On the morning of April 15, 2023, the fragile peace that had held Sudan together since the 2019 revolution collapsed with the sound of artillery. Before dawn, forces loyal to General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — universally known as “Hemeti,” commander of the Rapid Support Forces — attacked Sudanese Armed Forces positions across Khartoum. The RSF seized the presidential palace, encircled army headquarters, and overran the international airport, parking armoured vehicles on runways and stranding foreign nationals and diplomatic staff. By noon, fighting had spread across three states; by evening, Sudan had descended into a war that would become the largest humanitarian catastrophe on earth.
The conflict that erupted was not spontaneous. It was the culmination of a four-year struggle between two generals who had cooperated to remove a dictator, shared power in an uneasy transitional arrangement, and then maneuvered for complete dominance. General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces and chairman of Sudan’s Sovereignty Council, and Hemeti had been partners in the 2019 coup against Omar al-Bashir and co-architects of the October 2021 military takeover that derailed Sudan’s democratic transition. When their partnership broke down over the question of who would control a unified military command — and who would ultimately rule Sudan — the country paid the price.
By early 2026, over 150,000 people had been killed, more than 11 million displaced, and entire cities reduced to rubble. The World Food Programme declared famine conditions in five states. The UN described it as the world’s largest displacement crisis — surpassing Ukraine. Foreign powers — the United Arab Emirates, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Eritrea — had waded into the conflict with weapons, financing, and mercenary support, transforming a military coup into a full-scale proxy war that exposed the complete failure of African and international mediation. The world, consumed by Ukraine, Gaza, and the Taiwan Strait, had barely noticed.
The Two Armies¶
The Sudanese Armed Forces¶
The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) is a large, conventionally structured military, numbering approximately 200,000 personnel, with an officer corps drawn disproportionately from Arab communities of the Nile Valley — historically the backbone of Sudan’s military-political establishment. The SAF controlled Sudan’s air force, the country’s limited navy, and most of its heavy armour. Its equipment was a patchwork of Soviet-era and Chinese materiel, supplemented by more recent acquisitions from Russia and Ukraine.
Institutionally, the SAF considered itself the embodiment of Sudanese statehood — the legitimate inheritor of the national military established at independence in 1956. Its officer class had produced a succession of heads of state, from Ibrahim Abboud through Jaafar Nimeiry to al-Bashir. This tradition of military governance coexisted uneasily with the expectation, explicit in the 2019 constitutional framework, that the SAF would eventually subordinate itself to civilian authority.
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan came to the SAF’s top command as a relatively obscure figure when al-Bashir was overthrown. He had served in Darfur during the genocide, which made him a controversial figure to human rights investigators, though he was not personally indicted. Al-Burhan’s rise reflected the degree to which al-Bashir had systematically promoted officers based on loyalty and ethnic alignment rather than competence.
The Rapid Support Forces¶
The RSF was structurally different from any conventional military — and understanding its origins is essential to understanding the war. The RSF was not a professional army that developed alongside the state. It was a militia that the state had created as a tool, which then outgrew the state’s control.
The RSF’s direct lineage ran through the Central Reserve Police and the Popular Defence Forces — the paramilitaries Khartoum had used in the Nuba Mountains and in the Darfur genocide. The Janjaweed militias that committed the atrocities of 2003-2008 were its institutional ancestors. When Sudan signed the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur in 2011, Khartoum needed a mechanism to integrate the Janjaweed commanders it had used in the conflict without formally acknowledging their role. The RSF, formally established by presidential decree in 2013, was that mechanism.
Hemeti — full name Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — had been a mid-ranking Janjaweed commander from the Abbala Rizeigat tribe, a camel-herding Arab community in northern Darfur. He had come to al-Bashir’s attention through his effectiveness as a militia leader and his demonstrated willingness to use extreme violence. By the early 2010s he commanded the RSF directly, reporting to al-Bashir outside the formal SAF chain of command. The RSF became al-Bashir’s personal praetorian guard and instrument of internal repression.
Under Hemeti’s direction, the RSF grew to an estimated 100,000 fighters by 2023, with its own logistics, financing, weapons procurement, and intelligence networks. Crucially, it had access to independent revenue streams: primarily gold. Sudan is one of Africa’s largest gold producers, and the RSF controlled mining operations in Jebel Amer in North Darfur and in several other sites. The gold trade — much of it routed through the UAE — gave Hemeti financial independence from the Sudanese state and the ability to pay his forces, buy weapons, and cultivate international relationships without government oversight.
Origins of the RSF¶
From Janjaweed to Paramilitary State¶
The transformation of a collection of ethnic militias into a force that could challenge the national army was gradual but intentional. Al-Bashir expanded the RSF through the 2010s, deploying it not only in Darfur but against protesters across Sudan, including the 2013 killing of approximately 185 demonstrators in Khartoum. The RSF was also deployed to Yemen, where it fought as part of the Saudi-led coalition against the Houthis from 2015, earning Hemeti a direct relationship with Saudi and Emirati military officials and a regular income from Gulf states that proved important to future political maneuvering.
The Yemen deployment was significant in several respects. It gave RSF fighters combat experience in a different operational environment. It built Hemeti’s personal relationships with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the UAE and senior Saudi officials. It generated approximately $2 billion in Gulf payments to Sudan between 2015 and 2019, a significant portion of which flowed through RSF channels. And it gave Hemeti visibility as a Gulf-aligned security partner — precisely the kind of relationship that would matter when al-Bashir fell.
The Business Empire¶
By 2019, the RSF had evolved into what analysts described as a “state within a state.” Beyond gold, RSF-linked businesses controlled agricultural land, transportation networks, and import operations. Hemeti’s family members held ownership stakes in companies operating in multiple sectors. The RSF ran its own border control and taxed smuggling routes, particularly the lucrative smuggling corridor between Libya and Sudan that had operated since the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi’s government.
This economic infrastructure was not incidental. It was the foundation of the RSF’s political autonomy. A force that could pay its own soldiers, buy its own weapons, and fund its own logistics did not need the SAF — or the Sudanese state. When the partnership between Hemeti and al-Burhan collapsed, the RSF could sustain itself independently in a way that no conventional armed group in Sudan had previously been able to.
The 2019 Revolution¶
The Fall of al-Bashir¶
On April 11, 2019, Omar al-Bashir — who had ruled Sudan for nearly thirty years, who had been indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court, and who had survived a dozen coup attempts — was removed by his own military after four months of mass street protests. The protests had begun in December 2018 in response to bread price increases and had grown into a sustained popular uprising demanding an end to al-Bashir’s rule.
The protest movement — led largely by the Sudanese Professionals Association, a coalition of doctors, lawyers, teachers, and engineers — was remarkable for its size, its discipline, and its explicit commitment to civilian democratic governance. Millions of Sudanese, from major cities to provincial towns, participated. The movement’s signature tactic was the sit-in: from April 6, enormous crowds gathered outside the military headquarters in Khartoum and refused to leave.
Al-Burhan and Hemeti acted together to remove al-Bashir and install a Transitional Sovereignty Council, buying time by placing themselves at the head of a political transition that was not of their choosing. The protesters celebrated, cautiously. Sudanese civil society and political parties recognised that the military’s motives were self-protective rather than democratic — but calculated that working within a transitional framework offered the best path to civilian rule.
The Massacre of June 3¶
The military’s true intentions became clear on the night of June 3, 2019, when RSF troops and allied forces violently dispersed the sit-in outside army headquarters, killing an estimated 127 people, dumping bodies in the Nile, and committing widespread sexual violence against demonstrators. The massacre — documented by witnesses, medical workers, and subsequently by UN investigators — was attributed directly to RSF units under Hemeti’s command.
The June 3 massacre did not end the transition. Domestic and international pressure, mediated by the African Union and Ethiopia, produced the August 2019 Constitutional Declaration — a power-sharing arrangement between the military and civilian Forces of Freedom and Change coalition. The declaration created a Sovereignty Council (dominated by the generals) alongside a civilian cabinet led by economist Abdalla Hamdok and a Legislative Council that was never actually constituted. The arrangement was inherently unstable from its first day.
Power-Sharing Collapse¶
Two Years of Dysfunction¶
The 2019-2021 transitional period was characterised by persistent tension between military and civilian authority, economic crisis, and the unresolved question of accountability for June 3 and for the Darfur genocide. Hamdok’s government attempted to implement economic reforms demanded by international creditors — lifting fuel subsidies, floating the currency — while simultaneously managing security sector actors who had no interest in genuine reform.
The key structural problem was that the Constitutional Declaration required the SAF and RSF to be integrated into a reformed national military under eventual civilian oversight. This process required both the reduction of RSF autonomy and the curtailment of SAF political power. Neither Hemeti nor al-Burhan was prepared to accept this. The security forces maintained independent chains of command, independent economic interests, and independent foreign relationships. The civilian cabinet nominally oversaw an administration in which its most important components — security, intelligence, revenue from gold and oil — remained beyond its reach.
The October 2021 Coup¶
On October 25, 2021, al-Burhan and Hemeti staged a coup, detaining Prime Minister Hamdok and civilian cabinet members, declaring a state of emergency, and dissolving the transitional institutions. Hamdok was briefly reinstated in November under a new political deal — the November 21 Agreement — but resigned in January 2022, citing his inability to govern under military control.
The coup was condemned internationally — the United States suspended $700 million in aid; the World Bank froze programmes; the AU suspended Sudan. Massive street protests resumed and were met with live fire that killed over 100 people. But the military remained in control. The coup’s architects calculated, correctly, that international condemnation would be temporary and that the structural dependence of Sudan’s economy on Gulf financing would eventually provide a path back to normalisation.
The Integration Problem¶
Between October 2021 and April 2023, the central political question in Sudan was the terms on which the RSF would be integrated into the SAF as part of any eventual transition to civilian rule. The framework under negotiation — the December 2022 Framework Agreement, sponsored by the UN, AU, and a group of international partners called the Quad (US, UK, Saudi Arabia, UAE) — envisioned a two-year integration timeline.
Hemeti demanded ten years. Al-Burhan’s SAF officers demanded the RSF be absorbed completely within two years. Behind this numerical dispute lay an irreconcilable conflict of interest: integration on the SAF’s timeline would eliminate the RSF as an independent power base and leave Hemeti without the instrument of his political influence. Integration on Hemeti’s timeline would allow the RSF to maintain de facto independence long enough to consolidate its economic and political position. Each general understood that the other was angling for supreme power. Neither trusted the other to honour an agreement.
By March 2023, both sides were repositioning forces in and around Khartoum, placing RSF units in the capital that the SAF regarded as provocative. Negotiations on the Framework Agreement were stalling. When the RSF deployed additional forces to positions near key military installations in early April, the SAF demanded their withdrawal. The RSF refused. On April 15, the shooting started.
The War Begins¶
April 15 and the Battle for Khartoum¶
The opening phase of the war was disorienting in its speed and scope. The RSF’s strategy relied on the rapid seizure of key installations before the SAF could mobilise its advantage in air power and heavy armour. In the first hours, RSF units — pre-positioned in Khartoum over months — overran or surrounded SAF positions at the presidential palace, army headquarters, the Meroe military airbase north of Khartoum, and airports across multiple cities.
The SAF’s response — deploying its air force to strike RSF positions in urban Khartoum — inflicted massive civilian casualties and reduced large parts of the capital to rubble, but did not dislodge the RSF from its embedded urban positions. The RSF’s strategy of operating from civilian neighbourhoods made conventional air and artillery responses catastrophically damaging to the city’s infrastructure and population.
In the first week, both sides publicly claimed victory and called on each other to stand down. Ceasefire negotiations brokered by Saudi Arabia and the United States produced a series of short ceasefires, all of which collapsed within hours. The pattern established in April 2023 — announced ceasefires, violations within hours, renewed fighting — would repeat for the following two years without producing a durable halt.
The Fall of Khartoum¶
By mid-2023, the RSF controlled most of Khartoum’s residential areas and was systematically looting the city. Banks, hospitals, businesses, and diplomatic premises were stripped. Embassies were burglarised; the UN compound was attacked. International evacuations — conducted by military aircraft and overland convoys — extracted foreign nationals but left the vast majority of Khartoum’s five million residents to navigate a city that was simultaneously under occupation, under bombardment, and under economic collapse.
The SAF retained control of Omdurman, the twin city across the Nile, and used it as a staging ground for counterattacks. The battle for Khartoum became a grinding urban war in which neither side could achieve decisive victory: the RSF was too embedded in the urban fabric for the SAF to retake the city without destroying it; the SAF retained air superiority and the ability to prevent the RSF from consolidating control of the entire capital.
International Proxy Dimensions¶
The UAE’s Role¶
The United Arab Emirates became the most consequential external actor in the conflict, providing critical support to the RSF through multiple channels.
The foundation of Emirati-RSF alignment was Hemeti’s decade of relationship-building with Abu Dhabi, cemented during the Yemen deployments and the gold trade. UAE-based companies had served as intermediaries for Sudanese gold exports, with RSF-controlled mines routing product through UAE refiners. This financial relationship gave Abu Dhabi leverage over Hemeti and Hemeti leverage over UAE commercial actors who depended on Sudanese gold supply.
After April 2023, the UAE provided the RSF with:
- Weapons and ammunition: Documented through UN Panel of Experts reports and satellite imagery showing UAE-flagged aircraft and ground logistics corridors through Libya and Chad into RSF-held territories
- Drone support: UAE-supplied Bayraktar and other armed drones gave the RSF a capability it initially lacked against SAF air power
- Financial support: RSF gold continued to flow through UAE refiners, providing hard currency for weapons procurement
- Diplomatic protection: Abu Dhabi used its influence with Western governments and international institutions to moderate criticism of the RSF and resist accountability mechanisms
The UAE denied direct military support throughout, maintaining a position of nominal neutrality while evidence of its involvement mounted. When the UN Panel of Experts documented Emirati supply chains in a December 2023 report, Abu Dhabi rejected the findings and lobbied to restrict the panel’s mandate.
Wagner Group and Russian Arms¶
Russia’s involvement operated through different channels but with comparable effect. The Wagner Group — the private military company operating as an arm of Russian state policy across Africa — had established a presence in Sudan before the war, advising RSF units and facilitating Russian arms deliveries.
Wagner’s Sudan relationship predated the 2023 war. The group had provided security advice to al-Bashir’s government in exchange for gold mining concessions in the late 2010s. After al-Bashir’s fall, Wagner shifted its alignment toward Hemeti, assessing correctly that the RSF represented the more dynamic and Gulf-aligned actor in Sudanese politics. The relationship deepened after Wagner’s Libya operations gave it expertise in exactly the kind of light-force, armed-drone warfare the RSF was developing.
Following Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death in August 2023 and Wagner’s formal reorganisation under the Russian Defence Ministry, the Sudan relationship was absorbed into official Russian military cooperation channels. Russia supplied the RSF with anti-aircraft systems, ammunition, and technical advisers. Russian veto cover at the UN Security Council — blocking arms embargo resolutions and accountability mechanisms targeting the RSF — provided diplomatic protection analogous to what China had provided Sudan during the Darfur genocide two decades earlier.
Egypt and the SAF¶
Egypt aligned with the SAF, reflecting Cairo’s deep institutional ties to the Sudanese military establishment and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s preference for stable military governance over the uncertainty represented by Hemeti’s RSF. Egypt supplied the SAF with weapons and ammunition, provided intelligence support, and used its influence with Gulf states to lobby for RSF-critical positions — though Saudi Arabia, which maintained relationships with both sides, was not easily moved.
Egypt’s direct military interest was significant: the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam dispute, in which Sudan was a secondary party, made Nile basin stability a strategic priority for Cairo. An RSF victory — which would bring a Gulf-aligned, economically independent militia leader to power — was deeply threatening to Egypt’s interests in a predictable southern neighbour.
Eritrea, under President Isaias Afwerki, also aligned with the SAF, providing territory for SAF logistics and reportedly some ground support. Eritrea’s motivations were partly ideological — Afwerki’s hostility to political transitions and civilian governance — and partly strategic, reflecting competition with Ethiopia for influence in Sudan.
The Gulf Competition¶
Saudi Arabia occupied an ambiguous position. Riyadh had hosted key negotiating sessions — the Jeddah Process, initiated in May 2023 — between the warring parties and maintained nominal neutrality. But Saudi Arabia’s longstanding financial relationships with both Hemeti and the SAF officer class, combined with Abu Dhabi’s open RSF alignment, created a Gulf competition for Sudanese influence that complicated mediation.
The Jeddah Process produced repeated ceasefire agreements and declarations of intent, none of which held. American mediators working alongside Saudi counterparts found their leverage limited: the parties had alternative sources of support that reduced their dependence on the goodwill of Western-aligned mediators. The RSF could continue fighting as long as the UAE supplied it; the SAF could continue fighting as long as Egypt and Eritrea supported it.
Humanitarian Catastrophe¶
Scale and Scope¶
The humanitarian consequences of the Sudan war rapidly exceeded those of every other active conflict on earth. By late 2024, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported:
- 11 million displaced: Approximately 7.5 million internally displaced and 3.5 million who had fled to neighbouring countries — primarily Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Sudan — making it the world’s largest displacement crisis
- 25 million facing acute food insecurity: More than half Sudan’s population, with conditions in Darfur, Kordofan, and the North particularly severe
- Famine declaration: In August 2024, the WHO formally declared famine in parts of North Darfur — the first famine declaration on the African continent in years. By early 2025, famine conditions had spread to multiple states
- Health system collapse: Approximately 70-80% of healthcare facilities in conflict-affected areas were non-functional; cholera, dengue fever, and measles outbreaks compounded malnutrition
- Over 150,000 killed: Estimates varied widely given the absence of functioning documentation systems, but UN agencies and NGOs converged on figures in this range for direct conflict deaths, with total excess mortality significantly higher
Darfur Again¶
The geographic pattern of the war’s worst atrocities repeated the geography of 2003-2008 with disturbing precision. Darfur, where the RSF had its deepest roots and where the Janjaweed had committed genocide two decades earlier, became the site of the war’s most documented mass atrocities.
El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state, was the scene of systematic massacres of the Masalit community — the same group targeted in the original Darfur genocide. In June 2023, RSF and allied Arab militia forces killed thousands of Masalit civilians, expelled tens of thousands more, and destroyed the city’s infrastructure. West Darfur Governor Khamis Abkar — himself a Masalit — was killed by RSF forces after publicly accusing them of genocide, his death filmed and circulated online.
The UN estimated that approximately 10,000-15,000 people were killed in El Geneina in June-July 2023 alone. Subsequent months brought similar reports from Zalingei, Nyala, and other Darfuri cities. The patterns of attack — targeting by ethnicity, sexual violence, looting, burning — were those documented in the 2003-2008 genocide. UN investigators and human rights organisations including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International concluded that the violence constituted crimes against humanity and potentially genocide.
El Fasher — the last major Darfuri city not under RSF control — was besieged from May 2024. An estimated 800,000 displaced civilians had sheltered there, making it one of the most densely crowded and vulnerable locations in the world. The siege, in which RSF forces surrounded the city and periodically shelled civilian areas, was described by UN officials as creating conditions for a “catastrophic” mass casualty event.
Humanitarian Access¶
The warring parties systematically restricted humanitarian access. The RSF looted aid warehouses and aid vehicles. The SAF imposed bureaucratic restrictions on movement in areas it controlled. Both sides killed humanitarian workers; the International Committee of the Red Cross suspended operations in multiple areas after staff were killed. The UN World Food Programme was forced to suspend operations in several states following attacks on its personnel and assets.
The result was a humanitarian operation operating at a fraction of required capacity in the world’s largest crisis. Donor fatigue — following years of significant contributions to Ukraine, Gaza, and other emergencies — meant that Sudan’s appeals were dramatically underfunded. The 2024 UN humanitarian response plan for Sudan was funded at approximately 36% of the requested amount.
Why the World Looked Away¶
The Competition for Attention¶
Sudan’s war competed for international attention against Ukraine, Gaza, and the Iran crisis in a media environment with finite capacity. Ukraine attracted unprecedented Western political and financial commitment. Gaza generated enormous controversy and media coverage. Sudan — geographically remote, ethnically complex, without the geopolitical salience of either conflict — received a fraction of the attention.
This was not merely an accident of geography. Structural features of the international media and political economy shaped which crises received attention:
- No Western strategic interest: Sudan had no NATO dimension, no direct European security implications, and no major energy supplies to Western markets. The political incentive for Western leaders to invest attention and resources was weak.
- Complexity: Unlike Ukraine’s relatively legible narrative — democratic state versus authoritarian aggressor — Sudan’s war was between two military factions, neither of which had a democratic mandate. The absence of a clear victim-perpetrator narrative made it harder for media and advocacy organisations to frame.
- Access restrictions: The absence of independent media within conflict zones, and the danger faced by journalists who attempted to operate there, meant a systematic scarcity of images and eyewitness accounts that drive political attention.
- Gulf bloc protection: The UAE’s active interest in preventing accountability measures against the RSF translated into diplomatic pressure on Western governments and international institutions that moderately but consistently reduced the political cost of inaction.
The AU’s Mediation Failure¶
The African Union — which had deployed peacekeepers to Darfur in 2004 and mediated the 2015 Abuja and 2011 Doha agreements — launched multiple mediation initiatives in the 2023-2024 period without achieving a durable ceasefire.
The AU’s structural limitations were familiar from previous crises. The organisation lacked enforcement capacity and depended on member state consensus that was difficult to achieve when multiple members had direct interests in the conflict’s outcome. Egypt, Eritrea, and several Gulf-aligned African states complicated consensus. The AU’s preference for African-led solutions — which had legitimacy advantages over externally imposed frameworks — was undermined by the reality that “African-led” often meant “dependent on member states with conflicting interests.”
A separate process — the Jeddah talks, led by Saudi Arabia and the United States — produced successive ceasefire agreements that were violated within hours of signing. The talks collapsed entirely in May 2024 when the SAF withdrew, citing RSF violations.
Geopolitical Stakes¶
What Sudan Means for the Horn¶
Sudan’s instability radiates across a region already characterised by fragility. The Horn of Africa — Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti — is one of the world’s most strategically significant maritime corridors, situated at the intersection of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, through which approximately 12-15% of global maritime trade passes. Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, at the region’s southern end, is one of the world’s critical chokepoints — the same waterway through which Houthi attacks on shipping in 2023-2024 demonstrated the cost of regional instability.
Sudan’s Red Sea coastline — including Port Sudan, which became the SAF’s wartime capital and the country’s primary functioning international gateway — has been the subject of competition between Gulf powers and Russia, both of which sought basing or logistics rights. Russia had negotiated a naval logistics facility at Port Sudan with the al-Bashir government before the revolution; the agreement lapsed but Russian interest in Red Sea access persisted. The UAE has developed Emirati-controlled port and logistics facilities across the Horn, including in Djibouti, Berbera (Somaliland), and Bosaso (Puntland).
Sudan’s territorial scale — the largest in Africa before South Sudan’s secession — means that its fragmentation would have consequences for the entire Sahel region. State collapse in Sudan would produce refugee flows into Chad, already one of the world’s most fragile states; accelerate instability in South Sudan, which was itself experiencing renewed civil conflict; and potentially create ungoverned territory exploitable by Sahelian jihadist groups expanding northward from Mali and Burkina Faso.
The RSF-Wagner Template¶
The Sudan war established what may become a repeating template for African conflicts: a light-infantry paramilitary force, financed through natural resource extraction and Gulf money, armed with Chinese small arms and UAE-supplied drones, protected diplomatically by Russian veto power at the Security Council, fighting a conventionally structured national army that has air power and heavy armour but lacks the political coherence to mobilise society behind it.
This template — which echoes the Wagner Group’s operational model in the Central African Republic, Mali, and Libya — represents a significant evolution in African conflict dynamics. It combines the financial independence of resource-funded militias with the technological uplift of foreign drone and weapons supply, the diplomatic protection of great-power patrons, and the operational experience gained in Gulf-sponsored campaigns. Against conventional armies weakened by decades of corruption and political interference, it has proven highly effective.
The implication for African security architecture is sobering. If the RSF model — or variants of it — can defeat conventional national armies, then the model of stability through strong central militaries that has implicitly underwritten AU security frameworks since the 1990s faces an existential challenge. The African Union’s collective security mechanisms were designed for inter-state conflicts and secessionist movements. They have no adequate answer to well-financed, externally supported paramilitaries operating within member states.
The Democratic Transition’s Defeat¶
Perhaps the deepest consequence of the Sudan war is the defeat of one of Africa’s most promising democratic transitions. The 2019 revolution was genuinely remarkable: a broad, disciplined, non-violent protest movement that toppled a long-entrenched authoritarian ruler and produced a civilian-led transitional government with a credible reform agenda. Sudan’s civil society — its professional associations, women’s networks, neighbourhood resistance committees — demonstrated organisational capacity and political maturity that belied the country’s impoverished and conflict-ridden history.
The October 2021 coup and the April 2023 war destroyed that project. The civilian politicians who had shaped the 2019 transition were either exiled, killed, or marginalised. The Sudanese Professionals Association disbanded. The resistance committees that had organised the 2019 sit-ins were among the first civilian targets of the RSF in Khartoum. Sudan’s democratic moment — which had represented a potential counterexample to the narrative of African governance failure — was extinguished by two generals who had no interest in ceding control.
This pattern — popular uprising, military coup, civil war — had been seen elsewhere in the Arab world after 2011: Egypt, Libya, Yemen. But Sudan’s 2019 revolution had produced more genuinely civilian governance than any of the Arab Spring transitions. Its destruction was correspondingly more consequential as a precedent, suggesting that military establishments in fragile states have learned to manage and then crush popular democratic transitions more effectively than post-Cold War optimism about democratic diffusion had anticipated.
International Accountability and Its Absence¶
The mechanisms built after the Darfur genocide — the ICC’s arrest warrants, the Security Council referral, the Special Advisers on Genocide Prevention — proved equally inadequate in 2023-2024. The ICC opened a new investigation into crimes in Darfur in July 2023, but the fundamental enforcement problem had not changed. RSF commanders operating in Darfur faced no imminent prospect of arrest. Security Council resolution attempts targeting RSF financing and arms supply were blocked by Russian vetoes. Targeted sanctions imposed by the United States and European Union on RSF leadership had measurable but limited effect on the RSF’s operational capacity.
The pattern of impunity established by the failure to enforce the al-Bashir arrest warrant was directly relevant. Perpetrators in 2023 operated in a legal environment in which the international community’s demonstrated willingness to impose accountability — as opposed to its rhetorical commitment — was measurably low. The RSF commanders ordering attacks on Masalit civilians in El Geneina had every reason to calculate that international justice would not reach them.
Conclusion¶
Sudan’s civil war represents the convergence of every pathology in contemporary African proxy warfare: the weaponisation of resource revenues, the outsourcing of atrocity to paramilitaries with militia roots, the exploitation of great power competition for diplomatic protection, and the systematic destruction of civilian political infrastructure. It has produced the world’s largest humanitarian crisis while receiving a fraction of the political and financial attention directed at geopolitically salient conflicts elsewhere.
The war’s origins lie in a failed democratic transition — itself a consequence of the structural power that al-Bashir’s decades of military governance had lodged in institutions beyond civilian control. The RSF’s ability to fight the national army to a stalemate reflects decades of deliberate investment in paramilitary power as an instrument of domestic control that outlasted its intended purpose. The international community’s inability to respond effectively reflects the same structural failures — Security Council veto paralysis, regional organisation resource constraints, great-power economic interests overriding humanitarian obligations — that characterised the Darfur genocide of 2003-2008.
Africa’s largest countries — those with the most complex ethnic geography, the most resource wealth, and the most institutionally weak states — face the greatest exposure to this pattern. Sudan’s war is simultaneously a country-specific catastrophe and a template for how state fragility, external intervention, and paramilitary power combine to produce conflicts that international architecture is systematically unable to prevent or resolve. Until the underlying incentives change — for external backers who profit from proxy relationships, for military establishments that resist civilian oversight, for great powers that exercise vetoes to protect economic partners — the Sudan model will repeat.
Sources & Further Reading¶
- De Waal, Alex. Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy: The Promise and Betrayal of a People’s Revolution. Hurst, 2023. The essential guide to the 2019 revolution and its collapse, from the leading scholar of Sudanese politics.
- Human Rights Watch. Sudan: RSF Forces Kill, Rape Civilians in Darfur. July 2023. The first comprehensive documentation of RSF atrocities in El Geneina, drawing on survivor testimony gathered in Chad.
- UN Panel of Experts on Sudan. Final Report to the Security Council. October 2023. The definitive documentation of foreign arms supply chains to both parties, including UAE and Russian involvement.
- International Crisis Group. Sudan’s Spreading War. Crisis Group Africa Report No. 309, July 2023. The most comprehensive analytical account of the war’s origins, dynamics, and international dimensions.
- Tubiana, Jérôme. “The Man Who Terrorised Darfur Is Succeeding Beyond His Wildest Dreams.” Foreign Policy, September 2023. Essential profile of Hemeti and the RSF’s origins and ambitions.
- Médecins Sans Frontières. Sudan Emergency Update. Multiple editions 2023-2024. Field-level documentation of healthcare system collapse and civilian casualty patterns across conflict-affected states.