September 15, 2026

The UAE's Role in Sudan Exposes the Modern Face of Neocolonialism

topic:	Human Rights
tags:	#neocolonialism, #colonialism, #imperialism, #proxy wars, #Rapid Support Forces
located:	Sudan
by:	Piper Tozer

The UAE’s involvement in Sudan exposes a deeper system of neocolonial power, where economic exploitation, political influence and proxy warfare allow external powers to benefit from a country’s continued dependence. Its simultaneous role in fuelling the conflict and funding humanitarian aid reveals the dangers of this system, where those contributing to a crisis can avoid responsibility for its destruction while positioning themselves as part of the solution.

In the remote desert of southeast Libya, a sprawling network of smuggling routes, military camps and weapons transfers is helping sustain Sudan's brutal war. A recent Lighthouse Reports investigation traced that network back to a familiar regional power – the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Ahmed, an anonymous Rapid Support Forces (RSF) defector interviewed by Lighthouse Reports, spent three months at Camp 17, an LNA military base where he trained with squads handling heavy weaponry. He described Emirati planes arriving with weapons, ammunition and vehicles that would then be transported to Sudan. 'It’s all Emirati,' he said. 'Emiratis are the ones supporting the RSF.'

Drawing on Ahmed's testimony alongside satellite imagery, cellphone records and thousands of social media posts, the investigation exposed the scale of the UAE-backed network supporting Sudan's RSF. The contradiction is jarring. Publicly, the UAE has pledged $500 million in humanitarian aid to Sudan. Privately, mounting evidence points to its role in supporting the RSF, a paramilitary force accused of war crimes and genocide against civilians.

But this is more than just hypocrisy. It exposes something deeper about the system of power sustaining Sudan's war – the power of neocolonialism.

Sudan Through a Neocolonial Lens

Sudan has a long history of colonial exploitation that has undermined its ability to achieve economic and political freedom, even after its independence in 1956. While sovereign in theory, its economic and political systems remain heavily influenced by external forces, a phenomenon Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, deemed neocolonialism.

Zambia shows how this kind of economic control has outlasted formal independence. The country nationalised its copper mines in 1969, five years after independence from Britain, but debt and falling prices forced a reversal in the 1990s: the mines were sold off to foreign firms including Glencore, First Quantum Minerals and Vedanta Resources, which still dominate the sector today. Copper accounts for around 70 per cent of Zambia's exports, yet most of the profits flow abroad — a pattern echoed in the Democratic Republic of Congo's cobalt mines and Nigeria's oil fields, where resource wealth has entrenched foreign control rather than funded development.

Sudan's gold follows the same logic: a resource capable of transforming the country instead entrenches outside power — this time through the UAE's alliance with RSF leaders, primarily Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti.

For Nkrumah, this economic and external control has violent consequences that he calls ‘limited wars’. In the pursuit of avoiding mass destruction by waging war amongst themselves, neocolonial powers instead stage limited wars in places they deem expendable. These ‘limited wars’, such as the war in South Vietnam which Nkrumah uses as an example, serve as proxies for the economic, political or ideological battles fought among global powers, while neocolonial states bear the human and economic costs.

Gold, Power and the UAE-RSF Alliance

The UAE-RSF relationship shows what this neocolonial exploitation looks like in practice. Lighthouse Reports exposed the vast resources being used in Libya to support the RSF, amid the UAE's pursuit of regional influence and access to Sudan's natural resources, primarily its gold.

Reuters reported that the UAE is the top destination for African gold, while Sudan is Africa's third-largest producer of the metal. The UAE government's long-standing interest in Sudanese gold makes its alliance with people like Hemedti even more critical. Since 2017, Hemedti has controlled some of Sudan's most lucrative gold mines, making his relationship with the UAE not only a political alliance, but one rooted in the extraction of Sudan’s wealth.

Through gold smuggling from Sudan to Dubai, alongside dual-front companies and banks, the UAE and RSF have gained control over many of Sudan's key sectors and stand to profit significantly should the RSF win the war. What seems to fall under far less consideration is the mass human and cultural destruction occurring at the hands of the RSF and UAE, something Nkrumah's neocolonial theory helps us understand.

Rarely do rulers of neocolonial states answer to the people they govern, because they do not derive power from their citizens. Instead, their political and financial power is secured by their neocolonial master. Hemedti and his alliance with the UAE mirror exactly that. Hemedti has maintained vast wealth protected in the UAE, which has enabled his continued leadership and domination within the RSF. Furthermore, neocolonial powers lack responsibility for the countries they help destroy. Unlike a colonial master’s responsibility to restore peace, infrastructure, and community to the places it colonised, the same sense of duty is not required of a neocolonial master. They are awarded what Nkrumah calls ‘power without responsibility and … exploitation without redress’. And what is left of Sudan after the war will hardly fall upon the UAE’s shoulders to rebuild. Therefore, the death toll and mass destruction in Sudan, deemed the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, appear to hold little consequence for both Hemedti and the UAE. And while claiming to fight for the people of Sudan, Hemedti appears far more interested in serving only himself and his master.

When the Donor Fuels the Crisis

This brings into question the UAE's $500 million pledge to UN agencies to deliver ‘life-saving aid to Sudan’. The contradiction is difficult to ignore.

Beyond the international pressure on ‘developed countries’ to provide aid, and the positive reputation awarded to those who do, humanitarian aid often delivers immediate, life-saving assistance without addressing what comes next – long-term, sustainable development. Often, as we see in this example, the aid is delivered by large, primarily Global North-based INGOs that rarely involve affected communities in the programme decision-making. This exclusion not only perpetuates stereotypes of ‘helpless Africans’, but also tends to deliver aid that is misaligned with community needs. It rarely invests in education, income-generating activities or sustainable economic development, all of which could increase a country's economic independence. Furthermore, it rarely addresses the structural and political problems that caused the crisis in the first place. Instead, humanitarian aid sustains communities in the short term, nurturing a codependent relationship between the donor and the recipient.

In this sense, it is safe for the UAE to pledge this kind of aid, knowing it will not fundamentally restructure Sudan into an independent state that could weaken its ability to exploit it. It allows the UAE to appear generous, sustain profit-generating industries and maintain Global North allyship, while quietly profiting from the mass destruction and human suffering it helped create.

Conclusion

The Lighthouse Reports investigation raises the question of the underlying juxtaposition of the UAE's private and public involvement in Sudan. The UAE can profit from Sudan's resources and destruction while simultaneously positioning itself as a humanitarian donor on the global stage. Meanwhile, Sudanese civilians are left to bear the cost of being proxies in an economic fight that they'll never reap the benefits from. This is the danger of neocolonialism in the modern day: it promotes economic exploitation and power without responsibility.

The tools to change this already exist, even if they remain underused. Darfur has fallen under International Criminal Court jurisdiction since 2005, and a UN arms embargo has technically covered the region since 2004 — the same embargo that arms shipments like the ones described by Ahmed would violate if enforced. What's missing is not the legal architecture but the political will to use it: expanding the ICC's mandate beyond Darfur, and holding states accountable for embargo violations, would require exactly the kind of public scrutiny that investigations like Lighthouse Reports' make possible. Exposing which governments quietly fuel a war while publicly funding its relief is not just an act of journalism — it is itself a form of accountability.