Sudan, gold and the limits of international law
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John Ashworth
Jun 20, 2026, 3:08:28 AM (9 days ago) Jun 20
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Sovereignty without control: Sudan, gold and the limits of international law
By Maria Pietrolungo
African Arguments
June 19, 2026
In 2024, as Sudan reeled from one of the world’s worst humanitarian
crises, UAE imports of its gold jumped by 70%. Millions had been
displaced, tens of thousands killed, yet the gold kept flowing:
refinery-bound, market-ready, and largely unquestioned.
Sudan’s contemporary gold economy has become one of the most
significant sites of violence, coercion, and resource extraction in
the region. Since the early 2010s, gold has financed armed actors,
shaped patterns of labour exploitation, and linked local mining
communities to transnational markets stretching across the Gulf and
beyond. Far from representing a breakdown of order, this is how the
system works.
Sudan, resources, and historical subordination
Sudan’s gold boom did not happen by accident. When South Sudan gained
independence in 2011, Sudan lost the bulk of its oil revenues
overnight. Gold became the government’s answer: a strategic resource
to fill the fiscal gap and keep the country connected to global
markets. Even before secession, Khartoum had already begun positioning
gold as a key non-oil revenue source, and by 2014, it had handed out
around 127 mining concessions to attract foreign investment into what
was still a largely artisanal sector, though few of those concessions
ever became productive.
The official narrative was one of opportunity. Rising reserves,
growing production, a sector open for business. But the numbers told a
different story: reported production went up, while exports barely
moved. To this day, there is no comprehensive public register of
active mines, and information about what is being extracted depends
almost entirely on what companies choose to disclose. This opacity is
not incidental to Sudan’s gold sector, it is structural.
This is partly because in Sudan, economic power and political
authority have always been intertwined. Control over resource wealth
is not just a perk of political power; it is how that power is
maintained and reproduced. Large-scale mining is typically organised
through international joint ventures, where Sudanese partners, often
with close ties to ruling elites, hold majority stakes on paper. These
structures are less about attracting investment than about managing
access: they allow foreign companies to extract gold while insulating
both them and their local partners from accountability. The
corporation, in this sense, is not a neutral economic actor; it is the
vehicle through which extraction has always been organised, from
colonial chartered companies to today’s multinationals.
International law and extractive hierarchies
These arrangements did not emerge in a vacuum. The legal architecture
that enables them – the contracts, the corporate structures, the
frameworks that govern foreign investments- is part of a broader
international order. Understanding why Sudan’s gold economy works the
way it does requires looking beyond Khartoum.
International law’s role in structuring contemporary extraction cannot
be explained by domestic politics or markets alone; it must be traced
to its colonial origins. As legal scholar Antony Anghie has argued,
international law and doctrines like sovereignty were forged through
European encounters with non-European societies, producing legal
categories that enabled domination under the guise of order.
Non-European polities were granted only conditional, subordinate
sovereignty, which Anghie calls “alienation and subordination rather
than empowerment.”
This history underlies today’s extractive hierarchies. Formal
sovereignty has not ensured control over resources or economic
autonomy but instead integrated postcolonial states into an unequal
international economic order. As political theorist Getachew has
shown, anticolonial visions of sovereignty as economic
self-determination were progressively narrowed into a purely formal
legal status, detached from control over resources and markets,
especially after the defeat of projects like the New International
Economic Order, a 1970s push by developing nations to reshape global
trade rules.
In Sudan, this configuration produces a gold economy where formal
sovereignty coexists with structural conditions that facilitate
external access to resources and limit domestic regulation and
benefit-sharing. International law recognises Sudan as sovereign while
embedding it in a legal-economic order that prioritises stability,
market access, and capital mobility. Responsibility for extraction is
dispersed across jurisdictions and legal actors, making coercive
extraction appear legitimate and investable.
Gold, conflict, and global markets
Gold has long functioned as a conflict resource in Sudan, embedded in
both national and subnational struggles for power. Its role has become
particularly pronounced in the recent episodes of mass violence, the
October 2021 coup, and the civil war that began in April 2023, where
control over gold production, trade, and circulation has directly
shaped the conflict’s trajectory. The multi-billion-dollar gold
economy is the primary source of income for the main warring parties,
making extraction and trade central to the conduct and prolongation of
war.
The military government that ruled Sudan for three decades, led by
Umar al-Bashir (1989-2019), relied on security agencies and armed
groups to control gold-producing regions, embedding extraction within
militarised systems of authority. This mode of resource control was
not new but reproduced a historical pattern – rooted in colonial
governance – whereby peripheral regions were subjected to violence to
facilitate extraction, a pattern that persisted after independence and
remains central to Sudan’s extractive economy today.
Both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces
(RSF), the two parties currently at war, consolidated their dominance
over gold mining and trade by leveraging their political and military
power during Bashir’s rule and in its aftermath. Their competition
over mining sites, trade routes, and export channels is a key driver
of the current civil war. This struggle extends beyond Sudan’s
borders: gold extraction and circulation are embedded in transnational
networks linking Sudan to regional and global markets, particularly
through alliances with foreign companies and state actors in the
United Arab Emirates and Russia.
Regional and international actors sustain these dynamics. Egypt and
the UAE, as primary external supporters of the SAF and RSF,
respectively, exert substantial influence over the conflict’s
trajectory, driven by strategic, political, and economic interests
tied to Sudan’s resources. While targeted sanctions and regulatory
measures have been introduced, geopolitical dependencies, particularly
reliance on Gulf states and Egypt for broader regional stability,
constrain the willingness of powerful states to meaningfully disrupt
the gold trade.
Overall, Sudan’s gold economy reveals how conflict, extraction, and
global markets are deeply intertwined. Gold does not merely finance
violence; it is embedded in a transnational legal and economic
architecture that renders extraction profitable, governable, and
resilient to political disruption.
Sudan’s gold does not disappear at the border. It is refined, traded,
and absorbed into global markets that prefer not to ask many
questions. Between 2012 and 2024, at least 400 tonnes of Sudanese gold
were smuggled out of the country. This is not a failure of
enforcement; it is the system working as intended. If international
law continues to prioritise market access and investment security over
the lives of those who mine the gold, no amount of sanctions or
ethical sourcing commitments will change the fundamental dynamic. The
question is not whether the world knows where Sudan’s gold comes from.
The architecture was never designed to stop it.
https://africanarguments.org/2026/06/sovereignty-without-control-sudan-gold-and-the-limits-of-international-law/
END
______________________
John Ashworth
ashwor...@gmail.com
+254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile, WhatsApp and Signal)
PO Box 403 - 00206, Kiserian, Kenya
By Maria Pietrolungo
African Arguments
June 19, 2026
In 2024, as Sudan reeled from one of the world’s worst humanitarian
crises, UAE imports of its gold jumped by 70%. Millions had been
displaced, tens of thousands killed, yet the gold kept flowing:
refinery-bound, market-ready, and largely unquestioned.
Sudan’s contemporary gold economy has become one of the most
significant sites of violence, coercion, and resource extraction in
the region. Since the early 2010s, gold has financed armed actors,
shaped patterns of labour exploitation, and linked local mining
communities to transnational markets stretching across the Gulf and
beyond. Far from representing a breakdown of order, this is how the
system works.
Sudan, resources, and historical subordination
Sudan’s gold boom did not happen by accident. When South Sudan gained
independence in 2011, Sudan lost the bulk of its oil revenues
overnight. Gold became the government’s answer: a strategic resource
to fill the fiscal gap and keep the country connected to global
markets. Even before secession, Khartoum had already begun positioning
gold as a key non-oil revenue source, and by 2014, it had handed out
around 127 mining concessions to attract foreign investment into what
was still a largely artisanal sector, though few of those concessions
ever became productive.
The official narrative was one of opportunity. Rising reserves,
growing production, a sector open for business. But the numbers told a
different story: reported production went up, while exports barely
moved. To this day, there is no comprehensive public register of
active mines, and information about what is being extracted depends
almost entirely on what companies choose to disclose. This opacity is
not incidental to Sudan’s gold sector, it is structural.
This is partly because in Sudan, economic power and political
authority have always been intertwined. Control over resource wealth
is not just a perk of political power; it is how that power is
maintained and reproduced. Large-scale mining is typically organised
through international joint ventures, where Sudanese partners, often
with close ties to ruling elites, hold majority stakes on paper. These
structures are less about attracting investment than about managing
access: they allow foreign companies to extract gold while insulating
both them and their local partners from accountability. The
corporation, in this sense, is not a neutral economic actor; it is the
vehicle through which extraction has always been organised, from
colonial chartered companies to today’s multinationals.
International law and extractive hierarchies
These arrangements did not emerge in a vacuum. The legal architecture
that enables them – the contracts, the corporate structures, the
frameworks that govern foreign investments- is part of a broader
international order. Understanding why Sudan’s gold economy works the
way it does requires looking beyond Khartoum.
International law’s role in structuring contemporary extraction cannot
be explained by domestic politics or markets alone; it must be traced
to its colonial origins. As legal scholar Antony Anghie has argued,
international law and doctrines like sovereignty were forged through
European encounters with non-European societies, producing legal
categories that enabled domination under the guise of order.
Non-European polities were granted only conditional, subordinate
sovereignty, which Anghie calls “alienation and subordination rather
than empowerment.”
This history underlies today’s extractive hierarchies. Formal
sovereignty has not ensured control over resources or economic
autonomy but instead integrated postcolonial states into an unequal
international economic order. As political theorist Getachew has
shown, anticolonial visions of sovereignty as economic
self-determination were progressively narrowed into a purely formal
legal status, detached from control over resources and markets,
especially after the defeat of projects like the New International
Economic Order, a 1970s push by developing nations to reshape global
trade rules.
In Sudan, this configuration produces a gold economy where formal
sovereignty coexists with structural conditions that facilitate
external access to resources and limit domestic regulation and
benefit-sharing. International law recognises Sudan as sovereign while
embedding it in a legal-economic order that prioritises stability,
market access, and capital mobility. Responsibility for extraction is
dispersed across jurisdictions and legal actors, making coercive
extraction appear legitimate and investable.
Gold, conflict, and global markets
Gold has long functioned as a conflict resource in Sudan, embedded in
both national and subnational struggles for power. Its role has become
particularly pronounced in the recent episodes of mass violence, the
October 2021 coup, and the civil war that began in April 2023, where
control over gold production, trade, and circulation has directly
shaped the conflict’s trajectory. The multi-billion-dollar gold
economy is the primary source of income for the main warring parties,
making extraction and trade central to the conduct and prolongation of
war.
The military government that ruled Sudan for three decades, led by
Umar al-Bashir (1989-2019), relied on security agencies and armed
groups to control gold-producing regions, embedding extraction within
militarised systems of authority. This mode of resource control was
not new but reproduced a historical pattern – rooted in colonial
governance – whereby peripheral regions were subjected to violence to
facilitate extraction, a pattern that persisted after independence and
remains central to Sudan’s extractive economy today.
Both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces
(RSF), the two parties currently at war, consolidated their dominance
over gold mining and trade by leveraging their political and military
power during Bashir’s rule and in its aftermath. Their competition
over mining sites, trade routes, and export channels is a key driver
of the current civil war. This struggle extends beyond Sudan’s
borders: gold extraction and circulation are embedded in transnational
networks linking Sudan to regional and global markets, particularly
through alliances with foreign companies and state actors in the
United Arab Emirates and Russia.
Regional and international actors sustain these dynamics. Egypt and
the UAE, as primary external supporters of the SAF and RSF,
respectively, exert substantial influence over the conflict’s
trajectory, driven by strategic, political, and economic interests
tied to Sudan’s resources. While targeted sanctions and regulatory
measures have been introduced, geopolitical dependencies, particularly
reliance on Gulf states and Egypt for broader regional stability,
constrain the willingness of powerful states to meaningfully disrupt
the gold trade.
Overall, Sudan’s gold economy reveals how conflict, extraction, and
global markets are deeply intertwined. Gold does not merely finance
violence; it is embedded in a transnational legal and economic
architecture that renders extraction profitable, governable, and
resilient to political disruption.
Sudan’s gold does not disappear at the border. It is refined, traded,
and absorbed into global markets that prefer not to ask many
questions. Between 2012 and 2024, at least 400 tonnes of Sudanese gold
were smuggled out of the country. This is not a failure of
enforcement; it is the system working as intended. If international
law continues to prioritise market access and investment security over
the lives of those who mine the gold, no amount of sanctions or
ethical sourcing commitments will change the fundamental dynamic. The
question is not whether the world knows where Sudan’s gold comes from.
The architecture was never designed to stop it.
https://africanarguments.org/2026/06/sovereignty-without-control-sudan-gold-and-the-limits-of-international-law/
END
______________________
John Ashworth
ashwor...@gmail.com
+254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile, WhatsApp and Signal)
PO Box 403 - 00206, Kiserian, Kenya
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