https://arab.news/87kcj
Three years into Sudan’s war, a basic question refuses to yield a simple answer: Just what kind of war is this? Conventional frameworks — civil war, coup, proxy conflict — each capture a fragment, yet none fully explains a conflict where the state is not just collapsing but fighting itself in duplicate.
It is possible to arrive at a satisfactory answer if we strip away labels and ask: What happens when a regime designs its own internal rival, arms it, legitimizes it, and then loses control of it? Sudan offers a rare, perhaps singular, answer. War here is not the breakdown of sovereignty. War is sovereignty splitting into two competing systems, each claiming continuity of the same state.
The Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces are not adversaries in the traditional sense. Both are products of the same political ecosystem, shaped by decades of militarized governance and deliberate fragmentation of coercive power. One represents institutional continuity; the other represents outsourced violence that has matured into an autonomous force. Their confrontation, now entering its fourth year, is less a rebellion than a schism within the architecture of the state itself.
Parity between them has erased the asymmetry that typically defines civil wars. No insurgent periphery advancing toward a distant capital exists here as in the Sahel. Armed confrontation began in the capital, among units that shared bases, intelligence networks, and command histories. Such proximity produced a form of warfare that resembles a hostile takeover rather than an insurgency. Control over ministries, airports, and financial institutions became immediate objectives, not distant prizes.
It raises yet another question: What does warfare look like when it begins at the center rather than on the margins? Sudan’s experience suggests that destruction accelerates exponentially. Khartoum, once home to over a quarter of the population and more than 70 percent of large-scale industrial capacity, became a battlefield almost overnight. The result was systemic decapitation, not gradual erosion. Banking ceased to function; hospitals shuttered at scale, and administrative systems evaporated in weeks rather than years.
There is also the human displacement angle, which reflects the same logic of compression and acceleration. As many as 15 million people — almost a third of the population — have been uprooted within three years. Numbers of this magnitude surpass peak displacement seen in longer and more internationally prioritized conflicts. Internal displacement alone approaches 10 million, while millions more have crossed borders into states already strained by fragile infrastructures.
So, why has this kind of war only generated such a limited response? Sudan’s war exposes what might be called an attention asymmetry. Conflicts with clearer narratives — external aggression, ideological disagreement, or geopolitical alignment — attract sustained engagement. Sudan offers none of these comforts. Violence here is messy, decentralized, and often devoid of a single identifiable aggressor, even when patterns of atrocity are evident.
External involvement further complicates interpretation without elevating priority. Multiple regional and international actors supply weapons, funding, and political cover, yet none invest sufficient diplomatic capital to enforce resolution. Such behavior suggests a paradox: high strategic interest coexists with low urgency for stabilization. In other words, Sudan matters enough to influence, but not enough to resolve.
Khartoum became a battlefield almost overnight.
Hafed Al-Ghwell
What, then, sustains a war that lacks ideological mobilization?
Evidence points toward an economic logic that replaces political vision. Control over gold mines, trade routes, and extraction networks provides a self-financing mechanism. Armed groups do not require popular legitimacy when resource flows can sustain operations independently. War becomes economically rational, even profitable, for its participants.
Such dynamics reshape the character of violence. In areas under paramilitary control, governance fragments into localized systems tied loosely to central command. Looting, extortion, and coercion serve both as incentives and operational methods. In areas under formal military authority, coercion adopts more bureaucratic forms, including forced displacement and proxy enforcement. Civilian protection becomes secondary to asset control in both cases.
Unfortunately, famine emerges as a structural outcome rather than collateral damage. Agricultural production has been disrupted, markets dismantled, and supply chains severed. Hundreds of thousands face starvation, while millions more exist in emergency or acute crisis levels of food insecurity. Slow-moving mass death rarely commands sustained global attention, yet its cumulative impact rivals or exceeds that of more visible forms of violence.
Historical continuity complicates any claim of novelty. Patterns of militia use, peripheral marginalization, and ethnicized violence predate the current war by decades. Armed groups were cultivated as instruments of control long before they became independent actors. Today’s dynamics therefore represent an evolution rather than a rupture. Previous strategies of governance have metastasized into autonomous systems of violence.
Sudan’s revolutionary movement also adds another layer of complexity. Grassroots networks demonstrated remarkable organizational capacity during the 2019 uprising and its aftermath. Yet wartime conditions have exposed structural limitations. Localized coordination proved effective for protest mobilization but insufficient for state reconstruction. Absence of unified political strategy allowed military actors to reclaim initiative.
We must therefore ask: Can a state survive when its coercive institutions operate as competing sovereignties? Evidence from Sudan suggests that fragmentation is the most plausible outcome — not an outright victory. Parallel administrations have already emerged in parts of Darfur and beyond. Territorial control increasingly resembles a patchwork of authority rather than a coherent national structure.
The future points toward a model resembling prolonged fragmentation rather than decisive resolution. Competing authorities may consolidate control over distinct regions, institutionalizing division. External actors, already embedded in the conflict, are likely to formalize relationships with whichever entities control key resources or strategic corridors.
Beyond its borders, the war in Sudan is slowly transforming into a worrying prototype of a new form of conflict where state failure is not merely collapsing but transforming into multiple competing state-like entities. Sovereignty becomes divisible, tradeable, and externally influenced. Armed groups evolve into hybrid actors — part military, part economic enterprise, part political authority. Such a model carries implications far beyond Sudan.
Future conflicts may follow similar trajectories where fragmentation is engineered, not accidental, and where war economies sustain themselves without reliance on civilian populations. International responses, still calibrated for older conflict types, remain ill-suited to such new realities.
The war, therefore, ceased to be a humanitarian catastrophe on an immense scale. It is a structural warning. Systems built on fragmented coercion, extreme centralization, and resource-driven power inevitably produce conflicts that defy resolution through conventional means. Three years on, Sudan is not a mere illustration of state failure. It is a revelation of what comes after.
• Hafed Al-Ghwell is senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center in Washington and senior fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies.
X: @HafedAlGhwell