The war in Sudan is not a civil war; it is an ontological mutation of war.
To define the Khartoum massacre as a fratricidal clash for power is to use a twentieth-century category now incapable of reading reality.
What we are witnessing is the transition from war as an instrument of assertion of sovereignty to war as a deliberate mechanism of its liquefaction.

The Great Plunder

Historically, the roots of this process lie in a power structure that has systematically eroded the state in favour of parallel security apparatuses, but the explosion of the current conflict is not an endogenous event.
It is the result of kinetic pressure exerted by external actors who have identified Sudan not as a political partner, but as an asset to be dismembered.

Responsibilities are inscribed in a precise architecture of interests: on the one hand, the transformation of Hemedti’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) into a de-territorialised ‘Asset Protection Force’ at the service of Gulf monarchies, such as the United Arab Emirates, has created a private army whose sole purpose is to guarantee the inviolability of the gold and fertile land.

On the other hand, Russia’s activism, through theAfrica Corps structure, has provided the technology and tactical legitimacy to systematically operate outside the law. In this context, Sudan becomes the paradigm of Colonialism 2.0: a political-philosophical doctrine that does not want to occupy the state, but to deprive it of its power, replacing the responsibility of government with the privilege of access to resources and transforming sovereignty into a divisible and private commodity.

This architecture of state demobilisation finds its most brutal operation in the management of extraction nodes, where the physical geography of Sudan is rearticulated according to external interests. We are not dealing with a territorial dispute, but with a partitioning of resources operated through the control of strategic enclaves that elude any central authority.

The Russians’ hands on gold and uranium

The axis connecting Libyan Cyrenaica to Sudan is its first pillar: here Russia, acting through the Africa Corps, has consolidated a logistical corridor that transforms mining sites into extraterritorial islands of control.
These areas, removed from Khartoum’s jurisdiction, are managed by the Russian galaxy with a closed-loop security model: the Africa Corps does not merely protect the sites, but directly manages the entire value chain, from extraction to on-site refining to cross-border transport.

The primary focus is on gold, a fungible resource par excellence that allows Moscow to accumulate reserves of shadow currency to circumvent international sanctions and oxygenate the Kremlin’s coffers. However, interest also extends to critical minerals such as rare earths and uranium, essential for strategic industry and technological power projection.
These islands of control operate under a regime of total legal opacity and military secrecy, where mercenary force supersedes customs law and mining law, making Sudan a financial lung and reservoir of strategic materials inaccessible to any international oversight.

The Arabs’ hands on farmland

Symmetrically to the Russian mining axis, along the Nile Valley and in the eastern plains of Sudan, the caloric despoliation orchestrated by the Gulf monarchies is taking place, with the United Arab Emirates in a position of strategic pre-eminence.

In this area, the RSF do not act as a military faction, but as a private garrison protecting transnational agricultural assets.
The conflict, far from being an obstacle, becomes the operational tool that facilitates the forced displacement of rural populations and the subsequent land-grabbing on an industrial scale.

As the data of the World Food Programme (WFP) shows, the land is reduced to a private food reserve: the objective is not the sustenance of the Sudanese nation, but the securing of external hub supply chains, transforming the water resource and fertile soil into a patrimonial rent taken away from local sovereignty. Thus a brutal paradox is institutionalised: while Sudan sinks into an induced famine, its land continues to export calories to global markets under the protection of militias disengaged from any responsibility under international law. It is the material liquidation of the right to subsistence, where the state, reduced to an empty shell, loses its ability to protect even the primary metabolism of its own population.

An ocean of destruction to support islands of efficiency

This double expropriation, mining and farming, is not a chaotic process, but the result of a hyper-efficient logistical engineering that requires a two-speed geographic architecture.
Colonialism 2.0, in fact, has no interest in the stability of the entire Sudanese territory; on the contrary, it thrives on the creation of armoured corridors and security bubbles that surgically connect the pick-up sites to global exit nodes.
Thus we observe the fortification of Red Sea embarkation points, such as Port Sudan, and the consolidation of clandestine airstrips and air hubs in the desert, often coordinated through bases in Cyrenaica.

Within these flow lines, the logistics are impeccable: gold and agricultural resources travel on tracks protected by advanced surveillance systems that ensure the resource is never intercepted by the country’s moribund social body. Everything outside these strategic corridors is deliberately abandoned to a condition of systemic misery and programmed anarchy.

From this perspective, the destruction of civil infrastructure, the collapse of water networks and the absence of law and order are not tragic collateral damage, but essential operational requirements. Indeed, the vacuum of authority guarantees the absence of a sovereign entity capable of restoring law and order, imposing duties, regulating concessions or claiming national ownership of resources in transit.
An enclave economy is thus institutionalised in which islands of extractive efficiency float on an ocean of destruction. War, therefore, ceases to be a destructive event and becomes a method of logistical management: it serves to physically and legally separate the wealth of the land from the fate of the people, ensuring that the extraction continues undisturbed while the nation, as a political and social entity, ceases to exist.

The state administration in the hands of Elon Musk

This violent split between the resource that flows outwards and the population that remains trapped in the authority vacuum does not only affect the physical dimension. If the territory has been reduced to a logistical desert dotted with enclaves, the erosion of sovereignty finally penetrates and occupies the intangible dimension of connectivity, completing the process of patrimonialist liquefaction.
With the destruction of the ministries in Khartoum, essential state functions – from identity management to economic transactions – have not simply vanished, but migrated into digital exile on foreign servers.

Into this jurisdictional vacuum have stepped private technological actors who, operating outside of any agreement or protocol with local authorities, have become the new and sole mediators of civic life. Elon Musk’s occupation of digital space, through the Starlink satellite network, represents the latest stage of Colonialism 2.0: the transformation of citizenship into a subscription service.
In a Sudan devoid of physical banks, public offices or terrestrial networks, daily survival and the ability to receive remittances depend on mobile banking platforms such as Bankily, whose accessibility is entirely subject to the control of private foreign gateways.

Those who run the network now hold a power of veto over social and economic life that exceeds that of any government of the past. In this extraterritorial space,the right is no longer derived from belonging to a nation, but from the individual’s ability to connect to a private infrastructure and pay the fee.

It is the ultimate dematerialisation of sovereignty: after losing control of gold and bread, the Sudanese state also loses control of the code that allows its citizens to exist civilly, sanctioning the ultimate depletion of an authority reduced to a spectator of its own digital evaporation.

A black hole on the threshold of Europe

The warning to Europe is stark: if Brussels and the continental capitals do not stop looking at Sudan solely through the distorted lens of humanitarian emergency, they will soon find themselves dealing with a systemic shockwave on their southern flank.
To continue to view the Sudanese conflict as a crisis to be contained with aid and diplomatic rhetoric is to ignore that the liquid sovereignty model is contagious.
When state authority evaporates and is replaced by regimes of private extraction protected by mercenaries and digital technocracies, this does not just create a refugee crisis; it creates a regulatory vacuum that acts as a suction pump for all kinds of illicit trafficking, destabilising the entire Wider Mediterranean.

If Colonialism 2.0 – taking its first steps from the sands of Sudan to the ice of Greenland – were to institutionalise itself as the standard method of access to global resources, the challenge of the future will no longer be the simple management of regional crises.
We will have to resist the temptation of a global feudalism: a hyper-efficient system in which the state does not disappear, but is emptied of its public function to become a mere provider of immunities for the benefit of private actors and external powers.

Whether it is gold controlled by the Africa Corps or rare earths coveted by technological giants in the Arctic, the logic does not change: territory is no longer the space of citizens, but a patrimonial concession managed by enclaves that ignore national borders and laws. Without a reaffirmation of sovereignty as a civil and jurisdictional responsibility, the fate of Sudan risks becoming the common scene of a century in which the law will no longer follow the flag, but the profit of the mining network.

In this scenario, citizenship itself is downgraded to a cost variable, marking the definitive shift from an order of nations to an ordered anarchy of global flows.