Ghosts of imperialism’s past, present and future

On August 13, 2020, the United Arab Emirates became the first country in the Arabic-speaking world to normalize ties with Israel in over 20 years. Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan soon followed and signed their own Emirati-brokered normalization agreements in 2020 and 2021. In March 2025, Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to the United States, publicly supported an earlier US President Donald Trump plan to forcibly displace Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Egypt. The UAE justified this position by arguing that Egypt’s proposed plan to rebuild Gaza did not fully address how they would ensure Hamas’ removal from power. 

The UAE makes a similar statement whenever it addresses its role in the counterrevolutionary war in Sudan, especially to account for its patronage of the Rapid Support Forces. These rhetorical gestures are layered onto the competition over the definition of the war in Sudan. The UAE claims that it stands with the Sudanese people in solidarity of their revolution and that its presence in Sudan is limited to its war against the Muslim Brotherhood and its remnants in the Sudanese Armed Forces. And as these ideological lines are pushed, the UAE directly funds the war engine rampaging Sudan. 

Most recently, on August 16, Emirati political analyst Amjad Taha expressed with unusual confidence that Sudan’s “Muslim Brotherhood-led army” was the “Hamas of Africa.” It is no coincidence that Taha has played an important role in pushing the UAE’s normalization with Israel since they signed the Abraham Accords in 2020.  

This parallel marks an important point in the development of the UAE as a regional hegemonic power that is also the regional champion for Israel’s colonial project in Palestine. Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood present an existential threat to the UAE’s ambitions in the region and on the global stage. These groups’ predilection for political transformation at the expense of traditional politics and power players precludes the UAE’s vision for the world, one that has particularly taken shape after the signing of the so-called Abraham Accords. The UAE conjures the boogeyman of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas to invoke the destabilizing effects of counter-hegemonic organizations in the region in the grammar of the liberal imperial order. This buys them authority and legitimacy within it while they fund the suppression of popular movements in Libya, Egypt, Sudan and Palestine, to name only a few. 

Across the two sides of the sea 

The UAE’s long-standing entrapment in Sudan’s political landscapes of violence originates with landgrabbing deals made with Sudanese capitalists from 2008 onwards and the Emirati’s funding of the RSF in the mid 2010s. The UAE hired them as mercenaries for the Saudi-led and Emirati-supported war on Yemen. 

The UAE is so much a part of the world of Sudan’s militarized groups and their mechanisms of control that its investment in gold mines in both RSF and SAF-controlled territories ensure that the UAE is funding both sides of the war. In 2024, the Port Sudan government headed by SAF leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan earned US$1.5 billion from gold sales to the UAE. 

The relationship between the UAE, SAF and RSF in particular encourages us to examine how these groups operate as corporate entities with shared totalitarian aspirations. They work for commercial interests and the maximization of elitist power rooted in the accumulation of commodities and natural resources from and through Sudanese lands. 

The RSF development through the war in Yemen is a part of the same fabric of the parasitic clientele relationships between states and transnational, militarized corporate bodies that have taken hold in the region. France 24 recently released a five-part investigative series that details how the UAE government purchased 50 million euros worth of mortar bombs from Bulgaria and sent them through Libya to Sudan. The International Golden Group, an Emirati company headed by Mohamed Hilal al-Kaabi, the former chief of staff of the headquarters of the Emirati army, smuggled the bombs with UAE-hired Colombian mercenaries recruited by a Dubai-based, former Colombian soldier accused of having links to the cartel. 

SAF funds and is funded by the state that it accused of being complicit in acts of genocide in West Darfur at the International Court of Justice in April 2025. The SAF’s crimes mirror those they decry to the rest of the world, as women in Omdurman have reported that SAF soldiers forced them to have sex in exchange for food. 

At the same time, the RSF and the elites they have captured propagate the myth that the RSF are not an extension of the historical Sudanese metropoles of political power. They claim that the RSF government would act “as the voice, refuge, protector, and servant of all citizens who oppose and have suffered from the continued existence and brutality of the failed Sudanese state” if they were instated in power, even as the RSF induce famine in Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. 

Similarly, in other territories, the Emirati government has been using the Muslim Brotherhood and the other political pariahs of the region to justify its encroachment upon the sovereignty of its politically and fiscally insecure neighbors. 

This has allowed for the exploitation of the Egyptian regime’s infinite and never-ending debt crisis. The UAE has equally exploited President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s ravenous desire to transform Cairo’s urban landscape, revolution-proof the city and alienate Egyptians from the country. Emirati capitalists and state actors invested billions in the Egyptian government’s development of its coastlines along the Mediterranean and red seas and housing compounds across Cairo that serve as a thin sheath for the unfathomable levels of poverty and inequality that subsume Egypt. In return for their buy into Sisi’s vision, the UAE acquired unprecedented control over nearly half of Egypt’s 16 commercial ports through deals that give them usufruct rights over the land for up to 50 years and guarantees that the Egyptian government only receives as little as 15 percent of net profits. In early 2025, the Egyptian government recognized Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, Abu Dhabi Development Holding Company (ADQ) as a “government institution,” and privy to tax exemptions reserved for state institutions.   

In Syria, the context of the “new” order that has emerged in the post-Assad period under President Ahmad al-Sharaa is an important component of the present modes of imperialism taking shape in the region. In the past few months, Sharaa has made significant attempts to coerce the mostly-Druze region of Suwayda into submission, using skirmishes between Bedouin and Druze communities there to justify the government’s control over it. Throughout the Syrian Civil War, the city had primarily retained its autonomy. Sharaa’s Syria, however, requires the intertwined fundamentals for participation in the world system from the areas surrounding Israel, otherwise known as the living, insatiable eastern frontier of the Euro-American settler colonial imagination. These are: the removal of sanctions or other technologies of global economic exclusion, the infusion of Gulf capital in the state, the consolidation of fragmented military power in the central state authority, such as in the case of Suwayda and normalization with Israel, negotiated by the UAE, which is always framed as a political necessity and the key for the economic health of the future, fully-formed states of the global south. 

Across Sisi’s Egypt, post-Assad Syria, and counterrevolutionary Sudan, the pulse of imperialism is alive and well in the heartbeat of the universe. The histories entangled between the creation of the Israeli and Emirati empires reveal how imperialism, in the grammar of the Euro-American nation-building imagination, has sustained itself and developed into a highly sophisticated and precise technology. Israel and the UAE’s respective projects in Palestine and Africa and the broader region share a set of dangerous and universalizing justifications for “progress,” “democracy” and “revolution” that celebrate the technological and political advances they have funded, as well as the destruction these weapons have amassed in their colonies. Their genocidal campaigns go without any material consequence, and their attempts at foreign intervention, resource extraction and land grabbing, are written off as nation-building projects, globalization and development respectively. 

The fundamental difference between the UAE and Israel’s imperial projects lies in the fact that Israel is a settler colony, while the UAE primarily extends its empire through the enmeshment of Emirati capital and technology in the geographic, economic and political systems of rule in Africa. The differences in the ideological foundations of Israel and the UAE’s disposition internally, towards the region, and to their peers in imperial conquest in the West, also reveal how imperialism operates and moves through time as a historical force. 

The UAE directly benefits from the excesses of authority that emerge from its simultaneous co-optation into the Western imperial project and the assembly of its own imperial enterprise. 

The corporate relationships that make up the UAE’s global apparatuses for power and resource extraction are covert, efficient, and work to strengthen Israel’s grip over its empire in the region. This is how the political violence that emerges from the global inequalities of capitalist domination transmutes over time. A broader set of elite actors are brought into the fold of capitalist and colonial expansion, which naturally creates a highly concentrated environment of opportunistic actors whose interests are constantly shaped and reshaped by the violent political worlds they inhabit. As Husam Mahjoub argues, the UAE has taken up the role of the sub-imperial state that both mediates the global economy’s extraction of resources from Sudan and other African regions and legitimizes the histories, institutions and principles that are the foundation of the modern world and its roots in settler colonialism. This essay builds upon Mahjoub’s work. 

From the UAE’s economic agreements with Sudanese capitalists and their hire of RSF mercenaries, and continuing into the signing of the Abraham Accords and well into the present day, the implications of the global elements of counterrevolutionary Sudan’s history contributes to our understanding of the history of imperialism and its inherently transnational geographies. The Israeli and Emirati empires are simultaneously constructed through the investments of warlord capitalists, corporations, the counterrevolutionary elite and authoritarian states in the region that use their imperial patronage to defy local groups’ sovereignty and reinforce their hold over power. 

The particularities of this moment as seen from the vantage point of Sudan reveals the material bonds, distinctions and contradictions between Israel and the UAE s’ respective colonial projects in Palestine and in Sudan. 

Normalization and the new imperial order 

The global acceptance of Israel not only legitimizes the Zionist ethnostate but the other failed experiments of Euro-American statecraft as tenable geographies. Israel represents one of the final frontiers of the old world of settler nation-states. In the vein of this world, Israel is made through death and destruction. Haunted by its own fragility, it has not successfully steered its nation-building project through the dialectic movement of history — the push and pull of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces that make up the worlds carried by the pendulum swing of change and the possibilities that emerge from it over time. Israel disguises modern Zionism’s gluttony through the reproduction of an outdated, explicit and universalist language about white racial entitlement to violence. It refuses to even acknowledge the contradictions inherent to itself or attempt to subsume the history of the terrorism it has unleashed on Palestinians in a modern liberal fiction. The Zionist entity’s genocidal impulses lay bare for the world to see. 

The defenders of Israel are limited to the explicit supporters of genocide and displacement who use Israel to stake their authority over the region. In return for normalization, countries of the global south are granted entry into the arena of legitimate global actors. In 1979, normalization with Israel allowed Egypt to launch a bid for entry into the world economy of privatization, international debt schemes, neoliberalization and US military aid. In 1994, it gave Jordan water and natural gas from Israel, and in 2020, it established the United States’ recognition over Morocco’s illegal claim to Western Sahara. For the signing of the Abraham Accords, the UAE’s status as a major power broker, one that could interlope Western imperial interests with those of their own, was cemented. The UAE used the accords to strong-arm other countries in the region to act in line with Western imperial goals and develop more authoritarian technologies of control that could be dispersed throughout the region. 

The UAE is an empire, sanctioned by the fables of Western liberalism, that survives by creating constellations of counterrevolutionary power spread across the region and supported by global capital. Its investment in Euro-American imperial worldmaking schemes formally began with their involvement in the Saudi-led coalition against the Houthis in Yemen and in their suppression of revolutionary movements in the Arab world from 2011 onwards. The war, famine and genocide in Yemen led to the largest humanitarian crisis in the world in 2020 and resulted in the UAE’s repeated occupation of the Yemeni island of Socotra. Sudanese mercenaries, made up of workers from the excesses of militarized labor in Darfur, formed the majority of soldiers on the ground for the Saudi government at an estimated 4000, many of whom were children. 

In 2020, Mohammed bin Zayed, the president of the UAE, brokered the agreement that entitled Sudan’s transitional government to debt clearance and its removal from the United States’ sponsors of terrorism list, pending its normalization with Israel and its embargo on Hamas assets in Sudan. The deal also required that Sudan pay the US a $335 million settlement for the victims of the August 7, 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Dar al-Salaam and Nairobi. The US attributed the attack to Osama bin Laden, who had been living in Sudan at the time. Naturally, the lawsuit omits any record of the Bill Clinton administration’s bombing of Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Bahri, a suburb of northern Khartoum, on August 20, 1998. The factory produced 90 percent of all medicines in Sudan and its destruction forever weakened Sudan’s medical infrastructure. The fact that this agreement and this humiliation of Sudan and Sudanese people on the world stage was baked into Sudan’s signing of the Abraham Accords is not a coincidence, but indicative of the spoils and the consequences of the regional buy-into the Zionist project. 

On May 13, 2025, Trump remarked that it was the governments of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, rather than the “so called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits” of the West, who would build up the modern region. He summarized their role with a barrage of cliches, claiming that it was one that would ensure: “commerce, not chaos, and technology, not terrorism.” He noted that the signing of the Abraham Accords, the expansion of personal freedoms in Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states’ increasing responsibilities on the world stage marked important shifts in the region. 

Trump’s speech and this critical juncture of imperial history is a result of the US and Europe’s respective wars on terror and migration’s collective decimation around the world. The past decades of Western imperialism have revealed the dwindling hold it has over the contradictions of liberal democracy. The responsibility of managing these paradoxes is now being offloaded, in part, to nascent empires such as that of the UAE. This is not only evidenced by Trump’s speech in Riyadh but by global intellectual, academic, cultural and financial institutions and elites that have given consensus to UAE-government funded projects through their investment and legitimization despite the UAE’s innumerable human rights abuses against workers and political dissidents. The whitewashing of the UAE’s crimes with the thin sheath of liberalization has only enabled the UAE’s authoritarian aspirations. 

Trump’s speech also indicates how normalization, legitimization and cooperation with the Israeli state continues to signify the marker of modernity necessary for participation in the dominant world order, and how it remains a critical tool for the viability of the Zionist project. To the Euro-American world, normalization connotes a willingness to participate in a world where Israel and the global institutions built in the vision of Euro-America are regarded as legitimate political actors, without question. Israel is unique to other settler colonies in its desperation for global consensus, which it actively strongarms through normalization. Nonetheless, more established settler colonies are also dependent upon the survival of the Zionist project. If the Zionist experiment were to reach complete failure — if it was no longer an ethnonationalist state, if Palestinians were given the right to return to their land — it would put into question the existence of every painfully birthed nation-state, and any state that enforces its borders with violence. The evidence is in the funding Israel’s biggest sponsors continue to feed it. Listed in order, the five largest suppliers of military aid to Israel are the US, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada and India. They keep the project of Israel alive to preserve their own claims over the spoils of genocide and state-sanctioned violence. 

Empire is a corporation

The UAE’s global reach is materially sustained by the absolute breadth of the country’s public and private commercial enterprises. Over the past decade, the UAE has cemented itself as a major player in the present world order through its investments in energy, agricultural schemes, agritech, food security, digital technologies (namely AI), infrastructure, gold and other minerals, carbon offsets and digital currencies. After the US and China, the UAE has the third highest assets across all of its sovereign wealth funds at $2.49 trillion. Its sovereign wealth funds have made colossal investments in agricultural goods, technologies and development properties in the region, becoming a serious threat to the sovereignty of indigenous communities and nation-states. These projects not only extend the state’s reach into these countries but allow companies in the UAE to function as an alternative institution for global trade. 

Since the sanctions placed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine and the recent destabilization of US dollar hegemony, the UAE’s investments in gold have become all the more lucrative. Gold is the UAE’s key investment in Sudan and the sustenance of their relationship to the RSF, and is key to its evolution into a superpower with universal authority over global trading infrastructures and a monopoly over the terms and conditions of the world economy. The price of gold per gram has increased by 757.23 percent over the course of the last 20 years, and gold is now the world’s second-largest reserve asset. The Emirati conquest of Sudan’s goldmines has destroyed the fabric of the entire country. At the rate that gold prices are increasing, this plunder and devastation will return to them in dividends. 

In Africa, by the end of 2024, the UAE was the biggest backer of new business projects, which largely invested in renewable energy and other alternatives to fossil fuels. The UAE’s acquisition of land in Africa has sealed its role as a key economic space where carbon is commodified, speculated upon and bought and sold to worldwide polluters. Its involvement in global carbon washing schemes is reminiscent of a Ponzi scheme: in 2023, a company associated with the Maktoum ruling family of Dubai known as Blue Carbon purchased a land mass that is equivalent to the size of the United Kingdom in Liberia, Zambia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Prior to this purchase, Blue Carbon had no experience in carbon offset. The UAE uses companies like Blue Carbon to launder carbon and greenwash its national companies’ emissions, a natural consequence of these corporate bodies’ growth and unbridled expansion. 

Further, the UAE’s imperial hold moves along the flowing waters, as the state's investment in the logistics of the global maritime trade facilitates the movement of foodstuffs and livestock from lands leased by both public and private corporations that are usually linked to one of the royal families in the UAE and/or the state’s foreign policy agenda. Moonlighting as modern-day versions of the East India Company, Abu Dhabi Ports Group and Dubai Ports World are the UAE’s most lethal arm in the global war economy and counterrevolution in Africa. They have been essential to the UAE’s unchecked growth. Abu Dhabi Developmental Holding Company, the fourth largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, owns AD Ports Group, and the Emirate of Dubai owns DP World. Together, these companies are operating or developing more than 22 ports in Africa. In June 2024, DP World announced it would invest over $3 billion to develop ports in Africa. The company’s reach already includes 13 ports in Egypt, Tanzania, Somalia, Djibouti, Rwanda, Congo, Mozambique, Angola, Senegal and Algeria. As of January 2025, AD Ports Group holds rights over nine ports in Egypt, Congo and Guinea, and contracts to build and operate the proposed Port of Abu Amama in Sudan, manage the Pointe Noire Port in Congo and renovate the Port of Luanda in Angola. 

The global counterrevolution 

In order to guard these assets, the UAE has played a direct role in counterrevolutionary interventions in Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya, Egypt and Chad. UAE-sponsored authoritarian regimes guarantee the government and its institutions access to African land and seaports in exchange for weapons, surveillance technologies, coup-proofing mechanisms and debt. The UAE thereby exists as a powerbroker state sympathetic to authoritarian regimes that have been excluded from the global marketplace. Its strategy over the past decade has sent authoritarian states in the global south the clear and pointed message that mastery over liberal norms and standards for statehood are no longer a requirement for entry into the dominant world political-economic system of elite capture and capital accumulation. 

These states allow the UAE to encroach upon the rights of indigenous peoples and local farmers, dump the consequences of climate change on the African continent, and directly fund militarized groups that harm civilians. All of this guarantees the UAE’s continued ability to secure its wealth in Africa. As such, we have seen local geographies that are made up of an expansive war economy and layered institutions of violence. This is how the UAE is ripping out a page out of the playbook of 19th-century imperialism. It deliberately under-develops and exploits Africa and Africans and empowers authoritarian regimes in the region that enable its worldwide profiteering.

And while the UAE develops its own brand of imperialism, it is important to understand it as part of a broader historical continuum with intersecting pasts. We can compare Frantz Fanon’s depiction of the African nationalist middle class to the elites of today. They were postcolonial elites who reaped from the spoils of imperial systems of rule that were in the midst of reconfiguration to lay their claims over power. The difference between now and then lies in the possibilities offered to those elites. The complete monopolization over the nation-state and its productive industries was once the glass ceiling for rule. Today, international corporations with ties to the Emirati government directly interfere in local affairs with military technologies and strategies to build the UAE’s borderless empire.

Sudan is a case in point. The post-1989 postcolonial Sudanese state was ripe for global seizure. Bashir’s neoliberal economic policies encouraged the development of quasi-state military forces in the 1990s that worked to maintain the violent political equilibrium to regulate the export of oil, agriculture, livestock and gold, and ensure the government’s access to foreign exchange currency. These militia forces oversaw site security at oilfields as well as the harvest season and safeguarded the herds that were exported to markets in Libya and Egypt. Through the control of the commodity and revenue flows of oil, agriculture, livestock and gold, SAF-patroned militia forces cultivated consensus for Bashir’s rule amongst the urban elite. They ensured that food insecurity and other forms of state-engineered violence impacted rural people the most and maintained the appetite of the urban classes. 

With the secession of South Sudan in 2011, Sudan’s oil revenues plummeted, and gold became the new primary source of revenue for the state. Unlike the other commodities, gold requires that security actors that facilitate their trade or extraction become directly involved in gold’s mode of production, given the vast number of laborers involved and the disparate locations for mining. The SAF and their semi-independent paramilitary forces controlled mining by creating private companies and engaging with foreign investors, the most notable of them being Russia’s Wagner Group and the UAE. 

Like the state and its paramilitary arms (former and present), the Sudanese bourgeois class has historically aligned itself with the interests and demands of international capitalists. These elites put their faith in regional imperial actors such as the UAE, whose acquiescence to the Euro-American world ensures its ability to generate wealth and power for its patrons across the region. On August 19, 2025, the former minister of justice of Sudan between 2019-2022 and current RSF-supporter, Nasredeen Abdulbari, wrote an op-ed for Atlantic Council that argued that Israel should not rest its faith in the possibility of a democratic Sudan in the Port Sudan military government, but in the RSF. Abdulbari claimed that they are the only viable option to overthrow the illegitimate rule of SAF, who, according to him, were part of the same network that “once hosted Osama bin Laden and built strong ties with Tehran." Abdulbari is Harvard-educated and was lauded for his liberal approach to women’s rights and other marginalized groups in Sudan. He is ethnically Fur, so his inclusion in the government was celebrated amongst the liberal Sudanese disposition as a political miracle that could guarantee “freedom, peace, and justice” in Sudan without them having to concede anything more than the representation of historically marginalized groups in the government. Abdulbari repealed the Public Order Laws that had long terrorized women in Sudan, but Abdallah Hamdok’s government was ultimately constrained by the military’s stubborn hold over Sudan and was unable to transform the central infrastructures of power. 

The SAF, RSF and this counterrevolutionary war are a direct product of this Frankenstein-like amalgamation of a state and the excess of historical violence in Sudan. Through Gulf-funded economic infrastructures, this transnational plundering scheme persists even in the devastation of war. Namely, the trade of livestock and gold has increased in droves since April 15, 2023. The Saudi General Authority for Statistics reported a 77.4 percent increase in Sudan’s exports of livestock to Saudi Arabia between 2022 and 2023. In 2024, army-controlled areas in Sudan exported 64 tonnes of gold, an increase from 23.2 tonnes in 2023 and 41.8 tonnes in 2022. Only 23 out of the 64 tonnes of gold exported in 2024, however, were legally reported. Over $4 billion worth of gold was purchased and transported through RSF and SAF-operated shadow networks. 96.8 percent of the officially reported export of gold was sent from army-controlled areas to the UAE.

At this point in the war however, we can no longer interpret these historical moments as an inevitability of the military state. It is our responsibility to excavate the pathways to political and economic opportunism in Sudan, and address where elite capture ferments amongst us. We must analyze how elite actors coalesce around ideas that seemingly contradict their ideological position and guarantee their material gain. In many ways, these counterrevolutionary elites follow Sudanese businessmen’s longstanding trade of Sudanese sovereignty for the development of their own empires through Gulf capital. In 2022, Abu Dhabi Ports Group and DAL Group, Sudan’s largest conglomerate, signed a $4 billion deal to create a free trade zone between Port Sudan and Abu Dhabi, develop a new Red Sea port and facilitate the Abu Dhabi-backed International Holding Company’s lease of 400,000 acres of land in Abu Hamad, Sudan. The deal was signed less than a year after the SAF and RSF-led coup of Sudan’s transitional government on October 25, 2021. Partnerships between the military state, the business elite and the co-opted revolutionary forces such as Soumoud or the Civil Democratic Alliance of the Revolutionary Forces, one of many offshoots of Taqaddum or the Coordination for Civil and Democratic Forces coalition, predate the war. While the Sudanese people publicly rejected any cooperation with the military and asserted that the military be limited to the barracks and that the RSF be dismantled, these groups and their predecessors continued to cut deals with the military and its militias even after the massacre of June 3, 2019 and the October 25, 2021 coup. The counterrevolutionary elite signed these agreements only weeks after both disasters had occurred at the hands of the bloated Sudanese military state. 

Even before the war, civilian coalitions fractured along lines that demarcate the warring parties’ claims over the control of the Sudanese state. They too have become one of the many vultures that encircle the destruction that has amassed in Sudan. 

The counterrevolution is also an implication of the austerity measures implemented in the latter half of Bashir’s reign of horror between 1989 and 2019. These policies accelerated the privatization of state function and militarized power. The military hired rural militias to reorganize authority in the state’s rural peripheries and create and sustain a violent mode of production to extract resources and satisfy global demand. Bashir in particular harnessed this violence to incorporate militarized groups that rebelled against the state. He pit them against other securitized parastate arms of governance, and ultimately enmeshed these groups in a patronage system that orbited around the central Sudanese military body. This fragile balance collapsed with the December 2018 revolution. 

The UAE sows and reaps from the seeds of discord, authoritarianism and dispossession between Sudan and Palestine. Its rise is a result of its signing of the Abraham Accords and its participation in Euro-American restructurings of the Arab world. This position has given the UAE the political purchase necessary to build its own commercial and political empire despite the obvious calamitous consequences associated with it. This unique position that the UAE occupies illustrates how the death of the settler colonial world — the ultimate collapse of its fallacies — occurs at the expense of Palestine and Palestinian life and simultaneously inculcates the economic and political worlds of violence that drive the counterrevolutionary war in Sudan in the UAE’s interest. These geographies are the harbingers of the new world struggling to be born. This is, indeed, a time of monsters.