In Freiburg’s Christmas market, it is easy to forget how violent our “normality” is organized. Lights, music, mulled wine – and at the same time: mobile vehicle barriers at every entrance, officially there to protect against “terror and rampage attacks”. These blocks are not just technical security. They are props for a story: the ever-present threat of “Islamic terror” outside, and a supposedly innocent, peaceful “inside” that must be defended.
This securitized “inside” is heavily staffed. The police are on duty at the market every day; at weekends they are reinforced by police from France and Switzerland. Riot police are planned, alongside private security and the city’s enforcement officers patrolling the stalls. Weapons and knives are formally banned. The message is clear: this is a controlled zone, guarded from “dangerous others”.
And because it is Freiburg, the whole thing is, of course, proudly advertised as running on “100% green energy” – a clean, sustainable Christmas. But that “green” electricity does not fall from the sky. It depends on batteries, cables and infrastructure built from raw materials ripped out of places like Congo: cobalt, copper, lithium. Meanwhile, genocide is being funded with our taxes and our labour. The cosy glow on the Münsterplatz is plugged directly into extractivism, poisoned rivers and exploited labour elsewhere.
Barriers, police, security and green branding together draw a line through the city. Inside the bright, fenced-off area: those who can afford five-euro Glühwein, welcome as customers. At the edges of the same square: people without housing, people in poverty, people racialised as “risky” – treated as security problems, not as neighbours. They literally sit at the periphery of the Christmas market, in the shadow of a celebration that is not meant for them.
Here, Merz’s talk of the Stadtbild becomes concrete. The Christmas market, with its consumer logic and “attractive cityscape”, is what is to be praised and protected. The people at its margins – the homeless, the poor, migrants – are what is to be admonished as a “problem for the cityscape”, something that spoils the image and should be removed.
Christmas sells itself as a time of charity and warmth, but it is organized as an exclusionary space. It separates those who “deserve” comfort from those who are allowed to exist only as a disturbance or threat. Even the supposed “way out” offered within this logic is individual: if you are poor, you are told to work harder, be entrepreneurial, maybe one day open your own stand. Poverty is framed as personal failure, not as the consequence of a system that needs winners and losers.
What is missing is any idea of solidarity that breaks with this logic altogether.
We can see another practice in Sudan.
KHARTOUM STATE, SUDAN – MARCH 17, 2025: A man distributes food at an Emergency Response Room communal kitchen in Bir Hamada, in Khartoum state. As a war between rival generals and their armed forces devastates Sudan, millions have been displaced and left without access to basic services like medical care, water and electricity. While those at the top fight for power, neighbourhood committees and Emergency Response Rooms build kitchens like this one to keep people alive and practice grassroots solidarity from below.
Under war, displacement, hunger and state collapse, neighbourhood resistance committees in Sudan have set up community kitchens to keep people alive. There are no cosy markets there, and no NGOs swooping in to “save” anyone. Human rights organisations and aid agencies are absent, or appear only on terms set by the same imperial states that help fuel the war – often providing just enough assistance to stabilise the situation and discourage migration towards Europe.
The community kitchens are something else entirely. They are not charity from above. They are self-organised survival: neighbours pooling what exists locally – a truck, a yard, a gas bottle, a field, cooking skills, time, labour – and turning it into shared infrastructure.
This is a radical reconceptualisation of resources. Instead of asking “Who has money?”, people ask “What do we have among us?” The return is not profit, but collective survival and strength. This model:
mobilises local, non-financial assets,
distributes food according to need,
and keeps control in the hands of those who use it.
Because decisions are made collectively, it resists hegemony and co-optation. It is explicitly political: a social space where popular power is practised daily, where people defend their ability to survive and shape their future, independent of external agendas. In Sudan, this is a matter of life and death.
In Freiburg, we live in extreme privilege by comparison. People freezing on the street here are not doing so because the city has no food, no space, no money. They are freezing because of political choices: property rights enforced more harshly than the right to housing; a city centre designed for consumption and tourism, not for need; ever-growing budgets for policing and “security” while social services are cut, privatised or buried in bureaucracy.
Exactly because our situation is so privileged, there is no excuse to maintain Christmas as an exclusionary spectacle ringed by barriers, police and guards – and then wash it green with “100% renewable” branding built on extraction elsewhere.
If we take the Sudanese community kitchens as a model, an autonomous, anti-capitalist Advent in Freiburg could mean:
Setting up solidarity kitchens at the edges of the Christmas market, serving hot food and tea to anyone who needs it – housed or unhoused, with or without papers – without pity, tests, or charity branding.
Pooling resources – kitchens, cars, storage spaces, skills, time, some money – to build common infrastructure: food, warm clothes, sleeping bags, power banks, information.
Treating these places not as neutral welfare, but as spaces to meet and organise: to talk about why people are homeless, policed and poor in one of the richest regions in the world – and how to change it.
The goal is not to make Christmas a bit “nicer” within capitalism. It is to practise something that stands outside its logic: a redistribution from those with more to those with less, not as charity from above but as a conscious decision from below.
The person sitting at the periphery of the Christmas market is not a blemish on the festive scenery. They are a mirror held up to the city, showing that this way of celebrating is built on exclusion, securitisation and the criminalisation of poverty – powered, quite literally, by resources extracted from somewhere else.
We cannot copy Sudan’s struggle into Freiburg, and we should not romanticise it. But we can learn from the fact that, under bombardment and hunger, people build daily structures of solidarity without waiting for states, NGOs or donors.
Here, under fairy lights, mobile “anti-terror” barriers, permanent police presence and “100% green” marketing, the question for us is simple and sharp:
If they can build community kitchens under war, why can’t we build them under Christmas?
This article traces the Janjaweed’s origins, the pathway from Janjaweed to RSF, and the financing, recruitment, and foreign ties that sustain them. It looks beyond a purely human-rights frame to examine the material and ideological foundations of the project.
In 2003, Darfuri rebels rose up against the Sudanese government, due to systematic oppression of non-Arab communities. The Janjaweed militia became the backbone of the government’s counter-insurgency. Despite official denials, state resources flowed into Darfur, and the Janjaweed were equipped and coordinated as a paramilitary force, with communications gear and even artillery support (from the Sudanese Army).
Between 2003 and 2008, Janjaweed militias carried out crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, widespread rape, and torture in Darfur, killing an estimated 300,000 civilians and displacing about 2.7 million. These atrocities formed the basis for the International Criminal Court’s indictments of Sudan’s then-president, Omar al-Bashir, on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
The Janjaweed evolved into a formidable militia. Despite disarmament efforts, they were reorganized into the RSF, which grew strong enough to rival the national army. In 2023, this culminated in a power struggle between the RSF under Hemeti and the SAF under al-Burhan.
On 28 October, El Fasher—the capital of North Darfur—fell to the RSF, with mass atrocities, destruction, and rape reported. Much coverage filters Sudan through a humanitarian lens that catalogs harm and lists actors but rarely probes motivations or the political economy behind them, dissolving agency into an ethical abstraction.
This article takes a different approach. It examines the material foundations (land, resources, war finance), the ideological narratives (racial hierarchy, center–periphery identity, Islamist/Arabist frames), and human agency—why people joined, stayed, and acted as they did. It also challenges the reduction of Sudan’s crisis to “tribal warfare” or “Arab vs. African,” a framing that has justified excluding Darfur’s Arabs from engagement and has entrenched the very conditions that fuel militia violence.
KABKABIYA, SUDAN – NOVEMBER 21: FILE, Arab militias, a pro government paramilitary group, called „janjaweed“, are responsible for helping the government in the raid of African villages that has left 1.6 million Africans in the Darfur region of Sudan homeless and tens of thousands dead in Kabkabiya, Sudan on November 21, 2004. Refugees like these who have been driven from their lands by militias, could lose their land if a law that allows the government to take over land abandoned for one year. Thousands of Darfurians approach the first anniversary away from their villages many families in the refugee camps are still too scared to go home. (Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The Sudanese state’s “militia strategy” dates back at least to the 1980s under Jaafar Nimeiri and persisted through later regimes. In Darfur, many recruits were drawn from criminal bands and marginalized groups within so-called “Arab” tribes, then organized and armed. These militias also tapped cross-border mercenary networks in Chad and Darfur—some shaped under Gaddafi’s patronage and infused with Arab-supremacist ideas.
The Sudanese government funded and organized the Janjaweed in 2003 (and even before) to counter the Darfur rebellion after the regular army proved ineffective. The government did so despite clear evidence that these militias were committing severe human rights abuses, including forced displacement and widespread land clearance. Entire villages were burned on suspicion of rebel ties.
The British colonial administration had recognized dars (homelands) for most farmer groups in Darfur but left some nomad Arabs reliant on customary use rights—later strained by drought, desertification, and rising inter-communal violence. Some leaders then sought formal land for their people; others accepted promises of money and power, disregarding consequences. Not all Arab constituencies joined the „Janjaweed“; many tried to remain neutral, and a number of leaders refused to participate.
Over time, Janjaweed campaigns shifted land from largely settled farming communities labeled “African” to nomadic groups who, in a modern capitalist sense, were not traditional landholders. This dispossession created a lasting legitimacy problem: living on seized land demands continual force, outside patrons, and a steady flow of weapons to entrench and expand control. From afar, the conflict can appear as an “ethnic civil war,” yet victims included both groups marked as “Arab” and those marked as “African.”
Violence hardened identities: the more coercion was used and justified, the more communal labels were fixed and politicized, turning fluid social boundaries into rigid fronts. In this spiral, violence did not merely follow identity—it helped make it, as coercion and dispossession produced racialized boundaries that were then invoked to justify further violence.
Ethnicity has been manipulated by all sides, and lines have been sharpened by portraying the conflict as a genocidal war against “Africans.” Yet when government steps back and neighbors with long histories of coexistence meet to settle disputes, local politics and material interests outweigh imposed “racial” identities. Conflating „Janjaweed“ with „Arab“ helps perpetuate those narratives that seek to draw the conflict among tribal ethnic lines.
Mohamed Hamdan Daglo (C), known as Hemeti, deputy head of Sudan’s ruling Transitional Military Council (TMC) and commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries, waves a baton to supporters on a vehicle as he arrives for a rally in the village of Abraq, about 60 kilometers northwest of Khartoum, on June 22, 2019. (Photo by Yasuyoshi CHIBA / AFP) (Photo by YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images)
Mirroring the international conflation of “Arab” with “Janjaweed,” the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) signed in Abuja in 2006 left many nomadic “Arab” communities feeling betrayed. It sidelined their concerns and failed to address nomadic land ownership. With land at the core of the conflict, the agreement was seen as disadvantaging nomads and deepening distrust of the government.
The DPA called for disarming the Janjaweed. Yet nomadic groups—the backbone of many militias—have long fought to protect migration routes and, when necessary, force access to pasture and water. Fearing reprisals and lacking credible guarantees of security or land, many concluded that retaining their weapons was essential. At the same time, the Janjaweed had fragmented into multiple, often indistinguishable groups with overlapping interests, leaving the government unable to stop or disarm them.
Frustration among government-aligned militias simmered after 2006 and culminated in late 2007 with the mutiny of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemeti”). Khartoum appeased him to prevent wider defections: Hemeti received a brigadier general’s rank and command, his men were issued military IDs and salaries, and a large cash infusion effectively turned his organization into a capitalist enterprise.
With Hemeti back on side, President Omar al-Bashir moved to reorganize Darfur’s militias under tighter control. In 2013 the government created the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) from the Janjaweed militias and put Hemeti in charge. The RSF was later granted regular-force status (2015) and incorporated as an auxiliary within Sudan’s armed services (2017), positioned in part to protect Bashir against internal coups. While the Janjaweed were renamed as the RSF, their tactics did not change and were used to crush uprisings in Darfur.
After mass protests in 2019, the army removed Bashir. Hemeti did not defend his former patron and acknowledged protesters’ demands as legitimate, but the RSF soon participated in violent repression, including the June 2019 Khartoum sit-in dispersal—echoing methods previously used in Darfur. An uneasy RSF–SAF power-sharing arrangement followed.
That alliance collapsed on April 15, 2023. General al-Burhan cast the RSF as bandits; Hemeti presented himself as pro-democracy. Beyond personal rivalry, the war reflects longer dynamics: the marginalization of Darfur, competition over economic and natural resources, and the state’s long-term use and arming of militias to quash resistance in the peripheries.
This picture shows the shop window of a jewelry store in Dubai on March 10, 2025. Sudan’s gold industry is booming thanks to Emirati financing, but instead of helping end the war, it is fuelling it by enriching both the army and paramilitaries, according to official and NGO data. Demand for the country’s massive gold reserves is „a key factor in prolonging the war,“ Sudanese economist Abdelazim al-Amawy told AFP. (Photo by Giuseppe CACACE / AFP) (Photo by GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP via Getty Images)
Initially intended as Bashir’s loyalists—as his legitimacy waned—the RSF was deployed nationwide under intelligence oversight to deter internal threats. In parallel, it assumed border-enforcement roles within Sudan–EU migration-control frameworks. That role was often opportunistic: units alternated between stopping migrants and trafficking or ransoming them—whichever paid more. Becoming Sudan’s border guard in chief proved an effective cover for smuggling.
The RSF and Hemeti understood that money and resources were the keys to power and loyalty in Sudan’s peripheries. He and his family built a financial empire behind the RSF, leveraging official clout to capture natural resources and state contracts. A turning point came around 2017, when his forces took control of the Jebel Amer gold mines in North Darfur. With Bashir’s approval, Hemeti’s firm gained export rights; soon a large share of Sudan’s gold trade was in RSF hands. Profits funded RSF expansion, enriched the Hemeti clan, and provided financial incentives for further recruitment.
The RSF also delivered geopolitical leverage. By deploying forces to Yemen in support of Saudi Arabia and the UAE—reports cited figures up to 40,000 by 2017—Hemeti secured external patrons. After Bashir’s ouster, Saudi Arabia and the UAE pledged $3 billion to back the army–RSF junta. The partnership extended to Libya, where in 2019 about 1,000 RSF fighters supported Khalifa Haftar’s offensive on Tripoli.
As Hemeti’s prominence grew, so did his business interests, aided by Bashir’s patronage. The family expanded into gold mining, livestock, and infrastructure, creating a revenue base independent of the regular state budget and the Sudanese Armed Forces. This autonomy strengthened the RSF’s bargaining position in Khartoum and in regional dealings.
The RSF also paid better than the army or other militias—a decisive factor amid economic decline after South Sudan’s secession, falling oil revenues, and gold’s rise as a pillar of the economy. For many young men in Darfur and beyond, RSF salaries, access to spoils, and protection networks outweighed scarce alternatives in a shrinking labor market. The scale of RSF-linked gold extraction even helped fuel a surge in gold flows to the UAE, underscoring the force’s economic reach.
As the RSF–SAF war unfolded, external finance remained central. Hemeti had become the UAE’s preferred partner, which sought to expand its regional influence through a proposed $6 billion port-and-agriculture project on the Red Sea coast announced in 2022, with Emirati firms holding a majority profit stake. Such deals fit a broader Gulf strategy along the Red Sea and offered the RSF prospective funding streams outside formal state channels.
As the war has progressed, the RSF has come to resemble the Bashir-era model: minimal pay for fighters and permission to pillage as de facto wages. This is not incidental. Revenue and coalition maintenance depend on the continuous appropriation of public and private resources. Such flows are largely immune to sanctions because they are sourced on the ground. Looting is also organized, not random.
In Wad Medani, the December 2023 raid on the World Food Programme warehouse—stocked to feed 1.5 million people for a month—was not the work of “hungry residents,” as the RSF claimed, but was organized by RSF commanders to provision their troops. Other plunder is more localized but still regulated: new recruits are encouraged to raid homes and villages as a form of payment for their participation in fighting.
RSF soldiers turned traders now sit at the intersection of predation and production. From influential positions, they broker the RSF’s new economic frontiers, taking lucrative cuts to keep goods moving. A reshaped social hierarchy gives the RSF an edge, enabling external alliances through labor and commerce—both as merchants selling to the public and as brokers moving goods to and within markets. Other occupations have been pulled into the same extraction-tied-to-production logic.
Five job types structure the RSF’s labor hierarchy: soldiers, informants, drivers, thieves, and day laborers. Recruits from tribes close to Hemeti sit at the top, serving as field commanders and economic entrepreneurs who manage markets and oversee supply chains.
Members of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries led by General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, also known as Hemeti, deputy head of Sudan’s ruling Transitional Military Council (TMC) and commander of the RSF paramilitaries, stand guard during the General’s meeting with his supporters in the capital Khartoum on June 18, 2019. (Photo by Yasuyoshi CHIBA / AFP) (Photo by YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images)
As the RSF–SAF war unfolded, external finance remained central. Hemeti had emerged as Abu Dhabi’s preferred partner as it sought to expand influence along the Red Sea’s key trade route, via a proposed $6 billion port-and-agriculture project with a majority Emirati profit stake. The deal fits a broader Gulf strategy on the Red Sea and promised off-budget revenue streams for the RSF beyond formal state channels.
Since independence, Sudan’s ruling elites drew on hierarchies that cast “Arab” as civilization and “African” as other. This framing helped justify unequal wealth distribution toward “Arab” elites in Khartoum, even as the country’s major resources lay in non-Arab peripheries—oil largely in what is now South Sudan, gold heavily in Darfur. The state, dominated by northern elites, sidelined Darfur and other provinces, while successive regimes in Khartoum—and allied currents in Libya—circulated Arab-supremacist and Islamist narratives that naturalized center–periphery inequality.
These ideas fed a national identity crisis after British colonialism: who belongs, on what terms, and which regions count as the country’s core. Peace processes—from the Darfur accords to the Juba Agreement—could not undo decades in which violence, marginalization, racialization, and centralizing rule decided who had access to land, protection, and revenue; many in Darfur felt excluded. As violence escalated, identities hardened, turning once-fluid lines between “Arab” and “African” into rigid identities.
Within this landscape, Hemeti and the RSF sought an ideological pivot. They recast themselves not as a militia born of repression but as spokesmen for neglected peripheries. In public statements—“a Sudan that belongs to all Sudanese… from Darfur to Kassala”—Hemeti styled himself a “son of the people,” rooted in the experiences of Darfur, Kordofan, and the East. The message targeted two audiences at once: peripheral communities long dismissed by the center, and external patrons looking for a post-Bashir interlocutor.
In an apparent attempt to echo the Sudanese revolution, the RSF brands itself as its continuation—a pro-democracy, anti-Khartoum-elite force promising to redirect wealth from the center to Darfur’s marginalized. Yet the branding is contradictory: in practice, Hemeti moves to replace Khartoum’s elites with his own clan, offering no program for governance—only extraction and short-term gain.
However, reports suggest that even Hemeti struggles to control the RSF’s Arab militia core. He now resembles Bashir decades earlier: maintaining a fragile coalition of militias with divergent aims that often clash with his own ambitions for a political career. Distinguishing opportunists from true believers is difficult. RSF operations have been largely extractive and looting-driven, with fighters stripping areas of resources and moving the spoils to Darfur or local markets—producing an ebb and flow of fighters at the front as profit opportunities shift.
TOPSHOT – Makeshift shelters erected by displaced Sudanese who fled El-Fasher after the city fell to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), make up the Um Yanqur camp, located on the southwestern edge of Tawila, in war-torn Sudan’s western Darfur region on November 3, 2025. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
This article traced the material and ideological foundations of the Janjaweed, from which the RSF later emerged. One question remains: agency. The Janjaweed and the RSF have been responsible for grave human rights violations for decades—so why do fighters continue to fight for them?
Hemeti built a capitalist empire that rivals Khartoum’s elites and used that wealth to finance the RSF. The loop is straightforward: the RSF secures resources; those resources fund Hemeti’s businesses; profits flow back into the RSF. This explains capacity and endurance but not the core question: how was the violence justified? A gun does not fire itself; roughly 100,000 fighters chose to join and remain. Pay and material benefits matter, but do they justify mass atrocities, rape, and the destruction of civilian life? While Hemeti’s family captured the revenues, most fighters saw them only as salaries, protection, and status—not ownership or control.
As economically profitable as the system created by the RSF is, it creates a political crisis for the RSF. The cost of keeping the RSF together is a sort of infinite expansion—one that is necessary to produce the looted goods and checkpoint taxes that sustain its payment system. This expansion means that the RSF is forever in crisis—always in need of new territory to conquer, and always at risk of its structure falling apart.
Hemeti presents himself and the RSF as champions of the oppressed against corrupt elites in Khartoum, yet the conduct of the war undercuts that claim. He is open about his business ambitions and his ownership of gold mines. After seizing large parts of Khartoum early in the conflict, the RSF left the city in ruins and did not attempt governance—signalling short-term extraction rather than a plan to rule.
To address the opening question of agency, there isn’t one sufficient reason. Affiliation brings privileges and protection that make continued association advantageous; what is taken by force must be held by force, so violence becomes self-perpetuating; violence also forges identities; social and command networks bind recruits to units; an ideology of dehumanisation lowers barriers to harm; and external funding and resource access reduce the need for local consent. Even together, these factors remain unsatisfying given the scale of the atrocities.
These factors may explain how the RSF machinery operates, not why its fighters, commanders, and supporters accept its actions. What could ever make atrocities on this scale understandable?
tadamun 