Land, Gendered Labor, and Empire‐Making in Central Sudan

ABSTRACT This article offers an ethnographic analysis of Gulf Arab empire‐making in central Sudan, focusing on an Emirati‐owned farm in the Gezira region as a key site of capitalist extraction and imperial ambition. Through three overlapping vantage points—farm, port, and body—it explores how Emirati investments in Sudanese land, infrastructure, and labor reflect an emergent imperial formation that is ideological, racialized, and gendered. Drawing on multiscalar methodologies, it reveals how processes of concealment, control, and coercion operate across spatial and intimate domains, facilitated by domestic elites and obscured by discourses of Muslim solidarity and development. The article argues that examining emergent imperial formations through ethnography—formations that are continuously unsettled by different forms of resistance—allows us to better recognize sub‐imperial and imperial power in its increasingly diffuse and concealed forms, while deepening our understanding of the organizing and collective practices that threaten to destabilize this power.