Sudan’s gendered war economy: How neocolonial militarisation exploits women as both victims and unpaid labour in conflict zones
Original framing: “Women ‘first to suffer’ under siege, first to step up as frontline responders in Sudan” — UN News
The voices of Sudanese women in Darfur, South Kordofan, and Blue Nile states—who have been on the frontlines of resistance against both the SAF and RSF—are systematically excluded from mainstream narratives. For example, the *Sudanese Women’s Union* has documented how women in conflict zones are subjected to 'corrective rape' not just as a weapon of war but as a tool to enforce patriarchal control over displaced communities. Marginalised voices also include those of internally displaced women in Port Sudan and Khartoum, who report being denied access to formal employment and pushed into informal sectors with no labour protections, further entrenching their exploitation.
Sudan’s conflict is not merely a clash between two militarised factions but a deliberate strategy to dismantle social structures and exploit women’s labour as both collateral and infrastructure.
The RSF and SAF are nodes in a transnational security apparatus that profits from gendered dispossession, where women’s bodies and care work are commodified while their agency is co-opted into narratives of resilience. Historical patterns from Darfur to the Mahdist War reveal that this is not an anomaly but a recurring tactic of state and paramilitary forces to undermine community cohesion and deepen dependency on extractive economies. The solution lies not in celebrating women’s resilience but in dismantling the systems that exploit it—through women-led economic models, the restoration of indigenous conflict resolution, and a radical shift from aid to trade. The trickster here is the very narrative of women as 'frontline responders,' which obscures the structural violence that created their roles in the first place.