Building on Sand? The Perils of Peacemaking in Sudan

After 16 months of civil war, Sudan increasingly resembles a ‘failed state’, with displacement and man-made famine driving one of the ‘worst humanitarian disasters in recent memory’. Following early setbacks, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) – bolstered by Iranian-supplied drones – made sizable gains in January and February, retaking tracts of Omdurman and Bahri, Khartoum’s sister cities. Though over-stretched, the opposing Rapid Support Forces (RSF) still holds much of the capital, including the sprawling Al-Jaili oil refinery, and has made inroads across South Kordofan, Geizra, and Sinnar State. Having seized four of Darfur’s five provincial centres, the group is also consolidating control over its western heartlands; only El-Fashar – home to 1.8 million people – remains in army hands and now faces a protracted siege. Described as Sudan’s ‘Srebrenica’, the battle is both a strategic milestone and the latest example of a distinct system of violence, one of mass atrocity and ethnic cleansing running parallel to the conventional conflict.

At the same time, patterns evident at the outset of hostilities – namely, a proliferation and diffusion of fighting – have persisted, contributing to a confused and steadily fragmenting battlespace. Grand epithets – SAF’s ‘battle of dignity’ or RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan ‘Hemedti’ Dagalo’s ‘battle for democracy’ – do little to clarify this landscape, implying a turf war between two ‘broadly coherent’ blocs rather than a ‘mosaic of competing militia and rebel movements, each with their own interests and agendas’. Unfortunately, international diplomacy appears reliant on these bifurcated narratives in practice if not in rhetoric, ignoring the realities of Sudan’s political market and reducing ‘conflict resolution’ to a choice between ‘anti-democratic’ and ‘anti-state’ forces. Faltering ceasefire negotiations in Geneva – though well-intentioned – risk becoming the latest iteration of such trends, raising questions over the internal dynamics of its would-be participants and the implications these have for peacemaking.

Diplomacy Revamped?

In late July, the US State Department pitched a new round of dialogue between SAF and the RSF, co-hosted by Switzerland and Saudi Arabia, to better enable humanitarian access and agree a ceasefire. Despite benefitting from unusual levels of regional buy-in, neither party ultimately engaged in negotiations – the army boycotted, and Hemedti reneged. Though not surprising, the outcome speaks to the inherent difficulties of brokerage, and the perseverance of those involved in achieving even incremental gains such as opening the Adre border-crossing between Chad and Sudan. But Geneva also reflects the same problems besetting past efforts in Jeddah, with its limited inclusivity and shelving of ‘broader political issues’ eliciting little more than ‘motion without movement’. While a full appraisal of these shortcomings is available elsewhere, it is worth unpacking two overlapping dynamics in detail, given their impact on future interventions: the increasingly volatile disposition of Sudan’s warring parties; and the challenge of bridging elite bargains with more 'meaningful solutions'.

Anti-State Spoilers?

The RSF’s behaviour offers a classic vignette of a bad-faith actor. By accepting the invitation to Geneva, Hemedti once again attempted to exploit peace talks as a means of reviving his reputation, employing liberal jargon to boost his legitimacy and present himself as an ‘indispensable part of Sudan’s future’. In truth, his group – a ‘motley assortment of tribal militias and warlords’ – has no real appetite for delivering stability, let alone peace, as gradually became self-evident. After lauding their own ‘determination to alleviate the suffering of the Sudanese people’, his delegates abruptly withdrew from proceedings altogether, derailing the agenda in a cynical display of gesture politics. The experience – as with Jeddah – is damaging but also instructive, showcasing the RSF as a rapacious, ever more unwieldy criminal enterprise, one posing an existential threat to social cohesion with little incentive (or ability) to restrain the identity-based violence it benefits from.

Hemedti’s recent ‘political ploys’ are, in many ways, a return to the half-baked proto-populism he has touted since 2019. For years, security across Sudan’s borderlands was outsourced to the RSF, with his men gradually assuming ‘social provision and insurance functions’ alongside a stake in harvest management, healthcare and local infrastructure. Seed capital and vocational training were doled out ‘à la International Monetary Fund… recipes’; contract farmers profited from new irrigation systems, canals and solar cells; and company towns like Zurrug received clinics and prefab schools. Subsidised by a lucrative ‘enclave economy’ (featuring everything from banking and tourism to mining and mercenaries), this pseudo-civic largesse enabled the RSF to market itself as a champion of social change, ostensibly empowering the country’s nomadic underclass. Of course, the framing was mostly cosmetic, used to drum up support among Mahariya clansmen while whitewashing Hemedti’s political credentials. Beneath revolutionary tropes and old egalitarian slogans, the group remained a patronage machine for the Dagalo family – an admixture of ‘employment bureau, protection racket, and commercial conglomerate’ – rather than an authentic expression of rural emancipation. Nevertheless, it did start to reflect (and leverage) genuine grievances, building up the aesthetic of governance – from medical centres to a child protection office – as a means of laundering its public image. As journalist Matt Nashed reported back in 2021, there was a ‘coordinated plan to paint the RSF as the saviour of Sudan’.

With the outbreak of fighting, any semblance of this political project has disappeared. Colloquially dubbed the ‘Republic of Kadamol’, disparate experiments in paramilitary rule amount to little more than a ‘pillage state’, a synonym for atrocity, brigandage and sexual violence ‘indelibly coloured by a toxic Arab-supremacist ideology’. Reports of harassment, abuse, arbitrary arrest, and summary executions by RSF troops are widespread, with UN analysts investigating the deaths of 10,000 to 15,000 people in El-Geneina alone. Much of the violence appears ethno-centric, levelled at black African (Massalit, Fur, Burgo and Zaghawa) neighbourhoods using ‘tactics, techniques, and procedures’ recycled from the early 2000s. Densely populated suburbs such as Ardamata were deliberately shelled before RSF and Tamazuj militia went ‘door to door, shooting young men’ while shouting racial slurs (‘abeed’ and ‘nawab’). As several witnesses recall: ‘… people were rammed by vehicles, burned alive in their homes, and picked off in the streets by snipers’, their bodies ‘left to rot in the sun’. Once a regional hub, El-Geneina now resembles a ‘ghost town’, with analogous trends emerging across cities like Zalingei and Nyala. As Volker Perthes, the UN’s former Special Representative to Sudan, warned, the war in Darfur is akin to ‘ethnic cleansing, grand scale’.

The full scope of this self-induced anarchy remains unclear: not only is third-party access to RSF-run areas difficult, but the group still retains a sophisticated PR system. Proxy outlets in Dubai fabricate content for foreign consumption, showcasing the restoration of pharmacies and markets, (staged) reconciliation efforts, and aid distribution via the so-called Sudanese Agency for Relief and Humanitarian Operations. A string of ‘special bulletins’ were even found circulating Westminster early in the conflict. At the same time, Hemedti has attempted (with some success) to project himself as a statesman, touring South Africa, Uganda, Djibouti, Ghana, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Kenya (on an Emirati jet) to improve his diplomatic standing. These are not just perfunctory but predatory exercises, helping to literally ‘scrub away … evidence of [RSF] crimes’. In reality, his gunmen continue to methodically destroy local infrastructure – telecommunication masts, hospitals, schools and wells – while starving communities of food and medical supplies. Tactical advances are often accompanied by a ‘collapse of …state services’ and the ‘wanton looting’ of ‘homes, warehouses, and vehicles’. Occupied districts of Khartoum appear ‘lawless’, the token deployment of RSF police and field-courts offering cover for mass-expropriation and asset-stripping. Across Nyala, any pretence of administration has been dropped entirely, with Abdel Raheem Dagalo, Hemedti’s brother, leaving ‘day-to-day governance’ to native leaders – policies replicated in Wad Madani and Geizra State. As Suliman Baldo, a regional expert, explained to Al-Jazeera: ‘the RSF doesn’t have the capacity to manage population centres and to provide an alternative to government systems … they are not hiding it, and this is why they are asking people to do things themselves’. The outcome is nothing short of a routinised and systemic process of de-institutionalisation – vandalism in the absence of political vision.

Worryingly, these conditions could deteriorate further. Following a massive ramp-up in wartime recruitment, the RSF is no longer a bounded entity under Dagalo control but a confederation of tribal groupings with discrete issues and interests. Yes, the pathology may be cross-cutting: ‘militarised masculinities’ bred by a collective history of social marginalisation, resentment and deprivation. Many stakeholders also share similar aspirations, at least on an abstract level, of ‘building a home for people like them[selves], nomadic communities that want to rest … and … [find] stability’. But there is little prospect of delivery by a coercive regime bent on extraction, where ‘paramilitary colonels double up as administrators, skilled only in running [extortion] rackets’. Paramount chiefs received cars, money and military office in exchange for support and local knowledge, with much of the rank-and-file either forcibly conscripted or attracted by easy spoils. These ties are hardly sufficient for holding a coalition together, especially if land and loot run dry. El-Geneina is indicative as the new (RSF-backed) governor, Tijani Karshoum, quickly became sidelined by a raft of traditional leaders, ‘each controlling their own territory’. In this context, the so-called ‘Janjaweed rebranded’ may be susceptible to the same patterns of fragmentation as its predecessor, with the aleutaawa – Arabs across Darfur and Kordofan – competing over resources, property and position. With the defection of Musa Hilal, a long-time rival of Hemedti and head of the Mahamid clan (kin of the Dagalo’s Mahariya), this disassembly could already be starting.

The RSF’s involvement in peace talks therefore brings major challenges. With his men scaling up the genocidal tactics used two decades previously, any concessions to Hemedti under the rubric of ‘conflict resolution’ risk contravening international humanitarian law and hindering urgently needed atrocity prevention. Importantly, his dependency on communal militias and ‘ethno-mercenaries’ also leaves the resonance of elite-level bargains somewhat ambiguous. As leaders of a cartel united by little more than ‘conquest’ and criminality, it is questionable how far the Dagalos could actually rein in the social upheaval they have unleashed, even if they wanted to.

Anti-Democratic Preferences?

As noted by Daniel van Oudenaren, there is a temptation (particularly online) to frame the war as a dialectic between ‘bad and less bad’, with RSF abuses making SAF appear palatable by comparison. Cast as a familiar fixture in the public imagination, the army’s ‘imperfections’ are offset by claims of longevity, professionalism, and cultural appeal. Buoyed in part by state-centric preferences, similar sentiments are discernible in diplomatic circles, with US Special Envoy Tom Perriello testifying to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations: ‘we do see a future for [the armed forces] … it is an official institution … it has a proud history, as well as some not so proud moments. That is not the same as what we see with … the RSF’. Such distinctions are entirely valid. But, as Geneva shows, this does not necessarily mean that the SAF is itself plausible as a partner in peace.

To assume otherwise risks neglecting (or minimising) military culpability in both the conflict’s origins and later atrocities. Benefiting from a rigged process of privatisation under former President Omar al-Bashir, the army owns a sprawling nexus of corporate surrogates, charities and state-run enterprises, including an 86.9% share of Omdurman National Bank, Khartoum’s largest financial body. Giad, an SAF holding-company, boasts over 24 subsidiaries alone, and high-ranking officers – the ‘khakistocracy’ – enjoy vast control over the country’s agricultural and manufacturing base, pharmaceutical industry and energy sector. This economic leverage has repeatedly stifled any attempt at reform, allowing the top brass to quickly undermine Sudan’s democratic transition. Tellingly, the final days of Abdalla Hamdok’s premiership – marked by (artificial) wheat shortages – were followed by the sudden availability of new military-linked brands on supermarket shelves. By launching the October 2021 coup in concert with Hemedti, SAF was ultimately key in quashing the drive for liberalisation and preserving a predatory, highly authoritarian system: ‘Bashirism without Bashir’. In doing so it also left Khartoum’s oligarchs overly dependent on the RSF, subverting (or inverting) traditional patron-client relationships in unsustainable ways. Given the centrifugal propensities of Sudanese kleptocracy, this ‘counter-revolution’ consequently became a conduit for civil war, one abetted and facilitated by the army leadership.

Once hostilities began, both sides displayed an ‘utter disregard for … international humanitarian law’, albeit in different ways. While RSF violence is distinct in scale and intent, reflecting a deliberate targeting of specific populations, SAF’s atrocities are often incidental, the product of indiscriminate artillery fire, airstrikes and barrel-bombing. Many blame Hemedti for exploiting civilians as ‘human shields’, but it seems some of the generals are themselves indifferent to collateral damage – crimes that have marred much of SAF’s history. Having dusted off starvation strategies from the 1990s, for instance, the army is now ‘wilfully restricting humanitarian supplies’, leaving millions without access to food. At the same time, leaked documents allegedly reveal a plan to divvy up the country’s 25 ministries and Central Bank among just four security chiefs. While General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s cabinet, the Sovereign Council, may mimic state functions, it remains the face of a military syndicate, a profoundly anti-democratic structure opposed to any real change. Human-rights defenders and medical workers face prosecution as ‘RSF spies’; ‘Emergency Response Rooms’ (ERRs) – community-run aid networks – are regularly coopted or shut down; and several activists have disappeared into local ‘ghost houses’. How this confection could possibly align with the political aims of Sudanese revolutionaries and Western donors is therefore unclear.

The second issue is that Sudan’s regular forces can no longer be considered a coherent entity. Dismissed as a ‘vanity project’ well before the conflict, SAF has steadily become an alloyed army, reliant on various non-state outfits from Darfuri ex-rebels to the Central Reserve Police, self-mobilised Islamist brigades, and community defence forces. To offset early manpower issues, recruitment leant heavily towards ‘popular resistance’ groups, an innocuous label for the inherently unstable blend of ultra-conservatives, religious extremists, ‘radical democrats’, and youth activists now bulking out SAF’s offensive capabilities. Temporarily aligned by fear of the RSF, rather than support for Al-Burhan, it is an ad hoc association based on the same logic – ‘counterinsurgency on the cheap’ – that empowered Hemedti in the first place, diminishing any ‘official’ monopoly over the use of force and ceding power to independent conflict actors.

Put bluntly, ‘the army [hasn’t learnt] from its past’, a failure carrying dangerous implications. Several commanders, including al-Burhan’s deputy, have already expressed concerns over SAF ‘losing control of its … coalition’ and facing ‘blowback’ from erstwhile allies. Clashes between the military and local Beja fighters across Port Sudan allude to this risk, with the proliferation of arms re-inflaming tensions over land and resource access. The collapse of Wad Medani (Sudan’s second city), and subsequent setbacks in Sinnar State, have prompted cycles of recrimination along ethnic lines, and untrained conscripts – the mustanfareen – are establishing their own checkpoints, harassing residents and ‘arresting anyone [calling] for peace’. The result is a jumble of contradictions, with authority devolved to local militiamen and Islamist groups like Al-Bara bin Malik fighting alongside progressive members of resistance committees. Plainly, such arrangements cannot be sustained. This heterogeneity is even causing issues among al-Burhan's paladins; backroom bargaining in Manama, for example, was upended as ideologues and former National Congress Party officials in the Foreign Ministry advocated increasingly hardline positions, exposing a lack of mutually agreed strategy. With the mounting prominence of Darfur’s Joint Protection Forces (an amalgam of former insurgent groups now aligned with the army), decision-making appears ever more convoluted, raising doubts over how far the SAF can sufficiently appease its component parts.

False Binaries and Blinkered Strategies

Evidently, SAF and the RSF are not the same, and their methodologies should not be conflated. One – at the upper levels – is a creature of kleptocracy; the other is anathema to the state itself. But both share an entropic logic, whether incidentally or intentionally, threatening any prospect of a democratic, equitable Sudan. Neither ‘strongman’ has a workable roadmap for delivering peace. Hemedti’s ‘10 point-plan’ is an affectation, and al-Burhan’s preconditions are a non-starter. More importantly, an already saturated political marketplace has decentralised and expanded significantly since April 2023, fostering parallel systems of conflict that no elite pact could conceivably reconcile.

Yet, the premise of internationally backed initiatives like the Geneva talks is still based on a SAF/RSF dichotomy, prioritising power politics above civilian agency. As Tahany Maalla notes, such mediation strategies effectively militarise civic discourse, ‘with military entities [steadily] shaping civilian agendas. Consequently, most new political alliances reflect this militarised voice, reinforcing militarised authority and legitimacy’. Though belated efforts have been made to improve inclusivity, the focus remains limited to proxy outfits like SAF’s Democratic Bloc or technocrats such as Hamdok, neither of which have much traction on ‘the street’.

Diplomacy needs to catch up with these new realities or risks reproducing faults that have hampered Sudanese peacemaking for years. The 2019 Transitional Government and later Framework Agreement, for instance, failed in part because the ‘men with guns’ set the terms, tempering any incentive or opportunity for change. Recycling this formula would simply repeat the same outcome, empowering those benefiting from violence, or stall from the outset given the plurality of armed groups now active across the country. Crucially, both come at the expense of ERRs, resistance committees, and civil activists trying to preserve Sudan’s December Revolution, a short-sighted trade-off that does little to resolve the conflict’s underlying causes. Encouraging a top-down deal between al-Burhan and Hemedti may also void any chance of preventing or prosecuting complicity in war crimes, mass killings, and ethnic cleansing. With El-Fashar under siege, a ceasefire is essential, but international engagement cannot be confined to two competing flavours of reactionary politics: kleptocracy or genocide.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author’s, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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