Sudan becomes next domino in a new human century of global failed state disaster colonialism entropy

A war for our age: how the battle for Sudan is being fuelled by forces far beyond its borders

The RSF is loyal to Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (usually referred to as Hemedti), a former camel trader who started his career in charge of a notoriously brutal militia in Sudan’s south-west before graduating to industrial-scale gold smuggling and massacring pro-democracy protesters. Haftar is sending the supplies because his sponsors among states in the Middle East have asked him to and because it earns him a lot of money. A warlord in one conflict helps out another in a second, at the behest of a distant power.

Such is the way of contemporary war, as exemplified in this new fighting in Sudan. In this conflict frontiers have no significance, control of resources is the primary prize, with forces arising in borderlands seeking their revenge on once contemptuous metropolitan elites. Trafficking networks across swathes of desert are extensions of the “battlespace”, and almost innumerable actors with an axe to grind or an agenda to pursue vastly outnumber those who seek to stop the fighting.

All of this happens in a shadowy penumbra defined by backroom deals, obscure alignments of interests, brutal realpolitik and disinformation. The poor and the weak and the unarmed suffer most, as ever.

I fear Sudan is the latest domino to fall in a terrifying new disaster colonialism fuelled by regional players fighting for mineral control over geopolitical friction points on a burning planet.

We saw this type of fission in Libya, Syria and in the Congo. Warlords empowered by resource hungry external nations funding private militia too powerful for weakened States to challenge leading to dead zones of civilisation where the Warlord is all powerful and public services non functional.

This is the future, as the Russian/Ukrainian war stagnates into an immoral mincer of gridlock, the pressures that conflict is generating are bubbling to violent harvest in a dozen other geopolitical pressure points.

We will see these failed states disintegrate into enslaved militias or fleeing refugees who will put immense pressure on the West that they flee to.

Catastrophic climate change will exacerbate these pressures.

This is the beginning of a century of entropy as the frayed edges of our civilisation unravel with medieval contempt and malice for modernity.

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