Journal of Genocide Research ISSN: 1462-3528 (Print) 1469-9494 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/cjgr20 Lineages of Genocide in Sudan Alex de Waal To cite this article: Alex de Waal (29 Apr 2025): Lineages of Genocide in Sudan, Journal of Genocide Research, DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2025.2495792 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2025.2495792 Published online: 29 Apr 2025. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1336 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjgr20 REFLECTION Lineages of Genocide in Sudan Alex de Waal World Peace Foundation, Fletcher School, Tufts University, Somerville, MA, USA Today’s atrocities in Sudan are brazen. So too is the way in which they are ethnically targeted. In addition to human rights investigations using established methods, 1 the per- petrators’ own use of social media to celebrate their violence provides ample evidence for the crimes, those responsible, and their motives. 2 Any doubt about the scale and intent of the violence is dispelled by watching self-incriminating “trophy” videos, noting that there are many others too gruesome to publish. There are two principal belligerents in the current war, namely the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) headed by General Abdel Fattah al- Burhan – who also claims the position of head of the Government of Sudan (GoS) – and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, known as “Hemedti,” and both have committed war crimes. The clearest examples of genocidal violence are in West Darfur State where RSF com- manders and associated local militia have ethnically cleansed the historic homeland of the Masalit people, killing an estimated 10,000 or more as well as systematically raping, burning and looting, and forcing more than 600,000 to flee as refugees to Chad. The gov- ernor of West Darfur State, Khamis Abubaker, himself a Masalit, was murdered by RSF militiamen just hours after he publicly accused them of genocide. 3 There is also evidence for genocidal acts by the RSF in Khartoum and other parts of central Sudan, such as Gezira state. After the RSF was driven out from Khartoum in March 2025, the journalist Nesrine Malik wrote about the total human, physical and cul- tural wrecking of the city: “What occurred in Khartoum is the biggest looting of an African city, if not any capital city, in modern history.” 4 Evidence also points to potentially geno- cidal killings there and in Gezira. In trophy videos, RSF commanders candidly express motives that include punishing or destroying groups that fought against them, especially members of communities whose leaders defected from RSF to SAF. They also avow the goal destroying the post-colonial state – which they call the “1956 state” after the year of Sudan’s independence – once and for all. © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTACT Alex de Waal alex.deWaal@tufts.edu World Peace Foundation, Fletcher School, Tufts University, 114 Curtis St, Somerville, MA 02144, USA 1 United Nations Security Council, “Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Sudan,” 15 January 2024, S/2024/65, https://docs.un.org/en/S/2024/65; Human Rights Watch, “Sudan: New Mass Ethnic Killings, Pillage in Darfur,” Report, 26 November 2023, https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/27/sudan-new-mass-ethnic-killings-pillage-darfur; Human Rights Watch, “Sudan: Ethnic Cleansing in West Darfur: Thousands Killed, Half Million Remain Displaced,” Press Release, 9 May 2024, https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/05/09/sudan-ethnic-cleansing-west-darfur. 2 Sanjana Varghese, Natalie Reneau, Christoph Koettl, Aaron Byrd and Declan Walsh, “How ‘Trophy’ Videos Link Para- military Commanders to War Crimes in Sudan,” New York Times , 31 December 2024. 3 Zeinab Mohammed Salih and Jason Burke, “Sudan: Paramilitary Forces Blamed for Assassination of West Darfur Gov- ernor,” The Guardian , 15 June 2023. 4 Nesrine Malik, “The Siege of Khartoum Has Lifted. Left Behind are Scenes of Unimaginable Horror,” The Guardian , 31 March 2025. JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2025.2495792 While individual acts of violence in West Darfur, Khartoum and Gezira are similar, their political purposes are different. The Masalit are a marginalized group that has no link to the “1956 state.” They live in the savanna belt of Darfur and western Chad, in territory that was a small independent sultanate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 5 In the 1980s a group known as the “Arab Gathering” that nursed a supremacist ideology, aimed to conquer fertile savanna lands to establish a homeland for themselves, and set their sights on a swathe of territories across Darfur, inhabited mostly by ethnic Fur and Masalit. 6 The Arab Gathering originated among Saharan nomads who congregated in Libya, supported by its mercurial leader Muammar Gaddafi, who initially deployed them in support of his attempt to annex Chad. In the 1980s, they formed a militia known as the Janjaweed, which tried twice to seize control of Dar Masalit, in 1995 and 1999. 7 Those militia were drawn from numerous Arab groups, many of them recent immi- grants from Chad, including the Mahariya section of the Rizeigat, of which Hemedti is himself a member. In 2003–05 the Janjaweed ranged wider across Darfur. The best known of the Janjaweed commanders, Musa Hilal, hailed from the Mahamid section of the Rizeigat of North Darfur. Hilal and Hemedti were comrades in arms in the 2000s and bitter rivals in the 2010s. The forces that ethnically cleansed Dar Masalit in 2023 appear to have been Arab militia aligned with the RSF, with some RSF commanders, rather than crack RSF units themselves. Sudanese use the Arabic word ibada for such acts, which also refers to the felling of trees or clearing of land. The destruction of Khartoum and Gezira has been carried out by the RSF’s vanguard combat brigades. Most are from Darfur’s Arab communities but the rank and file are recruited more widely, including from neighbouring countries. They display an insurgent nihilism. Their target is the “community of the state,” a political establishment that also defines itself as “Arab,” but identifies with the civilization of the Nile. At the zenith of the Islamist project in the 1990s, the regime implemented what it called al-mashru’ al- hadhari , the “civilization project,” 8 aiming not only to convert non-Muslims but also to cure what it called the “social cavities” of Muslims whose beliefs and practices did not conform. Among these were many nomads of western Sudan, regarded as uncouth and in need of re-education before being admitted to the fold. The ransacking of Khar- toum can be seen as the revenge of the humiliated. To date the charge of genocide has been specifically levelled at the RSF. However, with escalating evidence for atrocities by SAF in the locations it has recently overrun, 9 war crimes charges against SAF commanders will multiply. Some of the SAF trophy videos reportedly include expressions of genocidal intent, though we must await systematic 5 Lidwien Kaptejins, Mahdist Faith and Sudanic Tradition: History of Dar Masalit, 1870–1930 (London: Kegan Paul, 1985). 6 Sharif Harir, “‘Arab Belt’ versus ‘African Belt’: Ethno-Political Conflict in Dar Fur and the Regional and Cultural Factors,” in Short-Cut to Decay: The Case of the Sudan , ed. Sharif Harir and Terje Tvedt (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1994), 144–85; Ali Haggar, “The Origins and Organization of the Janjawiid in Darfur,” in War in Darfur and the Search for Peace , ed. Alex de Waal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 113–39; Jérôme Tubiana, “Darfur: A War for Land?” in War in Darfur and the Search for Peace , ed. Alex de Waal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 68–91. 7 Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, Darfur: A New History of a Long War (London: Zed, 2008), 56–63. 8 Alex de Waal and A.H. Abdelsalam, “Islamism, State Power and Jihad in Sudan,” in Islamism and Its Enemies in the Horn of Africa , ed. Alex de Waal (London: Hurst, 2004), 89. 9 United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Sudan: UN Human Rights Chief Appalled by Wide- spread Extrajudicial Killings in Khartoum,” Press Release, 3 April 2025. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/ 04/sudan-un-human-rights-chief-appalled-widespread-extrajudicial-killings; Mat Nashed, “Sudan’s Army Carries Out Ethnic Killings in Gezira State,” Aljazeera , 23 January 2025. 2 A. DE WAAL compilation and analysis. Reprisals have been carried out on the basis of ethnic identity or rumour. SAF leaders have publicly alleged that South Sudanese are fighting in the ranks of the RSF, a claim that led to the targeting of South Sudanese in the city of Wad Medani following its recapture, in turn sparking retaliatory violence in South Sudan. 10 The Suda- nese online news magazine Atar has observed that social media platforms have become “a space for public trials, where accusations of collaboration with the RSF [are] widely shared, often without evidence.” 11 Both belligerents are using starvation as a weapon and benefiting from famine. Both use siege warfare and block humanitarian assistance. The RSF is a pillage machine. 12 SAF obstructs aid. Commanders and businessmen on both sides profit from the looting, smuggling and carpetbagging, including collaborating across the battle lines. The famine kills. But more than killing, starvation sunders social bonds, humiliates and dehumanizes. 13 Using the terms “genocide” and “famine” in Sudan today are correct, but insufficient. They are akin to measuring the highest peaks in a mountain range but leaving the range itself unnamed. We need a wider perspective and a different vocabulary to describe the overwhelming catastrophe in Sudan today. International responses may be woefully insufficient but the violence and suffering are not secret. As well as a host of dedicated Sudanese online outlets, coverage by Declan Walsh in the New York Times has been exemplary. In its last weeks in office, the Biden Administration of the US Government issued a genocide determination naming the RSF and sanctioning Hemedti. 14 It also sanc- tioned al-Burhan for war crimes. 15 This was not the first time that the US had taken such a step, but on this occasion its impact has been negligible. The comparison with twenty years earlier is striking. In Sep- tember 2004, responding to a swelling American protest movement under the banner of “Save Darfur,” which had sparked activism in the US Congress, Secretary of State Colin Powell made a genocide determination. 16 Powell called out the Janjaweed militia in Darfur, a government proxy force drawn from Arab-identifying groups (in the vernacular, “Arab tribes”) as responsible. On that occasion, the genocide determination was followed within days by a resolution by the UN Security Council 17 that established the International Commission of Investigation on Darfur (ICID) headed by Judge Antonio Cassesse. The ICID 10 Jan Pospisil, “The First Violent Spillover: Sudan’s War Ignites Violence in South Sudan,” PeaceRep , 31 January 2025. https://peacerep.org/2025/01/21/the-first-violent-spillover-sudans-war-ignites-violence-in-south-sudan/. 11 Atar Editor, “Collaborating with the Enemy? Civilians at the Mercy of State of Exception,” Atar , 15 March 2025. https:// atarnetwork.com/?p=8475. 12 Joshua Craze and Raga Makawi, “The Republic of Kadamol: A Portrait of the Rapid Support Forces at War,” Small Arms Survey , 31 January 2025. https://www.smallarmssurvey.org/resource/republic-kadamol-portrait-rapid-support-forces- war. 13 Amrita Rangasami, “The Study of Starvation and Famine: Some Problems,” in Les spectres de Malthus: déséquilibres ali- mentaires, déséquilibres démographiques , ed. Francis Gendreau, Claude Meillassoux, Bernard Schlemmer and Martin Verlet (Paris: Études et Documentation Internationales, 1981), 41–60. David Keen, The Benefits of Famine: A Political Economy of Famine and Relief in Southwestern Sudan, 1983–1989 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994). 14 Antony Blinken, “Genocide Determination in Sudan and Imposing Accountability Measures,” Washington DC, Depart- ment of State, Press Statement, 7 January 2025, https://2021-2025.state.gov/genocide-determination-in-sudan-and- imposing-accountability-measures/. 15 US Department of the Treasury, “Treasury Sanctions Leader of Sudanese Armed Forces and Weapons Supplier,” Press Release, 16 January 2025. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2789. 16 Colin L. Powell, “The Crisis in Darfur,” Testimony Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Washington, DC, 9 September 2004, https://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/36042.htm. 17 Resolution 1564, 18 September 2004. JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 3 recommended referring the case to the International Criminal Court (ICC) 18 and the Secur- ity Council duly did so. 19 In those days, the critiques of international responses, including my own, were concerned with overreach. Sudan was a testing ground for the liberal version of western hegemony, captured in the slogan of a protester on the Washington Mall, calling for American troops “Out of Iraq, into Darfur.” 20 In this narrative, Sudan was the arena in which a narrative of Arab-Islamist intruders attacked and destroyed African indigenes, with President Omar al-Bashir’s regime coloured as genocidaires as well as terrorists. In turn it became the test case for Pax Amer- icana’s policing. ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo issued arrest warrants for a senior government official and a militia commander, 21 and then President al-Bashir himself, evoking concern that this might push the Sudanese leader into a corner in which he would be ready to sacrifice democratic elections, humanitarian aid and peace for his own survival. 22 Despite these worries, the agenda of sending troops was wildly popular among many Darfurians. The massive international investment in peacekeeping, humani- tarian aid and human rights monitoring had tangible results on the ground. Darfur was a testing-ground for aspirational liberal norms, including the responsibility to protect and accountability for international crimes. The ICC mandate remains in place today and on that basis the current Prosecutor Karim Khan has reopened investigations. At the time of writing, he has not publicly asked for arrest warrants for recent crimes. Should he do so, he would have a strong case for including the crime of genocide. Genocide charges have also been brought to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Because the al-Burhan administration is recognized by the UN (though not by the African Union or League of Arab States) as the Government of Sudan, this gives it sufficient standing in UN organs to attributes of sovereignty. On this basis they have brought a case against the United Arab Emirates (UAE) at the ICJ for enabling genocide, insofar as it is supporting the RSF. 23 There is ample evidence that the UAE is indeed the RSF’s external patron, despite Emirati denials. 24 Other Middle Eastern states including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Qatar and Turkey supply SAF. Al-Burhan’s move may be a bar- gaining gambit, in which he then offers to withdraw the case in return for inducements that the UAE can readily provide. Regardless of whether the UAE is responsible as charged, the case brings into focus its particular role in the region. The ICJ case is consequential. Sudan is bound by the Genocide Convention and having raised the issue to the ICJ, the UAE counsel could be expected not only to protest 18 Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary-General, 25 January 2005, https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/1480de/pdf/. 19 Resolution 1593, 31 March 2005. The vote was 11 in favour (including Russia), zero against, and four abstentions (Algeria, Brazil, China, and the United States), each of which had some reservations either over the resolution or (in the case of the US) the court itself. 20 Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (New York: Crown, 2009). 21 The militia commander, Ali Kushayb, surrendered to the ICC in 2020. His trial began in 2022 and concluded in 2025. 22 Alex de Waal, “Sudan and the ICC: A Guide to the Controversy,” Making Sense of Sudan , 11 July 2008, available at African Arguments , https://africanarguments.org/2008/07/sudan-and-the-icc-a-guide-to-the-controversy/. 23 International Court of Justice, “Sudan Institutes Proceedings Against the United Arab Emirates and Requests the Court to Indicate Provisional Measures,” Press Release, 6 March 2025, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/ 197/197-20250306-pre-01-00-en.pdf. 24 Declan Walsh, Christoph Koettl and Eric Schmitt, “Talking Peace in Sudan, the U.A.E. Secretly Fuels the Fight,” New York Times , 23 September 2023; Declan Walsh and Christoph Koettl, “How a US Ally Uses Aid as a Cover in War,” New York Times , 21 September 2024; Patricia Zengerl, “US Lawmakers Find UAE Provides Weapons to Sudan RSF; UAE Denies This,” Reuters , 25 January 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/us-lawmakers-find-uae-provides-weapons-sudan-rsf- uae-denies-this-2025-01-24/. 4 A. DE WAAL innocence but to turn the tables by pointing to the GoS own record of genocidal acts. The UAE’s most senior official responsible for Sudan has hinted that they may take such a route. 25 The Court need not limit itself to the measures demanded by the GoS. Should it identify mass starvation, by either side or both, as a potentially genocidal act, it can demand humanitarian measures. 26 This reflection proceeds as follows. This introduction outlines the current catastrophe in Sudan, posing the question, how to place genocide within that catastrophe. To address that question, the next section outlines a framework within which genocidal acts can be seen. The reflection then turns to lineages of the genocidal violence, beginning with the contending empires on the Nile and Red Sea arena in the century, and the interlude of consolidated colonialism. It examines a series of genocidal episodes in post-colonial Sudan, concluding that (with revealing exceptions) they fit a pattern of simultaneously generating and managing insecurity on frontiers characterized as ethics-free zones. Next, the essay turns to the logic of extreme violence today, within Sudan and across its boundaries, dwelling particularly on the RSF – in part because they are responsible for the acts most clearly identified as genocide, but also because their model is setting an agenda of political-military authority, not only in Sudan but across the wider region. A brief concluding section reflects on the striking contrast between the situation twenty years ago when atrocities in Sudan were an international priority and today, when foreign governments and international public opinion are largely indifferent. The catastrophe is normalized. A Framework for Genocides in Sudan The challenge I pose in this section is, how would one seek to frame the culpability of the Sudanese state, insurgents, and foreign actors in the pattern of genocide? The upcoming ICJ case may content itself with a narrow focus on the ethnic cleansing of Dar Masalit and the role played by UAE-supplied weaponry, but this would be to take just one narrow slice of the wider catastrophe. Arguments around any one specific acts of genocide should be embedded in a wider framework. Tracing the lineage of mass atrocities takes us back 200 years and ranges beyond the boundaries of the state, to Egypt, the Sahel-Sahara and Britain’s maritime mercantile empire. While the Sudanese state is at the centre of this account, this is not a history of state formation, but rather a history of contending imperia. One common thread through these histories is that of imperial projects that sometimes collude, sometimes compete and sometimes fight – among them the Egyptians and Ottomans, the British and the Mahdists, with France and Ethiopia as secondary actors. A second thread is how imperial conquest forged the fictitious commodities 27 of land, labour and political authority from the terrain and communities they overran. On the nineteenth-century Ottoman-Egyptian imperial frontier, subject people became commodities in the strict 25 Anwar Gargash, “The UAE’s Commitment to Sudan’s Future Remains Strong,” The National , 6 April 2025, https://www. thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2025/04/06/the-uaes-commitment-to-sudans-future-remains-strong/. 26 Alex de Waal, “Genocide in Sudan: How Should the ICJ Treat the Case?” Reinventing Peace , 20 March 2025, https:// worldpeacefoundation.org/blog/sudan-genocide-case/.The precedent is the Provisional Order of 28 March 2024 in the case of Israel vs. South Africa, when the Court ordered Israel to facilitate humanitarian assistance. 27 See Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon, 2001 (originally published 1944). JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 5 market sense: having been captured by force and shackled, they were bought and sold. Entire countries were stolen too, their territories bartered among the rival colonial powers. For the peoples of the Nile Valley, this experience was genocidal. Sudanese resistance to this coalesced into Mahdist millenarianism, yet Mahdism itself became a violent, totalizing project. In the first half of the twentieth century, the British colonial formula was to coopt the prior social hierarchy as junior partners in a capitalist cartel, creating a structurally unstable state. 28 At independence in 1956, the colonial hierarchy simply took over the postcolonial state. In the prescient words of a contemporary journalist, “The Sudanese vessel of state has certainly started its voyage with an exceptionally explosive cargo.” 29 Some of those who captained the ship were firefighters, others were pyromaniacs. And over the following decades, the Sudanese state, at best a plausible imitation of an institutionalist blueprint, ceased to operate as anything more than a kleptocratic cartel. Contra to the Tillyean maxim that making war makes states, 30 Sudan remained stuck at Tilly’s point of origin: government as organized crime. But it modernized. Its unstable core managed its rebellious peripheries with newly refashioned methods of divide-and- conquer in a system of monetized, dynamic neo-patrimonialism that its practitioners call the political marketplace. Sudan’s governance has mutated into what can be described as a globalized political market, namely an arena in which transactionalism trumps institutional rules and procedures and political allegiances, public office, official services and even sovereignty itself are sliced, diced and traded. 31 Lineages of the Catastrophe Narratives for Sudan’s catastrophe are disputed and the polarization and acrimony in the Sudanese debate will likely intensify as charges of genocide become more salient. This essay will examine several lineages that can help us understand today’s calamity: the suc- cessive empires on the Nile; the most energized forms of resistance that drew on commu- nal solidarities as well as radical ideologies; military-commercial entrepreneurship; and Britain’s mercantile maritime empire. Insofar as Sudan is a state, it is a conquest state. For two centuries, successive regimes have been war machines, in which mass atrocity and starvation are the norm. The SAF styles itself as the Government of Sudan and as the inheritor of the Sudanese state. This correctly also marks it as carrying the legacy of the habitus of predatory “necropoli- tics.” 32 It is traceable to the Ottoman-Egyptian empire on the Nile, a “different shade of colonialism” 33 and the Khartoum traders who served as its local agents. The Egyptians, the traders and their European partners were driven out by the Mahdist uprising in 28 Peter Woodward, Sudan 1898–1989: The Unstable State (London: IB Tauris 1991). 29 Anthony Mann, Where God Laughed: The Sudan Today (London: Museum Press, 1954), 215. 30 Brian Taylor and Roxana Botea, “Tilly Tally: War-Making and State-Making in the Contemporary Third World,” Inter- national Studies Review 10, no. 1 (2008): 27–56. 31 Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), Chapters 4 and 5; Benjamin Spatz, Aditya Sarkar, and Alex de Waal, “The Political Marketplace: A Framework and Toolkit for Analyzing Transactional Politics in Conflict-Affected Countries,” Occasional paper, London School of Econ- omics, Conflict Research Programme (2021), https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/111009/. 32 Achille Mbembe, trans. Libby Meintjes, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. 33 Eve Troutt-Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 6 A. DE WAAL 1883, but were restored to their privileged role after British and Egyptian troops defeated the Mahdist armies in 1898. Although the second colonial period (1898–1955) was in theory an Anglo-Egyptian condominium, in practice the British were the senior partner. Colonial rule rested heavily on coopting the two most powerful Sudanese leaders, known as the “two Sayeds.” 34 One was Sayed Ali al Mirghani, leader of the Khatmiyya sect. By relying on him, the British reinforced the social and economic hierarchy of the Khartoum traders. The other was the posthumous son of the Mahdi, Sayed Abdel Rahman al-Mahdi, who was awarded honours and vast land grants. The combination became a capitalist class, blending feudalism, commercial agriculture and state bourgeoi- sie, that has since relentlessly dispossessed smallholders and pastoralists and created a permanent precariat of labourers. 35 The two Sayeds had a loyal following among the pro- vincial aristocracy, and they sided with the British to suppress an ill-fated nationalist upris- ing of 1924. 36 They, in turn, were godfathers to Sudan’s independence in 1956 – ensuring continuities between pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial political orders. This legacy is not dead. Following the recapture of the former seat of government in Khartoum, members of the coalition of forces aligned with SAF and its leader al- Burhan, are debating their war aims. We can be grimly confident that they will utilize a repertoire of tools that draw on Sudan’s history as a conquest state. Sudan’s conquest state has generated resistance in every periphery. The flag of the Beja Congress, northern Sudan’s first provincial resistance movement, contained an image of the Gash River delta, the grazing lands from which Beja pastoralists had been dispossessed in the 1950s. The unquenchable appetite for land for commercial farming contributed to wars and hunger in Sudan’s peripheries over decades. 37 Resistance came from the south, initially with the Anyanya separatist movement (early 1960s- 1972) and later the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA, founded in 1983), and also in the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile (just north of the internal north–south boundary) and Darfur. The RSF’s war aims and practices need also to be seen within that same history. One perspective is to locate the historical origins of the RSF as a product of Darfur, and specifi- cally Darfurian resistance to the Khartoum traders. The independent Sultanate of Dar Fur was established in the early seventeenth century and lasted until 1874. 38 During this period, Saharan Bedouins migrated into the region’s outer realms and the sultans awarded their leaders fiefdoms known as hakura s. The “Darfur consensus” was cohabita- tion between Fur and Arabs. 39 This broke when one of the most powerful of the Khartoum traders, Zubeir Rahma “Pasha”, in command of an army of mercenaries and plunderers, 34 Martin W. Daly, Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 35 M.A. Mohamed Salih. “Ecological Stress and Political Coercion in the Sudan,” Disasters 14, no. 2 (1990): 123–31. Edward Thomas, “Hunger in Sudan’s Political Marketplace,” World Peace Foundation and Conflict Research Programme , Occasional Paper no. 32 April 2022. 36 Elena Vezzadini, Lost Nationalism: Revolution, Memory and Anti-Colonial Resistance in Sudan (Oxford: James Currey, 2015). 37 M.A Mohamed Salih, “Resistance and Response: Ethnocide and Genocide in the Nuba Mountains, Sudan,” GeoJournal 36 (1995): 71–8; Louise Wise, “The Genocide-Ecocide Nexus in Sudan: Violent ‘Development’ and the Racial-Spatial Dynamics of (Neo)colonial-Capitalist Extraction,” Journal of Genocide Research 23, no. 2 (2021): 189–211. 38 R.S. O’Fahey, State and Society in Darfur (London: Hurst, 1980). 39 Abdul-Jabbar Fadul and Victor Tanner, “Darfur after Abuja: A View From the Ground,” in War in Darfur and the Search for Peace , ed. ed. Alex de Waal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 284–313. JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 7 defeated the sultan’s army and appointed himself as ruler. Zubeir made the error of reporting in person to the Egyptian Khedive, who, fearful of his lieutenant’s ambitions, refused to let him leave Cairo. Zubeir’s own deputy, Rabih Fadlallah, took heed and departed westward with his band of freebooters, ravaging much of central Africa, before securing for himself the post of Sultan of Borno (in modern day Nigeria), where he met his death fighting the French in 1900. 40 Darfur itself was absorbed as a frontier province of the Egyptian empire, but within a decade it became the crucible of the Mahdist uprising and revolution that overran Sudan, expelling the Egyptians and killing the British general, Charles Gordon, who had been sent to rescue Khartoum. Mohamed Ahmad “al-Mahdi” led the uprising. He himself was from the Nile. But it was the fusion of a west African strain of Mahdist mass mobilization with the charisma of al- Mahdi that created the movement and the Mahdist state. The instigator of this synthesis was a Darfurian Arab of west African descent, Abdullahi Torshein “al-Khalifa.” It was he who first hailed the Mahdi, 41 served as his deputy, mobilized many of its brigades and – after al-Mahdi’s death – who ruled the Mahdist state from its new capital at Omdurman from 1885–98. Al-Khalifa brought his own constituency of Arabs from Darfur to Omdurman to consolidate his government. This mass forced migration, known as tahjir , is a reference point for nomadic groups’ blended stories of victimhood and the de facto practice of assert- ing a right to land through conquest. In popular history, the people of the Nile recall the Khalifa’s state as the imposition of an alien tyranny, a time when ruthless Bedouin from Darfur and further west ruled over them. The vernacular sociology echoes the classification of the medieval writer Ibn Khaldun. In his masterpiece, al-Muqaddimah , 42 Ibn Khaldun casts the history of civilization as a cycle in which metropolitan dynasties preside over cultural glories but also, over a median span of three generations, suffer from political decay, until a new political force, animated by asabiyya – the spirit of group solidarity, found in its purest form among nomadic clans – sweeps in and installs a new warrior leader on the throne. In this telling, the Mahdists of the 1880s, resemble the hordes led by Timur who ransacked the cities of Mesopotamia and the Levant and created a new order from first principles. The political philosopher Eric Voegelin saw Timur as the ultimate exemplar of Machiavel- li’s political praxis, whereby a prince creates a principality by skill in arms and rules by laws of his own creation. 43 Ibn Khaldun famously was lowered from the walls of besieged Damascus to parley with Timur. The infamous postscript to this encounter is that Timur burned the city though he stopped short of erecting a pyramid of skulls at its gate, which had been his custom elsewhere. Some Sudanese from the riverian heartlands, see the RSF, and Hemedti’s rule-from-the- saddle, in a similar light. Referring to the distinctive headgear of desert nomads, a long 40 Kyari Mohammed, “Borno under Rabih Fadl Allah, 1893–1900: The Emergence of a Predatory State,” Paideuma 43 (1997): 281–300, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40341740. 41 He earlier hailed Zubeir Rahma as the Mahdi, but Zubeir dismissed him. 42 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (abridged edn.), ed. N.J. Dawood and trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2015). 43 Todd Myers, “Pyramids of Skulls: Unacceptable Violence, Transcendence, and the Image of Timur in the Thought of Eric Voegelin and Contemporary Scholarship,” Voegelin View , 3 February 2021, https://voegelinview.com/pyramids-of- skulls-unacceptable-violence-transcendence-and-the-image-of-timur-in-the-thought-of-eric-voegelin-and-contemporary- scholarship/ 8 A. DE WAAL dark scarf wrapped around the head and face, known as kadamol , they refer to the RSF- controlled domain as the “Republic of Kadamol.” Ibn Khaldun’s term for metropolitan civilization was hadhari – the same word used by Sudan’s Islamists in their “civilization project,” which reproduced the imperial and post- colonial hierarchies in a different colour. For civil society activists, the opposition to Isla- mist hadhari is medaniya , or “civicness.” However, for some on the political left, hostility to the Islamists and the “deep state” is so visceral that they are ready to ally with the RSF against it. The veteran leader of the SPLM-North in the Nuba Mountains, Abdel Aziz al- Hilu, is in this camp along with some resolute civic secularists and champions of the rights of the marginalized. This makes for an unhappy marriage, as the RSF’s often pro- gressive political rhetoric is outgunned by its characteristics as asabiyya and nihilist insurgency. A third lineage spanning two centuries warrants mention, not least because it is rel- evant to the proceedings at the ICJ. The UAE also has an unusual history of statehood. The southern shoreline of the Persian Gulf and Straits of Hormuz including Abu Dhabi and Dubai were known to the British East India Company as the “pirate coast.” Demanding safe passage for their ships, the EIC bombarded the towns and landed troops in 1820, negotiating with the Arab chiefs to establish the “Trucial States,” and slicing up their sovereignty so as to award maritime protection and foreign relations to a British resident. In the words of Peter Lienhardt, “the sea made the states, while the desert made the tribes.” 44 Variants of informal empire or protectorate continued for 150 years. 45 The Trucial States were given independence – something their sheikhs had not demanded – in 1971 and became the UAE. Their economic position was transformed by the exploitation of oil. But there was no change to their domestic governance other than the establishment of the federal state; the rulers replicated their own historic experience of informal empire, seeking to sit at the apex of an informal empire of their own. The UAE’s financial, commer- cial and mercenary regional policy includes striking deals with client potentates who include heads of state and government, heads of unrecognized states, secessionists and hybrid entrepreneurs such as Hemedti’s RSF, as well as employing mercenaries. 46 The Emirati portfolio of clients across the Red Sea arena includes Ethiopia, Kenya, Chad, Somali- land, and leaders in Yemen, Libya, Somalia and South Sudan as well as the RSF. Abu Dhabi is an advanced practitioner of a trend in which sovereignty is treated as a commodity, divis- ible and tradable in a regional political marketplace. This has notable echoes with EIC prac- tices but is also distinctively contemporary. Post-Colonial Genocides Sudan’s post-colonial history includes episodes that can reasonably be characterized under international law as genocide. Some of the violence in the country’s first civil war in the south (1955–72) and in the suppression of insurrection in the north (1970) 44 Peter Lienhardt, Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2001) (originally completed as DPhil dissertation, 1957), 25. 45 Tancred Bradshaw, The End of Empire in the Gulf: From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 46 Ariel Ahram, and Ranj Alaaldin, “Separatists and Spoilers: The UAE’s Way of Proxy Warfare,” Orbis 66, no. 3 (2022): 373– 90; Andreas Krieg, “The UAE’s ‘Dogs of War’: Boosting a Small State’s Regional Power Projection,” Small Wars & Insur- gencies 33, nos. 1–2 (2022): 152–72. JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 9 was arguably genocidal. However, it was in the second civil war (1983–2005) and in Darfur (2003–05) that the continuities from nineteenth century imperial practices were most apparent. There were several episodes of extreme violence and mass starvation, each marked by a huge spike in mortality. 47 The first two occurred during the counter-insur- gency in southern Sudan in 1985–89 – which reached its zenith with the militia raids, mass displacement and starvation – alongside a distinct episode of ethnically-targeted massacres in the city of Wau in southern Sudan in 1986–87. A third was an escalation in the immediate aftermath of a split in the SPLA in 1991, marked by inter-communal violence among southern armed groups, most notably a massacre in Bor perpetrated by the breakaway “Nasir Faction,” and fuelled in part by a government strategy of divide-and-rule. 48 A fourth was a concerted campaign, publicly heralded as jihad , in the Nuba Mountains in 1992, which went beyond counter-insurgency to include a programme of population transfer and Islamization. 49 This occurred when the Islamist government of President Omar al-Bashir was at the height of its ideological ambition, pursuing an agenda shaped by the Islamist leader Hasan al-Turabi for the total transform- ation of the country. A fifth was a series of military campaigns in 1998–99, with the main goal of clearing areas of southern Sudan of the local population in order to enable oil extraction. A final instance was the mass atrocities in the war in Darfur in 2003–05. While the atro- cities just discussed had been described as genocide by human rights advocates and cam- paigners, the Darfur conflict was exceptional in the international attention it garnered, including the US genocide designation, the campaign by the “Save Darfur” coalition to dispatch international troops to Darfur to protect civilians and, implicitly, enact regime change, and the ICC arrest warrant for al-Bashir. These wars, atrocities and famines killed hundreds of thousands of people. These episodes share several features. All took place in the context of war, and specifi- cally, wars in which the government outsourced its counter-insurgency to proxy militia. In addition to fighting rebels, these militia pursued local vendettas, seized land, and rewarded themselves through pillage. They targeted ethnic groups distinct from the gov- erning elite and used highly derogatory racist slurs, such as the word abid (slave) to refer to darker skinned citizens, evoking the previous centuries’ history of enslavement. Impu- nity ruled in “ethics free zones.” 50 Successive governments adopted the militia strategy in part because they lacked the resources to mount a conventional war. The use of militia in turn became a self-replicating strategy of generating ungovernable peripheries. While the specific purposes of the violence varied from case to case, the outcome was predictable 47 J. Millard Burr. “Quantifying Genocide in Southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains, 1983–1998.” In eds. Samuel Totten and Amanda Grzyb, Conflict in the Nuba Mountains (London: Routledge, 2014), 89–111. Alex