Loot as Livelihood: Why the RSF Cannot Govern, and Why Its Alleged Government Will Fragment

By Mohamed Osman Akasha, PhD

International Security and Diplomacy

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia is often analysed as a military actor seeking political legitimacy and eventual statehood. This framing obscures a more
fundamental reality: the RSF militia is sustained not by governance, taxation, or institutions, but by looting. Its commanders and fighters survive primarily through the pillage of cities and towns they capture. This political economy of predation makes durable territorial control impossible and ensures that, absent continued expansion, the RSF militia will fragment rather than consolidate.

For most RSF militia combatants, war is not a salaried service but an extractive enterprise. Fighters are compensated through unrestricted access to civilian property, homes, vehicles, cash, markets, and warehouses, while commanders substitute permissive criminality for logistics and payroll. Looting is not a breakdown of discipline within the RSF militia; it is the system itself.

Yet looting is inherently self-defeating. Cities can be stripped only once. As populations flee and assets are exhausted, the RSF’s primary economic base erodes. When this occurs, cohesion collapses. Fighters desert or defect, commanders turn inward, and violence shifts from outward conquest to internal competition.

This dynamic renders a frozen conflict particularly dangerous. If front lines harden and territorial expansion stalls, the RSF’s militia economic model ceases to function. Without new cities to pillage, commanders will compete over shrinking resources. Units will become increasingly autonomous, operating checkpoints, protection rackets, kidnapping networks, and extortion schemes. The RSF militia will not stabilise; it will splinter into armed fiefdoms.

This outcome is not hypothetical. It reflects a well-documented historical pattern among armed militias that rely on criminal extraction rather than institutional finance. In such systems, loyalty flows to those who can deliver immediate material survival, not to distant leadership structures. Over time, central command becomes nominal, violence localised, and authority fragmented.

Against this backdrop, the emergence of an illegal authority sometimes referred to as the “Tasis government” should be understood not as state-building but as political theatre. The entity lacks the core economic foundations of governance: it has no viable taxation system, no productive economy, and no administrative capacity capable of sustaining civilian life across territory.

Its survival instead rests on two narrow and unstable pillars: external financial support, most notably from the United Arab Emirates, and revenues from illicit gold mining. Neither can substitute for a domestic fiscal base. External funding is contingent and politically reversible; illicit gold extraction is volatile, contested, and captured by commanders rather than institutions. Both reinforce militarisation rather than governance.

As looting revenues decline and gold income fragments, the Tasis authority will be unable to enforce decisions, arbitrate disputes, or maintain unity among militia actors. Real power will reside not in any central structure, but in local commanders who control violence and access to resources. Governance will give way to coercion, and coercion will give way to fragmentation.

For international policymakers, the implications are clear. Any strategy that assumes the RSF militia can transition into a stable governing authority fundamentally misunderstands its political economy. Recognising RSF-controlled territories or freezing the conflict along current lines would not produce order; it would entrench criminality and accelerate warlordisation. Truce proposals that ignore this reality risk cementing instability rather than resolving it.

The RSF is not built to govern; it is built to extract. Its authority expands through motion and collapses under stasis. As cities are exhausted and expansion stalls, fragmentation among this genocidal militia is not a risk, it is the inevitable outcome. For Sudan and its neighbours, the danger is not the emergence of an RSF state, but the proliferation of armed criminal enclaves whose violence will not remain confined within borders.