power relations, religious and geographic affiliations, migration dynamics, and contrasting economic logics. By mobilising the concept of the religious economy, this article has argued that these conflicts are not solely about livestock mobility, but rather about the strategies of actors situated at the intersection of religious, political, and economic registers. Religious entrepreneurship is one – though not the only – factor in this complex configuration.
More broadly, these confrontations cannot be reduced to binary oppositions: farmer vs. herder, sedentary vs. nomadic, Muslim vs. Christian, North vs. South. Instead, they reflect differentiated – and at times competing – concerns linked to survival within rural contexts undergoing profound transformation, marked by heightened competition for scarce resources. Rather than clarifying the nature of these conflicts, such binary framings often intensify them, by assigning collective blame that fails to account for the diversity of individual trajectories and strategic positioning. The violence that now afflicts entire regions of Chad underscores, in reverse, the urgency for the state to reclaim its role as a regulating force in the face of rural transformation.
1 Le Pays « Conflits éleveurs-agriculteurs dans le Lac Iro : plus d’une quinzaine de morts et une vingtaine de blessés », Journal Le Pays, https://www.lepaystchad.com/25128/, 2022.
2 Alwihda Info, « Tchad : Un affrontement entre agriculteurs et éleveurs à Nya-Pendé fait un mort et plusieurs blessés », Alwihda Info – Actualités TCHAD, Afrique, International https://www.alwihdainfo.com/Tchad-Un-affrontement-entre-agriculteurs-et-eleveurs-a-Nya-Pende-fait-un-mort-et-plusieurs-blesses_a133493.html, 2024.
3 OCHA, « Tchad : Aperçu des conflits inter/intracommunautaires », https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/chad/tchad-apercu-des-conflits-interintracommunautaires-juillet-2024, 2024.
4 JACQUEMOT, Pierre, « Les États et la « gestion apaisée » du pastoralisme. Afrique contemporaine », 274, 2022, 147–155.
5 LEFORT-RIEU, Claire, « Du conflit d’usages au prisme communautaire : penser les conflits agropastoraux et leurs réponses à l’est du Cameroun (régions de l’Adamaoua et de l’Est) », Afrique contemporaine, 274, 2022, 51–69.
6 MBA, Jean-Émile, & NOUFFEUSSIE, Leopold Ngueuta, « Conflits intercommunautaires au Cameroun : une rationalisation néo-causale au prisme des interférences intra et extraterritoriales », Afrique contemporaine 274, 2022, 97–121
7 U.S. Department of State. 2023 Report on International Religious Freedom. https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-report-on-international-religious-freedom/ (2023).
8 MAGNANT, Jean-Pierre, « Du grand prêtre au roi : les origines religieuses des Etats anciens du Tchad », in Jean-Pierre CHRETIEN (dir), L’invention religieuse en Afrique : histoire et religion en Afrique noire, Paris : Karthala, 1993, 159–178.
9 ZELTNER, Jean-Claude, Histoire des Arabes sur les rives du lac Tchad, Paris : Karthala, 2002.
10 MAISTRE, Casimir, La Région Du Bahr-Sara, Montpellier : Imprimerie centrale du midi, 1902.
11 DUMONT, Fernand, La pensée religieuse d’Amadou Bamba, Dakar : Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1975.
12 ELA, Jean-Marc, Travail et Entreprise En Afrique : Les Fondements Sociaux de la Réussite Économique, Paris : Karthala, 2006.
13 LADIBA, Gondeu, L’émergence des organisations islamiques au Tchad : Enjeux, acteurs et territoires, Paris : L’Harmattan, 2011.
14 Attestation d’attribution de terrain à une école coranique, 2013.
15 Correspondance du chef de canton aux conseillers islamiques et hommes de bonne volonté pour le développement de l’islam dans le monde, 2015.
16 Communiqué de presse du Comité de crise relatif à l’attaque des terroristes dans le Département, 2022.
17 Conseil supérieur des Affaires islamiques, Autorisation de fonctionner à une école coranique, 2015
18 Vatican News, « Tchad : l’évêque de Sarh appelle à la justice suite au conflit dans le département du Lac-Iro », https://www.vaticannews.va/fr/afrique/news/2022-09/tchad-l-eveque-de-sarh-appelle-a-la-justice-suite-au-conflit-da.html, 2022.
i Interview with the founder of a Quranic school, September 2023.
ii Ibid.
iii Interview with a Quranic school founder, November 2023.
iv Interview with a Quranic school founder, October 2023.
v Interview with the director of a Quranic school, September 2023.
vi Interview with a village chief, November 2023.
vii Interview with a Quranic school student, November 2023.
viii Interview with a student-turned-entrepreneur living in a Quranic school, October 2023.
ix Interview with a local farmer.
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