Most Powerful

• #1 Omar al-Bashir
  Sudan Party State ControlPolitical World Wars and Midcentury State Power Power: 100
  Omar al-Bashir, born in 1944, dominated Sudanese politics from his 1989 coup until his overthrow in 2019. His rule joined military command, Islamist organization, security-state surveillance, and patronage into a durable but deeply destructive system of power. Al-Bashir governed not by building broad legitimacy but by managing fragmentation: rival regions, parties, armed groups, and international pressures were handled through repression, selective co-optation, and control of state resources. Oil revenues, especially before South Sudan’s secession, strengthened the regime, but war, sanctions, corruption allegations, and international criminal accusations exposed its brutal foundations. His government presided over civil conflict in the south, atrocities in Darfur, and an economy repeatedly distorted by elite extraction and political survival. Al-Bashir’s long tenure shows how coup regimes can endure for decades when military force, party patronage, and scarcity management reinforce one another, yet still collapse quickly once crisis broadens beyond the state’s ability to buy loyalty or monopolize fear.
• #2 Osama bin Laden
  AfghanistanPakistanSaudi ArabiaSudan CriminalCriminal EnterprisePolitical Cold War and Globalization Illicit NetworksState Power Power: 92
  Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) was the founder of al-Qaeda and one of the most consequential terrorist leaders of the modern era. Born into a wealthy Saudi family, he transformed inherited social position and wartime networks from the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan into a transnational extremist enterprise dedicated to mass-casualty violence. His historical importance lies not in conventional state power or productive wealth, but in his ability to build a decentralized organization that combined ideology, clandestine finance, propaganda, and operational planning across multiple countries. Under his leadership al-Qaeda attacked civilians on a vast scale, culminating most famously in the September 11 attacks in the United States. Bin Laden’s career demonstrates how non-state violence can acquire strategic reach when it fuses sanctuary, money, narrative, and recruitment into a coherent system. His legacy is inseparable from murder, fear, war, and global institutional change.
• #3 Mo Ibrahim
  AfricaSudanUnited Kingdom TechnologicalTechnology Platform Control 21st Century Technology Platforms Power: 80
  Sir Mo Ibrahim (Mohammed Fathi Ahmed Ibrahim; born May 3, 1946) is a Sudanese-British telecommunications entrepreneur and philanthropist best known as the founder of Celtel, a mobile telecommunications company that expanded across Africa and was sold in 2005 in a deal reported at $3.4 billion. After the sale, he established the Mo Ibrahim Foundation to promote governance and accountability in Africa, including through the Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership and the Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG), first published in 2007. Ibrahim’s career spans the build-out of mobile infrastructure and the creation of civic institutions that use measurement and incentives to influence public leadership.