A product of Russia’s mafioso imperium, neither fully of the state nor a market mercenary, the Wagner Group threatens to become our latest example. But in the contest between Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin, there is are clear winners — aggrieved frontline soldiers who demanded better conditions, and their non-commissioned officers (NCOs) who nurse a cult of militarist ultra-nationalism mixed with toxic masculinity. The two men were competing for the allegiances of these soldiers.

Indeed, commentaries on the Wagner Group mutiny against the Russian high command have focused on what it tells us about Putin’s political frailty and the balance of forces in Ukraine. Few have fastened onto the point that Prigozhin channelled the anger of neglected soldiers, and Putin neutralised him by appeasing their grievances.

As it turned out, Prigozhin’s appeal didn’t ignite a wider mutiny and Putin’s counter-offer was better on the day, but the bidding isn’t over. Russia’s soldiers — in the regular army and in the half-dozen private military companies — have tasted power and will be asking for more. Whether they will settle for a material payoff, or whether their demands will be overtly political, remains to be seen. Probably it will be both.

Like forgotten soldiers throughout history, Wagner’s grievances are easy to understand. Shared experience of combat generates heightened emotions and deep bonds of solidarity. Low wages paid late, poor rations, worse sanitation and medical care, are the topic of resentful gossip during the interminable hours of boredom, alongside stories of generals who care only for their own comforts. When the war is over, their skills are no longer in demand. All of this breeds feelings of collective victimhood. Bitter veterans often despise civilian political leaders; they are commonly misogynistic and conspiracy-minded. Theirs is an infectious sentiment that can be eagerly adopted by other men who missed out on the war and crave to join the club.

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A ruler bidding for the loyalty of disaffected soldiers is a combustible mix. The would-be tsar in the Kremlin might want to reflect on what happened during the “auction of the Roman empire” in AD 193. That year, the Pretorian Guard mounted a coup and declared that whoever paid them most would become Caesar. Didius Julianus, a man whose wealth and vanity exceeded his political acumen, outbid his rival and won the post — and was assassinated a few months later.

America’s more recent imperial experiments have created their own host of monstrous military offspring. Perhaps most infamously, al-Qaeda started life as a welfare and employment scheme for the “Arab Afghans” — the international brigades of volunteers from the Arab world who joined the jihad against the Soviet Union in the Eighties with CIA backing. They had nowhere to go when the conflict ended. But the Arab Afghans are an unusual case in that these forgotten fighters had actually won their war and had every expectation that they would be welcomed home as heroes. But Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Arab countries didn’t want them — and Osama bin Laden offered them a home. He gave them jobs on construction projects and farming schemes in Sudan, while those with disabling war injuries got pensions. After Saudi Arabia rebuffed bin Laden’s proposal to remobilise the Arab Afghans as an alternative to the US Army to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, he launched his second jihad.

Later American interventions also saw abandoned soldiers remobilised. Hussein’s Iraqi army was recklessly dissolved by the US provisional administration after taking control of Baghdad in 2003. Many of them joined al-Qaeda and later the Islamic State. The overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya let loose his Saharan brigades to destabilise Mali. And an even more contemporary case can be found among the US-trained Afghan special forces, abandoned two years ago, and now being recruited by Russia. Isolated, unemployed and under threat in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, turned away by an impenetrable US immigration system, some of these soldiers have accepted good pay to use their skills in Ukraine.

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The frontiers of empire are always cruel. And when those empires retract their reach, the men they employed on their front lines — officers from the metropolis or local irregulars — may opt for freelancing. There’s no doubt that regular Russian officers sympathised with Prigozhin’s tirades against the field marshals, and should that high command crumble, both regular units and mercenaries may go rogue.

The end of Europe’s empires left many colonial officers adrift. Often candidly racist, they had won many battles and refused to accept that they had lost the wars. France’s mutinous colonels in Algeria were placated by Charles de Gaulle’s words, “I have heard you”, spoken with the credibility of a war hero, but the rancour of abandonment was diluted, not purged.

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And some veterans of Britain’s counterinsurgencies in Malaya and Kenya gravitated to Rhodesia and South Africa where they contributed to the last stand of racist rule in Africa. In turn, as South Africa’s post-apartheid army shed its dirty war specialists, some of them turned to commercial mercenarism. The flagship was Executive Outcomes, which provided combat services in Sierra Leone where it was paid in diamonds. It is a template for a host of private military companies which now operate across the Middle East and Africa — including Wagner.

Perhaps the most chilling parallel comes from Sudan. The paramilitary “Rapid Support Forces” currently ravaging the nation’s capital and committing genocidal massacres in Darfur are a hybrid of state militia and mercenary enterprise. Their leader, General Mohamed Dagolo “Hemedti” is, like Prigozhin, a plain-speaking populist commander and a wealthy mafioso businessman. And the two men became business partners — not least because Hemedti has been selling smuggled gold to Moscow.

The RSF’s origins lie in the notorious Janjaweed militia used by Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir to suppress rebellion in Darfur 20 years ago. The Janjaweed were drawn from nomadic Arab tribes, some of the most deprived communities of the region. They stalled rebel advances by burning, pillaging, raping and killing their way through hundreds of villages suspected of rebel sympathies. The militia was vilified internationally and disowned by al-Bashir. And, cast adrift, the Janjaweed began to mutiny, using the label “the forgotten soldiers”. They were eventually brought back into al-Bashir’s fold with amnesty and financial inducements, and under Hemedti’s capable and merciless leadership they were formalised as a paramilitary, reporting directly to al-Bashir.

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They fought as mercenaries in Yemen, gaining battlefield experience while their commander established personal links with Gulf rulers and became a gold trader. It was at this time that al-Bashir brought the RSF to Khartoum as a personal protection force, refusing to heed the advice of his army generals to dissolve the group or at least to relocate it away from the capital. It was a big mistake. Four years ago, Hemedti conspired with senior generals to depose al-Bashir. By this point, the RSF had become as powerful as the army itself; what they lacked in aircraft and tanks, they made up for in tactical acuity and battlefield experience.

This rogue private army tried to seize power in a kleptocratic-gangster state. The putsch failed, but the regular army — corrupt and inept — can’t prevail either. The Sudanese state is being destroyed in the generals’ fight to the death. This is the scenario most feared by Russians.

How, though, do you resolve the problem of abandoned but ambitious soldiers? There’s some experience from the deals that ended civil wars in countries from Myanmar and Colombia to Congo and South Sudan. The military men who negotiate these are attentive to the demands of their armed followers. The text of a peace agreement typically includes material recompense for their foot soldiers — what’s known as a “payroll peace”. This is sold to international mediators as a temporary expedient, though it rarely turns out that way. Officers are licensed to stick their fingers into the national honeypot. Armed groups are supposed to transition to civilian political parties, but their leaders normally keep both the armed and civil options open — while adding crony capitalist businesses to their portfolios.

The political price for pandering to populist militarism is harder to quantify. Myths of honourable causes abandoned, of national entitlements betrayed, endure for generations. Once these beliefs are planted, they don’t get forgotten. Whatever the DNA of the original seed of discontent, the laws of militarist mutation decree that the plant that grows will be toxic.

Putin had hoped for a short, victorious war in Ukraine. He didn’t get it. Putin hoped to be the master of the imperial militarist narrative. The jibes of Prigozhin and other hardliners, and the steps Putin took to placate the mutineers, suggest that imperial militarism is now his master. It’s hard to see him repeating de Gaulle’s performance in Algiers: the howls of betrayal will be too loud.

The logic of power in a mafia state is that the ruler pays the going market rate to specialists in violence. In Russia, that price — financial and political — has just gone up. Russia’s military politics have taken a toxic turn. That’s good news for Russia’s mercenaries and ultra-nationalists. It’s bad news for everyone else.

While the fighting in Sudan is, on the face of it, little more than a power struggle between the two rival factions that control the country, there is also an important international and geopolitical dimension to the conflict. At its heart is the great powers’ competition for influence over the continent — what has been called the “new scramble for Africa”.

Given its vast natural resources, including gold, its agricultural wealth and its geopolitically strategic location, Sudan has long attracted regional and international power plays. In recent years, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Israel have all been cultivating economic and political ties with the country’s leadership — and its two warlords in particular.

One country, however, stands out for its “special relationship” with Sudan: Russia. Putin made sure to cultivate an alliance with the country’s former leader, Omar al-Bashir, deploying the infamous Wagner Group in 2017 to provide him with political and military support. More importantly, that same year, al-Bashir signed a military cooperation agreement with Russia which included allowing the Russians to establish a military base along the Red Sea, ensuring a permanent presence for the Russian Navy in a crucial region and easy access to the Indian Ocean.

Al-Bashir was overthrown in 2019, before the agreement came into play, but Russia maintained good relations with the new administration’s military leaders, especially Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, whose Rapid Support Forces control the country’s gold mines. The transitional military-civilian government confirmed the decision to allow Russia to establish a base in 2020, but backtracked the following year under pressure from the US. However, once the civilian members of government were purged in yet another coup, in 2021, the agreement was revived.

Today, there is no indication that the issue of the naval base played a role in the recent outbreak of fighting, nor are any of the major foreign players openly backing either of the two warring factions. But if one side should explicitly align itself with, say, Russia, the conflict could easily turn into another front of the proxy war between the West and Russia, alongside Ukraine, with potentially disastrous consequences for the entire continent.

For Africa is already the stage of the New Great Game of the 21st century — the struggle between Western countries, China and Russia for influence over this immensely resource-rich, young continent predicted to be the next frontier of growth. In this game, Russia is particularly well-positioned. More so than the West, it enjoys strong historical and ideological ties with many African nations. The Soviet Union was the primary ally of several nations on the continent during the Cold War, and supported various anti-colonial and post-colonial movements; many countries are still ruled by parties that were supported by Moscow during their struggles for liberation from colonial or white supremacist rule, including Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC).

The West’s appeals for democracy and national independence, on the other hand, are perceived as hypocritical, given its history on the continent. Hence Russia’s argument that the war in Ukraine is actually part of a broader struggle against Western imperialism resonates in Africa, which harbours strong grievances against the West over its colonial and neocolonial practices. Indeed, a recent study carried out by the University of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy shows Russia remains popular across much of Africa today.

This has meant that not a single African nation has joined Western sanctions against Russia, choosing to either remain neutral — for example by abstaining in UN resolutions condemning Russia — or more or less explicitly siding with Russia, as in the case of South Africa, which in February even participated in a joint military exercise with Russia and China. It is also why Russia has actually strengthened its military, security and economies ties in the region since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. Just last month, delegations from 40 African countries and 14 leaders assembled in Moscow for the international parliamentary conference “Russia-Africa in a Multipolar World”.

On that occasion, Putin gave a keynote speech in which he stressed that Russia “has always and will always consider cooperation with African states a priority”. He recalled the large Russian investment projects being implemented in Africa, emphasising the importance of electricity production on the continent. Russia also has a military presence in several African countries, either in an official guise or via the Wagner Group, including in Libya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Angola, Madagascar, Mozambique and Mali. It is also the region’s largest arms exporter (close to 50%).

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Meanwhile, Sino-African relations are also deepening, with China now the continent’s largest trading partner and main source of project finance in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative. This has included massive infrastructural projects, including the Addis Ababa-Djibouti and Mombasa-Nairobi railways and the planned Angola-Tanzania railway, which will be the first railway section connecting the Atlantic coastline to the Indian Ocean, on top of roads, dams, ports and airports. China is also the largest political and economic supporter of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), which has 43 parties and another 11 signatories, making it the largest free-trade area in population and geographic size, spanning 1.3 billion people.

Even though there is no evidence that China is engaged in so-called debt trap diplomacy, as claimed by Western representatives, Chinese activities in Africa have been associated with poor labour conditions and unsustainable environmental practices. Yet it’s a fact that “African officials overwhelmingly view China’s role in Africa positively”, as the Rand Corporation noted in 2014, as do the majority of African citizens. This is not only because they see China’s tangible contribution to their nations’ infrastructure and overall economic activity, but also because China’s approach to global affairs and development — ostensibly based on non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations and on prioritising societal stability and economic development over political reforms — offers an alternative to the mainstream Western model for development, largely considered to have failed.

Indeed, it is telling that China has achieved all this without resorting to explicit military force: at present, China operates a single military base on the African continent, in the small East African country of Djibouti, which it inaugurated in 2017. The contrast with America’s approach to the continent couldn’t be starker. As part of its post-9/11 “War on Terror”, the US massively expanded its military presence in Africa, placing troops in at least 15 countries. In 2008, in order to coordinate its growing presence in Africa, the US placed responsibility for the continent under a single United States Africa Command, or Africom. This led to a considerable spike in the number of US troops, bases and drone strikes across the continent, most with counter-terrorism as the stated mission, as well as in coups (attempted and in some cases succeeded) carried out by US-trained troops.

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The best-known example of Africom’s impact is the US-led bombing campaign against Libya in 2011, which plunged the country into anarchy and violence. But several other African countries have been the target of US bombs in recent years. Just last year, the US bombed Somalia and Niger. Meanwhile, as Politico recently reported, American special operations teams are playing a direct role in military actions in at least eight African countries, including Somalia, Kenya, Tunisia and Niger, under a set of classified “surrogate programmes”. Officially, the US only has one permanent base in Africa — Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. But formerly classified documents obtained by The Intercept show that the US military footprint in Africa is much larger, encompassing 29 bases located in 15 different countries or territories. According to CBS News, “the US does have some military presence in virtually every African nation, even if it’s small”.

It seems to finally be dawning on US policymakers that this military-centric approach — which has sparked resistance in many African states — might not be the best way to counter Chinese influence on the continent. In recent months, several high-profile US representatives, including Kamala Harris, Anthony Blinken and Jill Biden, have travelled to Africa on what has been described as a “charm offensive”, while President Biden has promised to visit this year. “The United States is all in on Africa and all in with Africa,” he said last December at the second-ever US-Africa leaders’ summit in Washington.

It signalled that America seems to be catching on to the fact that African nations no longer want to be bossed around, they want to courted. They know that today they don’t have to choose sides, as they did during the Cold War, but they can do business with anyone and everyone at the same time. And this gives them power — more power than they’ve ever had. As a result, the real winner in the new scramble for Africa is likely to be Africa itself.

Since a coup in 2021, Sudan has been run by a council of generals, led by the two men at the centre of this dispute: army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy-turned-enemy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti), the head of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Al-Burhan and Hemedti represent a long-standing divide in Sudanese society, between the people living along the Nile and those on the marginalised periphery. Al-Burhan is a traditional army recruit who rose up the ranks. Raised in a small town in Northern Sudan, he looks to and is allied with Egypt.

Hemedti is very different. He comes from the western region of Darfur and his family extends into Chad. He belongs to the Rizeigat, a nomadic Arab tribe, and made his name with the Janjaweed militia (literally “devils on horseback”) by attacking settled Darfuris. In 2013, he transformed the Janjaweed into the RSF and has extended his power ever since. Today, he is one of the richest men in Sudan: a smooth operator, with vast holdings in mining and property.

This conflict, however, is much bigger than the two personalities at its heart. Indeed, there is a third character in this violent tragedy, a man who prefers to watch from afar.

Vladimir Putin already exercises influence across much of the arid Sahel through the Wagner Group. Although best known for its current activity in Ukraine, Wagner is also active in a number of African states, including Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad and Libya. In this conflict, Hemedti is the man who could add Sudan to that list.

During the Cold War, Africa was transformed into a superpower battleground, with the USSR and the USA slugging it out from Egypt and Ethiopia to Angola and Mozambique. Since then, Putin has continued to regard Africa’s conflicts as a cheap route into the continent. Using every trick in the book, from troops on the ground to digital propaganda, the Wagner Group has become one of the most powerful forces on the continent, allying with embattled political leaders and militia in exchange for cash or lucrative mining concessions.

Wagner’s chance to make inroads into Sudan came in November 2017, when then Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir visited Putin’s residence in Sochi. Publicly, the agreement reached by the two leaders was focused on their joint opposition “to US interference in the domestic affairs of Arab countries”; less publicly, it paved the way for the extension of the Wagner Group into Sudan.

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What form this took only became clear last July, after an investigation by CNN revealed that Russian aircraft had been flying Sudanese gold out of the country to the Syrian port city of Latakia, where Russia has a major airbase. The purported aim was simple: Russia was desperate to fortify its reserves against increasingly punitive Western sanctions. In total, CNN estimated that up to $13.4 billion worth of gold was missing, though Bloomberg later put the figure at $4 billion. Either way, the sums of money are enormous.

These transactions were being organised by Meroe Gold — a subsidiary of M-Invest, owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group. In return, Prigozhin provided training and arms for the Sudanese military and, increasingly, to Hemedti. As CNN pointed out, in early 2022, a day after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Hemedti flew to Moscow, “ushering in a new phase in the RSF’s relationship with the Wagner Group”.

These reports were corroborated a few months later, when journalists from Le Monde and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) were sent a trove of documents relating to Wagner’s activities in Sudan. Their publication revealed just how deep this relationship had become. M-Invest was shown to have paid millions of dollars to a company operated by Sudanese military intelligence. And the dividends for Prigozhin were huge. In return, Wagner was granted permission to land on a military base in Khartoum and to use “the signal code of the air force for the purpose of operating internally and externally”. It was, in effect, a licence to fly weapons into the country and gold out of it — without being officially declared or detected.

For a short while, they managed to get away with this — until July 2020, when the US sanctioned Meroe for its links to Prigozhin. Last month, the Council of the European Union followed suit, claiming that: “These companies, together with Lobaye Invest Sarlu and Diamville in the CAR (Central African Republic), are sanctioned in view of their role in illegally trading gold and diamonds looted by force from local traders.”

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Yet the measures appear to have had little impact on the activities of any of the parties concerned: there is simply too much at stake. This is also partly why, in 2020, as scrutiny of Wagner’s foreign companies intensified, Meroe handed its interests to a new company called Al Sawlaj for Mining Ltd, which has no assets and lists just one employee — a former Meroe Gold manager.

While few at the time noticed this shift, on 13 April, just three days before the latest fighting erupted, Bloomberg carried an intriguing story. The Sudanese authorities, it emerged, had charged a Russian national working for Al Sawlaj with gold smuggling. This signalled, claimed the report, “an escalation in a simmering power struggle between Sudan’s military and a rival militia whose leader has forged close ties with Russia”.

One can probably assume that “the rival militia leader” with close ties to the Kremlin was Hemedti. By the time his confrontation with al-Burhan erupted, he was estimated to have had as many as 100,000 troops at his disposal. Hemedti had become, in other words, a serious political rival with a military force to boot. And from Moscow’s point of view he was more compliant than al-Burhan, who was happy to receive Putin’s foreign minister, but was nowhere near as close to Russia.

In Sudan, then, it appears we have yet another conflict sparked by a struggle for a nation’s wealth and weapons. But if that were the spark, the Wagner Group was the match. A new Cold War is playing out in Africa — and Africa seems unlikely to win.

The glorious picture of Alaa Salah, the 22-year-old captured against the evening skyline in long white robes and gold jewellery, woke the world to seismic events taking place in this huge north African nation. An insurgency, that began with street protests over rising bread prices four months ago in the city of Atbara, has led to the sudden deposing of Sudan’s strongman leader, Omar al-Bashir, after 30 years in power.

The generals stepped in to remove him, the only world leader wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Even some soldiers joined the protests. A military council will now remain in control for two years before elections supposedly take place.

The extraordinary sight of exuberant Sudanese crowds waving flags and chanting for freedom, peace and justice comes just days after mass demonstrations led to the departure of another long-serving and elderly north African autocrat: Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria.

Rarely seen in recent years, confined to a wheelchair since a stroke, 82-year-old Bouteflika had nonetheless sought to cling to office by standing in a fifth election. But, in the face of rising unrest, the army that gave him power in 1999, after brutal civil war, finally dumped him. Bouteflika was replaced by an elderly ally as caretaker president and pledges of free elections were made.

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Unsurprisingly, these, too, failed to quell demands for more significant changes to end cronyism and corruption. After tear gas was turned again on crowds bearing placards reading ‘Systeme Dégage’ (System Get Lost), the army chief announced a July election date and promised that judges would investigate ‘the whole gang’ – the term used for Bouteflika’s cabal.

These are tense moments in nations that have been trapped for decades under grim regimes, and which are both still under the grip of generals. They are like belated echoes of the Arab Spring, which swept the region with such immense consequences eight years ago. The impression is intensified by the fact that one general in Libya is trying to grab the capital Tripoli with his tanks and planes, while another – the former spy chief who crushed Egypt’s revolution after a coup – has been visiting Washington.

Each country is different, of course, and each protest has local patterns. Activists are certainly more cautious than was the case eight years ago. In Algeria and Sudan, they say they have learned lessons of the past, when despots were ousted only to be replaced by bloody chaos or harsh counter-revolution.

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One country in the region did turn its revolution into positive change, though: Tunisia. And its former president, Moncef Marzouki has described the peaceful rotation of power in Algeria as “one of the most successful revolutions of the Arab Spring“.

It’s true that these uprisings all have a communality that reaches back to 2011, linking them directly to that revolutionary fervour that shook the world after a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire to protest corruption.

The roots of current discontent can be found in the same foetid swamp that gave birth to the protests of eight years ago, nurtured by the arrogance of self-serving autocracies. These young societies are frustrated by rampant youth unemployment, infuriated by state-captured capitalism, dismayed by corruption, inflamed by social media and angered by rich old men who refuse to share power or wealth.

In Algeria – Africa’s biggest country – more than two-thirds of its fast-growing population of 42 million is under 30 years old. These are the ones most affected by rising unemployment, with almost 30% of them jobless.

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Its well-trained army swiftly stopped riots in 2011 over corruption and economic dislocation, aided by painful memory of the savagery of its war against Islamists during the 1990s after elections were cancelled. The anger, though, over bad governance, economic woes and lack of freedom has remained profound.

The sparks vary from uprising to uprising. It was the tripling of bread prices and flour shortages amid rampant inflation in Sudan – a country where almost half the population lives below the poverty line and the end of an oil boom has devastated the economy. But the chant is the same. “Al-sha’b Yurid Isqat al-Nizam” (The people demand the downfall of the regime) was heard in Tunisia in 2011, and Sudan in 2019. It came from the mouth of one courageous army colonel in Khartoum. And was the potent phrase scrawled by teenage schoolboys on the wall of their school in Daraa one night after a game of football, which proved to be the innocent start of Syria’s conflagration.

In the West, we focused on the Arab Spring’s failures, transfixed by the tragedy of Syria, the terror in Egypt and the meltdown of Libya. Yet we largely ignored that the conditions that lay behind the original uprisings remained firmly in place, fuelling that explosive desire for dignity, freedom and social justice.

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Revolutions take time to brew, says the Egyptian-born, Cambridge-based historian Khaled Fahmy. In an essay he wrote four years ago, he pondered how far back we might trace the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, finally asking if the Tahrir Square protests were really rooted in the foundation of the modern Egyptian state in 1805.

Fahmy concluded that five factors thwarted the transformation of Arab nations. These include the impact of foreign intervention, the scourge of petro-dollars funding despotic Gulf regimes determined to stop democracy, and the surge of political Islam. “Despite these deep problems, I remain confident that the future is ours and our revolution will prevail…it would be naive to expect its victory overnight with one decisive knockout blow.”

He is right. Just as the demands of the French revolution did not dissolve when Napoleon Bonaparte took control in 1799, so the pressures of these troubled societies are still bubbling beneath the surface.

There was naivety aplenty in 2011, not least from journalists such as myself who gave too much credence to middle-class protesters they met on the streets and too little weight to the impoverished masses slaving away in fields and factories. The dreams of democracy founded on protest were soon dashed on the rocks of reality.

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And some sceptics still dismiss hopes of democracy in these benighted societies, making bigoted assumptions about Arabs and Muslims, or sneering at their right to have the same freedoms that we enjoy as they endorse cruel and thieving regimes. We have seen the pendulum swing in the United States – still the global superpower despite mounting challenge from China – from a foolish president who thought he could impose democracy on despotic states, to an even more foolish president who flirts with vile autocrats.

But from Syria to Sudan to Saudi Arabia, the choice and issues remain the same for those of us lucky enough to live in democracies: do we support the people pushing for more open societies and stand up for human rights? Or do we espouse such ideals at home, while ignoring them abroad in a misguided search for stability and perhaps a bit more trade.

The answer is clear, as seen in both Algeria and Sudan: never expect the status quo to last in places where aspiration is stifled by autocracy. This is not historical determinism, simply a reflection of human desires and needs. For that brave female student in a protest in Sudan showed the same demand for basic dignity and fairness that led to the Arab Spring – and the pressures in places filled with frustrated young people cannot be contained for ever.