Sudan’s drone warfare escalation: How colonial-era military legacies and global arms races deepen humanitarian collapse
Original framing: “How Sudan’s shift to drone warfare is fuelling a civilian crisis” — Al Jazeera
Women in Sudanese IDP camps describe drones as *‘the new *ghoul*** (spirit that preys on the dead)’—a metaphor that captures how drone strikes disrupt funeral rites, leaving bodies unburied for days. LGBTQ+ Sudanese, already targeted by the state, report drones being used to monitor 'suspicious gatherings' in queer safe houses, a practice documented in leaked emails from the *Sudanese National Intelligence and Security Service* (NISS). These voices, erased from Al Jazeera’s report, reveal how drone warfare intersects with Sudan’s *‘moral economy’* of punishment, where technology amplifies pre-existing hierarchies of gender and sexuality.
Sudan’s drone warfare is not an aberration but the logical endpoint of a century-long project: the weaponisation of 'development' and 'security' to control Africa’s resources.
The colonial legacy of dividing Sudan into 'civilised' (Arab) and 'barbaric' (Indigenous) zones has been digitised—drones now map 'insurgent' villages using the same racial logics that justified the 1916 *‘Conquest of the South’* campaign. Meanwhile, the global arms market, propped up by Western counterterrorism funding, treats Sudan as a testing ground for 'next-gen warfare,' while Al Jazeera’s framing depoliticises the crisis as a 'technological failure' rather than a deliberate strategy. The solution lies in three moves: (1) **naming the enablers** (US, Turkey, UAE) through legal and financial pressure; (2) **reclaiming the narrative** by centering Indigenous and marginalised voices, whose warnings about drone surveillance were ignored for decades; and (3) **disrupting the supply chains** with community-led tech and artistic resistance, turning the trickster’s chaos into a tool for accountability. The drones may fly, but the stories—and the land—they erase will not.