In most Hollywood films that use civil wars in Africa as a plot device, the commanders of armed groups are usually portrayed as erratic tyrants with little understanding of the wider world. Such assumptions even permeate news coverage of subnational militias, tribal forces and armed political factions, contrasting their supposedly primitive structures with those of state militaries.
Yet as clashes in Sudan between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, and the regular military escalate into full–blown civil war, the extent to which the geopolitical sophistication of such warlords has been underestimated is becoming increasingly clear.
In contrast to the crude narrative often constructed in Western media, armed groups like the RSF in Sudan, the Libyan National Army, or LNA, in Libya and the militias that became pillars of the dynastic Deby regime in Chad combined vicious disregard for civilians with a shrewd understanding of how they could manipulate great power rivalries and regional economic systems to their own advantage.
Senior commanders that dominate these armed groups—such as the RSF’s Mohamad Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, in Sudan and the Deby family in Chad—are quite effective managers of large organizations controlling far-flung business empires and patronage networks. Even a less skilled warlord like the LNA’s Gen. Khalifa Haftar in Libya has managed to obtain assistance from people with the necessary experience in military affairs, banking, intelligence operations and other fields to help him keep a large armed force well-equipped and financed.
The extent to which such institutionally complex forms of “warlord-ism” have expanded in power and regional scope was already visible in the civil wars that tore Chad apart in the 1970s and 1980s. Various armed formations began as rebel militias taking on a centralizing government in a conflict that drew in Libya, which under then-leader Muammar Gadhafi sought to annex territory in northern Chad, and France, which as the former colonial power intervened to push the Libyans back.
Over time, the effectiveness of these irregular militias in Chad enabled commanders such as Hissein Habre and Idriss Deby to seize presidential power and legitimize their positions as internationally recognized heads of state.
In their wars against first a French-backed regime and then in alliance with France against invading Libyan troops, these irregular militias developed a penchant for tactical innovation that made them the most transformative military force in the evolution of warfare since 1945.
The skillful deployment of light infantry in Toyota pick-up trucks, often with heavy machine guns and anti-tank guided missiles bolted onto the cargo bed, overwhelmed Libya’s armored brigades and enabled Chad’s state and military to project power over vast spaces. By the time Deby toppled Habre in the last of Chad’s so-called Toyota Wars in 1990 to become president himself, this form of pick-up truck warfare to outmaneuver cumbersome armored columns was not only being emulated across Africa and the Middle East, it was also influencing how great power militaries approached combat in similar conditions.
Across the Sahel and Central Africa, the template set by Chad’s wars fostered a form of warlord-ism that mixed brutal disregard for civilian welfare with a high level of managerial competence in business and military affairs. In Sudan, for instance, Hemedti initially gained influence leading the vicious Janjaweed militias enlisted by the Sudanese military in its wars against insurgents in South Sudan and Darfur in the 2000s. He then leveraged that influence to secure control of gold mines, the livestock trade and smuggling routes.
Hemedti’s own skills as a manager of an expanding patronage network combining business, military and political resources enabled him to defeat Darfuri rebels and outmaneuver rival Janjaweed commanders as well as enemies within the military in Khartoum. He went on to become one of the dominant figures in Sudanese politics in the years before mass protests toppled former President Omar al-Bashir’s authoritarian regime in 2019.
In the wake of such regional turmoil, Hemedti, Haftar and other warlords emulating them have drawn heavily on assistance from external powers. Deals with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, France, Russia and Egypt mean that they need to take the interests of external partners providing arms and cash into account. Nevertheless, their grip on natural resources and industrial infrastructure provide them with enough revenue of their own to carve out some room for maneuver.
A widespread tendency to label these modern warlords as mere proxies of external powers consistently underestimates the extent to which leaders like Hemedti are themselves formidable economic and political actors with the power to shape the regional order.
Across the Sahel and Central Africa, a modern form of warlord-ism has mixed brutal disregard for civilian welfare with a high level of managerial competence in business and military affairs.
The institutional sophistication of these forms of warlord-ism has also been enabled by the changing outlook and savvy of military and civilian personnel serving the interests of commanders such as Hemedti. In the 1980s, the business horizons of militia units through which Deby and Hemedti rose to the top remained limited to illicit trade and trafficking.
In contrast, today their successors rely heavily on access to global banking centers such as Abu Dhabi and Dubai to invest profits they generate through their business interests and use the returns to fund ongoing military and political projects. In his current war against the Sudanese military, Hemedti’s survival hinges as much on the ability of his financial advisers to move money he needs to survive around the global banking system as it does on the willingness of his troops in the field to take and hold ground in Khartoum.
The widening access these warlords have to the global economy is also affecting the aspirations of the foot soldiers and lower-ranking commanders that serve them. Having seen up close power structures that involve control over industrial infrastructure and the export of resources such as gold, many fighters across the Sahel and Central Africa are unlikely to be satisfied with a return to farming communities after the fighting is over. As members of a globally connected society with access to information at the touch of a smartphone, these combatants will find a warlord’s lucrative patronage network more compelling than anything a United Nations-sponsored demobilization and reintegration program can offer.
The extent to which warlords such as Hemedti have developed complex systems of revenue-generation also challenges assumptions about development that have historically shaped how international aid organizations and external powers interact with societies in the Sahel and Central Africa. Since decolonization in the 1950s, the development strategies put in place by the U.N., China and Western states in societies across Africa and the Middle East have hinged on the belief that technological modernization and prosperity would, over time, reduce the willingness among regional elites to use armed conflict to resolve disputes. Yet even a cursory glance at recent history suggests that as long as social fault lines remain unresolved, greater economic development is unlikely to prevent armed conflict between competing states and subnational constituencies, whether in Europe or Africa.
To the contrary, in societies whose political systems are incapable of managing such rivalries, economic modernization can exponentially increase the size, strength and firepower available to warlords. In the early 1970s, armies and militias in Sudan and Chad consisted of at most a few thousand men who had to make do with bolt-action rifles and a handful of rocket-propelled grenades. In 2023, their successors in the RSF and Sudanese army can coordinate vast business empires with their own ammunition factories to put tens of thousands of fighters in the field with access to artillery, anti-tank guided missiles, fighter jets and tanks. Clearly, economic development can vastly increase the scale of warfare as much as it can become a pillar of successful conflict resolution.
A widespread tendency in the 1980s and 1990s to assume that militia commanders and autocrats in the Sahel and Central Africa were merely ignorant thugs was always a deeply problematic and often racist misreading of complex social systems. Today, such a simplistic underestimation of modernized warlord-ism will hamper efforts to bring the conflict in Sudan, as well as others, to an end. As long as warlords understand the impact of globalization better than the great powers understand warlords, vicious but skillful entrepreneurs of violence will continue to prosper.
Source: msn.com