Sudan: Capital, Conflict, and the New Sudan – the Politics of Permanent Displacement

The Sudan War series is a joint collaboration between the Center for Economic, Legal, and Social Studies and Documentation – Khartoum (CEDEJ-K), Sudan-Norway Academic Cooperation (SNAC) and African Arguments – Debating Ideas. Through a number of themes that explore the intersections of war, displacement, identities and capital, Sudanese researchers, many of whom are themselves displaced, highlight their own experiences, the unique dynamisms within the larger communities affected by war, and readings of their possible futures.

Sudan’s displacement crisis can be explored through many lenses, but one reality dominates; how does an entire country of displaced people function? Sudan is the world’s largest displacement crisis. A third of those displaced hail from Khartoum; the capital once projected to rank among Africa’s top megacities by 2100. This trajectory reflected decades of rapid urbanization, a process inseparable from Sudan’s history of poverty and wartime mobility. As of March 2025, nearly two years into the current war, the International Organization for Migration reports a 2.4% decline in internally displaced persons (IDPs) – the first decrease since April 2023 – as some begin returning to areas reclaimed by the Sudan Armed Forces.

These returnees will face the realities of a transformed Khartoum. In addition to the devastated homes, livelihoods, public services, and infrastructure, the war in Sudan has also deprived the city of the economic and political functions it played prior to 2023. “Return” does not mark displacement’s end but reveals its enduring grip. Those coming back confront a fractured political reality, where the systems they once navigated no longer exist. Displacement, in this sense, becomes a permanent reordering – not merely a pause in ordinary life.

Displacement in Sudan will feature not as a condition but a transformative political reality. While the country has a long history of wartime mobility, this conflict demands deeper scrutiny of how displacement alters political agency. This conflict has generated distinct dynamics; the systematic destruction of economic infrastructure – once the bedrock of the political class and power-sharing settlements – has fundamentally altered the relationship between political and economic capital. economic and political capital mean more than just money or government power. For displaced people, capital show up in everyday life as: Who can find work and earn a living, and who cannot. Who can access services, aid, and protection, and who is left out. Who has the networks, connections, and influence to rebuild a life in exile, and who struggles to even be seen.

To understand these shifts, we must examine how the war’s erosion of Sudan’s economic foundations has destabilized the elite’s ability to accumulate wealth and leverage it for political control. The collapse is not merely economic; it is recalibrating the very mechanisms of power, forcing political groups to operate in a landscape where old alliances and patronage networks no longer hold. The interplay of these collapsing systems reveals how war transforms political agency even after the physical return of displaced persons.

No conflict in Sudan’s history has dismantled its economic infrastructure as catastrophically as the war of the past two years has done. Previous conflicts – and the peace agreements that supposedly addressed them – operated within a persistent political economy: elites cyclically brokered power and wealth-sharing deals, relying on extractive industries and patronage networks to sustain their authority. These arrangements followed a predictable rhythm of political capital accumulation and erosion, anchored by an economic base that, however strained, endured. Today, that foundation has collapsed. The current war, amplified by compounding shocks, has erased factories, farms, and financial systems that once stabilized elite bargains.

The 2023 war has permanently altered Sudan’s economic landscape. Emerging surveys and research underscore the unprecedented scale of destruction: while certain sectors display limited resilience, the broader economy faces systemic collapse. The service sector – Sudan’s largest contributor to GDP and second-biggest employer – has been decimated by the destruction of urban centres like Khartoum, which housed critical commercial infrastructure. Growth in this sector once relied on wholesale and retail trade, hospitality, and financial services, but the war has obliterated communication networks, airports, and business hubs, paralyzing the possibility of recovery.

Equally devastated is the industrial sector, historically concentrated in Khartoum and a few provincial cities, leveraging centralized infrastructure, labour, and markets. As of December 2023, Sudan’s Minister of Industry reported the 90% destruction of manufacturing facilities in Khartoum, erasing decades of industrial development.

Agriculture, the largest employer despite its long-term decline, faces compounding crises. Pre-war stagnation has accelerated under the conflict. Insecurity now blocks farmers’ access to fields, disrupts supply chains for seeds and fertilizers, and critical financial services. Conflict zones report abandoned farms, severed trade routes, and communication breakdowns, while soaring input prices and machinery shortages slim productivity gains. Limited resilience persists in capital-intensive irrigated farming, but smallholders in rain-fed agriculture, who lack resources to absorb shocks, were hit harder. Many now turn to informal non-farm activities, replicating survival strategies seen during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Sudan’s post-war economy has grown perilously dependent on extractive industries with gold exports – both formal and smuggled – emerging as its fiscal lifeline. Over the past two years of conflict, tax revenues have collapsed amid a shrinking formal economy, declining from an already fragile tax-to-GDP ratio of 2.1% in 2022. Meanwhile, gold exports have surged, becoming the de facto anchor of government revenue. Mohammed Tahir Omar, Director General of the Sudanese Mineral Resources Company, reported an increase in gold production generating $1.9 billion. While this boom might temporarily offset collapsing tax income, it leaves the budget vulnerable to global price volatility and further reinforces an economy driven by extraction.

Sudan’s economic unraveling has and will further reshape its political landscape in paradoxical ways – entrenching old patterns of elite predation while accelerating the fragmentation of governance. The hollowing of the state’s productive economic base has reinforced a decades-long reliance on extractive industries, now monopolized by military elites who trade control of gold mines, smuggling networks, and customs revenues for political loyalty. This is not a rupture but a deepening of Sudan’s entrenched “political marketplace”, as Alex de Waal describes it – a system where power is brokered through transactional alliances, with elites exchanging money, weapons, or protection for allegiance. Yet the war has amplified this logic: competing factions, desperate to finance their survival, now strip public assets with even greater urgency. The result will be a state that exists in name only; its bureaucratic machinery replaced by a militarized bazaar where governance is reduced to auctions of loyalty.

In this vacuum, authority is being redefined. Public services – electricity, water, security – will increasingly depend on a patchwork of non-state actors: armed groups, diaspora-funded NGOs, local mutual aid groups, and tribal leaders. These entities do not merely fill gaps; they cultivate legitimacy through governance. A neighbourhood might receive electricity from an armed group backed generator scheme, water from a charity tied to a Gulf donor, and dispute resolution from a tribal council. Compliance emerges not from trust in institutions, but from necessity – a reluctant acceptance of whichever actor delivers basic order. This hyper-localized governance is fluid and contested, with alliances shifting as groups vie for control. Public authority, in this context, becomes a performance: a blend of coercion, service provision, and symbolic gestures that communities navigate strategically to survive.

For Sudan’s urban middle class – once insulated by remittances from relatives abroad – this erosion of centralized governance has laid bare their political fragility. Remittances, which surged as a lifeline for households facing collapsed healthcare and education systems, will now serve as a grim subsidy for the state’s abdication of responsibility. It is not hard to imagine families pooling funds to hire private security, import medicines, or pay bribes for passports – effectively outsourcing the social contract to the diaspora and immigrant workers. But this stopgap cannot mask the state’s irrelevance, nor can it restore the middle class’s eroded political agency. Displaced from their historic proximity to power and perhaps their role as advocates for change, many now cling to survival strategies that further atomize collective action.

Displacement in Sudan is not a temporary disruption to be “solved” by return; it is an irreversible political transformation. The war has ruptured the foundations of power, severing millions from the economic, social, and institutional ties that once defined their political agency. To assume that repatriation alone can restore pre-war dynamics ignores the profound capital shifts that have already reshaped Sudan’s political landscape. Displaced actors – whether activists, community leaders, or political elites – do not simply resume old roles when they return. Displacement changes the meaning of wealth and influence. When people lose their homes and livelihoods, they also lose their place in the system of favors, protections, and opportunities. New forms of capital emerge — the ability to find work across borders, build new community and political ties, or speak languages that open doors to help and jobs.

Their ability to influence politics now hinges on what they can carry back with them: a transferable capital encompasses the resources – economic, social, political, or cultural – that retain their utility across displacement contexts, enabling displaced actors to sustain influence in new environments. Meanwhile, non-transferable capital, by contrast, refers to resources rooted in pre-war power structures, which lose relevance once severed from their original context. The former allows adaptation; the latter, when lost, forces a reckoning with new hierarchies of power.

This distinction is critical. Displacement does not merely relocate people – it reconfigures their political agency. Those who return cannot reclaim authority tied to systems that no longer exist, nor can they ignore the networks and strategies forged in exile. To assume otherwise is to misunderstand displacement’s irreversible nature. The war has not just destroyed infrastructure; it has redistributed capital in ways that redefine who holds influence, how it is wielded, and what legitimacy means in a fragmented state.

This transformation matters because displacement does not pause politics – it rewrites it. Displaced political actors are already forging new alliances, leveraging transnational resources, and redefining demands for justice and representation. Their agency is no longer anchored in Sudan’s pre-war institutions but in hybrid systems blending local grievances with global advocacy. To dismiss this evolution is to risk misreading Sudan’s future: the political class that emerges from this crisis will be shaped less by pre-war allegiances than by who masters the art of reinvention in displacement. Analysing these shifts is essential. Without grasping how capital shapes agency in displacement, efforts to rebuild Sudan will fail to engage the very actors redefining its politics. The future hinges not on restoring the past but on recognizing that there is a new political reality – where power flows not through old institutions, but through the contested interplay of survival, innovation, and resilience.

By African Arguments