Rule by Militia: Minnesota by way of Nyala

This piece was published in the inaugural edition of the journal Zawaya, April 2026.

نشرت هذه الكلمة في العدد الافتتاحي من مجلة زوايا، أبريل ٢٠٢٦، وصيغتها العربية كذلك من ترجمة نجلاء عثمان التوم. 

The ongoing war in Sudan has earned the epithet of the ‘world’s largest humanitarian crisis’ in the language of United Nations (U.N.) agencies. Quantification of a war with such a superlative might draw sympathetic attention but leaves much to say about its meaning, an absence that is often occupied by the term ‘senseless’, as if observers are simply encourages to throw their arms up in the air and gasp at the inexplicability of the tragedy at hand. 

Two aspects of the war in Sudan are often singled out as particularly resistant to explanation: the fact that it is a war between the national army and a militia to which it once under presidential orders outsourced its counter-insurgency operations, border management functions and deployments on foreign soil; and the rampant sexual violence directed against women. 

Both aspects have invited considerable introspection into the particularities of Sudan’s human and political geography, social and cultural bents, and political upheavals, some insightful and many circular rotating around essentialist conceptions of ethnicity and gender. Two parallel developments on the global stage might however help reposition Sudan’s war within a global ecosystem of violence where it is not an incidental local misnomer that invites gasps but a peripheral premonitory manifestation of history writ large, the history of the world. While this is an ambitious claim to make it is no more ambitious that the ‘world’s largest humanitarian crisis’. 

The Economist asked its readers in an exasperated tone with reference to the U.S. Office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) in its 31^st January 2026 issue whether the U.S. President is “building his own paramilitary militia?” and answered in the affirmative of potentiality: “The most disturbing possibility is that the president is creating a militia which answers only to himself.” 

The same U.S. president makes frequent appearances in what is now officially the ‘Epstein library’, a wealth of communications and records between sex offender and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and a global elite of powerful men and women recently disclosed by the U.S. Justice Department. A cursory conclusion of the Epstein library is that at the heart of the liberal notion of women emancipation paraded by the Western elite as a model for the entire world lies in concrete terms the obscene pleasure of the sexual consumption of teenage female bodies at will in clandestine zones of privilege and power beyond good and evil, more or less as an excess ornamentation of lavish dinner parties, networking events, business deals and political alliance building. 

Now, the U.S. rendition of the militia form and the epidemic peacetime sexual violence against women in the highest circles of power throw into sharp relief the limitations of a purely localised explanation of the wartime tragedies of Sudan in terms of ethnic and cultural particularities. The term ‘senseless’ seems more appropriate when applied to the specific form of militia and sexual violence in the U.S. democracy stripped of the obfuscations of ‘tribal’ rivalries and rabid masculinity in an African periphery. The following is a brief outline of first of these two aspects, the U.S. president’s very own milita. 

Masked agents of I.C.E. shot dead on 24 January 2026 a 37 years’ old man in Minnesota believed to be a U.S. citizen, the second killing by federal agents in the town within three weeks. Thirty two other people died in custody of the I.C.E. in the year 2025. 

The fatal force, known as ‘la migra’, was founded in 2003 at the height of the U.S. “war on terror” with the aim of swiftly detaining and deporting individuals, at the time mostly Muslim Arab and South Asian men, deemed a threat to U.S. national security. The I.C.E. came into being as an operational arm of the Department of Homeland Security established in 2002 in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks as one of 16 agencies including the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.), the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Secret Service.

The lethality of the I.C.E. is partially grounded in law and feeds off a chain of contradictions in U.S. society. President Trump signed on 29 January 2025, weeks into his second term, the Liken Riley Act which stipulates that agents of the DHS  “must detain an individual who (1) is unlawfully present in the United States or did not possess the necessary documents when applying for admission; and (2) has been charged with, arrested for, convicted of, or admits to having committed acts that constitute the essential elements of burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting.” 

Translated into action the DHS boasted of deporting 675,000 “illegal aliens” in 2025 claiming further another estimated 2.2 million have self-deported. During the first year of President Trump’s rule the I.C.E. reported arresting 43,305 potential national security risks, 1,416 known or suspected terrorists, deporting another 1,392 known or suspected terrorists and arresting another 7,000 alleged gang members. A record number of some 70,000 individuals are being held in partially immigration detention centres, many run by private sub-contractors in what is effectively a service industry of detention and incarceration. 

This empowerment comes about thanks to generous funding from President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. Together the C.B.P. and the I.C.E. are today the largest policing agency in the U.S. with 30 billion U.S. dollars in funding for direct operations and another 170 billion U.S. dollars for further expansion over the coming four years. Politically, the I.C.E. onslaught is the attempt to realise a fantasy of right-wing politics in the U.S., constructing a nativist majority through cleansing the nation of aliens and intruders. This, it might be argued, is an electoral necessity of the Make America Great Again (M.A.G.A.) coalition, its means of renewing itself. 

The basic elements of the I.C.E. operation are American in form; the outcome of a steady but firm rightwards reorientation of working  class interests and ideological motifs in a highly industrialised social order from the Keynesian redistribution formulae born out of the post-World War II consensus to individualist non-class based but nevertheless economically determined strategies of racial exclusion and antiimmigration on the background of the long downturn of industrial production since the 1970s (Riley, D., & Brenner, R. (2025). The Long Downturn and its Political Results. New Left Review, (155), 25-70). What is essentially a crisis of the productive base of the social order is ideologically reprojected as a distribution crisis between racial factions of the working class, a crisis of race. The politics of race, in many ways a psychoanalytic category, are hard to map into a constitutional order premised on citizenship, as flawed as it might be. 

Indeed, the violence necessary to enforce a new hierarchy of worth, a strict pecking order under conditions of scarcity, explode the constraints of any constitutional order in the recognisable sense of the term. The consequence is the emergence of creatures like the I.C.E. designed, recruited and equipped to mete out such violence with the objective of enforcing a new rationality of law and order. Particularly so where the established forces of state violence fall short out of established rules of engagement wedded to the constitutional order or the semblance of one, social composition of these forces, deficits in political loyalty to emerging winners of political power and authors of the law, and inertia. 

But what are these elemental features of the I.C.E. and similar formations? In brief, the outsourcing of militarised policing functions by political fiat to formations recruited from the vast pool of an expendable unemployed and effectively unemployable surplus labour force invested with a supremacist ideology of racial difference and grievance popularised through the figure of a princely saviour, a superhuman of sorts who embodies the promise of “clearing the swamp”, overcoming history as it were, and delivering a new era of prosperity for his flock come what may.  

Similar elements can be recognised outside the U.S. metropole in human geographies that overlap with critical nodes of the capitalist world system and where a restructuring of the social order by whatever means is necessary to guarantee the prompt delivery of returns. Evidently, where interests cross national borders so do militia formations, epitomising in spirals of cross border and transcontinental violence the globalisation that underwrites and equally threatens the state-based order as we know it, whereby the balance of stabilisation and threat is unequally distributed fanning out from the stable centres of financial capital to the failed peripheries of extractive resources. Interestingly, the I.C.E. born, raised and operative within the U.S. metropole is the exception that proves the rule. 

Indeed, a generic pattern with a global remit emerges whether in inner town Minnesota, the border regions of Fortress Europe, the coastal zones of the Red Sea, Palestine, the flatland of Gezira between the Niles, the fertile crescent, the Donbas, the plains of Kordofan and Darfur, or even in Alberta, Quebec or Greenland. Where contradictions within national formations fail to deliver the necessary allies, some are manufactured ad hoc or policing operations, their meaning plastically extended as an euphemism for high-tech military onslaughts, pierce as far as presidential chambers tucked in military garrisons to pluck a Maduro and his wife. 

In that sense, Nyala, the capital of the Rapid Support Forces (R.S.F.) proto-state, is not a surprising outlier; and self-incriminating introspection into the failings of the post-colonial state in Sudan might be informative but does satisfactory address what in essence is a local manifestation of a global scramble for the reordering of human geographies to match the requirements of a renewed drive for primitive accumulation  under conditions of an epochal slack in industrial productivity. Rosa Luxemburg would have recognised these patters under her general law of primitive accumulation as a permanent requisite of capitalist accumulation, a notion she dared even challenge Karl Marx with its salience. Marx, albeit not the natural optimist, generally understood primitive accumulation as an incidental feature of the capitalist mode of production, and its wrenching violence a travesty of the genesis of capitalism. 

The lady contravened: "Capital needs the means of production and the labour power of the whole globe for untrammelled accumulation; it cannot manage without the natural resources and the labour power of all territories. Seeing that the overwhelming majority of resources and labour power is in fact still in the orbit of pre-capitalist production – this being the historical milieu of accumulation – capital must go all out to obtain ascendancy over these territories and social organizations. There is no a priori reason why rubber plantations, say, run on capitalist lines, such as have been laid out in India, might not serve the ends of capitalist production just as well. Yet if the countries of those branches of production are predominantly non-capitalist, capital will endeavour to establish domination over these countries and societies. And in fact, primitive conditions allow of a greater drive and of far more ruthless measures than could be tolerated under purely capitalist social conditions… Whatever the theoretical aspects, the accumulation of capital as an historical process, depends in every respect upon non-capitalist social strata and forms of social organisation" (Luxemburg, R. (2015). The Accumulation of Capital. Routledge, p. 345-346).

As a possible rejoinder to Luxemburg, capital indeed needs the means of production of the whole globe but a fragment of the labour power, the surplus of which is housed in two departments of Homo sacer, the displaced and the militiaman.