Geography of wealth ties Sudan’s feuding factions together

Decades after South Sudan voted overwhelmingly to break Africa’s largest country in two, a new seam is being stitched into Sudan’s political fabric. In diplomatic circles and even on social media, speculation has hardened into a strange fascination: that the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces is headed toward a “Libyafication” of Sudan, cleaving the riverine heartland from the western peripheries of Darfur and Kordofan.
On the ground, the conflict has indeed entrenched two rival administrations. Yet the prospect of a clean, internationally recognized divorce is a mirage. Sudan is destined to remain a single state — perpetually broken, violently contested, and incapable of governing itself either as a coherent whole or through a surgical amputation.
Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan’s SAF operates from the Red Sea city of Port Sudan, preserving the institutional skeleton of the old regime: the central bank’s transaction records, the Foreign Ministry’s diplomatic cables, and control of the arterial highways that channel agricultural exports toward the port that handles more than 90 percent of the country’s legitimate foreign trade.
On the other hand, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo has established a shadow “state” across Greater Darfur and chunks of Kordofan. Since late 2025, a self-proclaimed civilian administration in Nyala, South Darfur, has issued ministerial decrees, collected informal taxes, and printed its own identification documents. No capital has recognized it, but within its territory it runs the schools, the clinics, and the checkpoints.
Parallel to the military fragmentation, a populist discourse has taken root in the Nile Valley that frames partition as liberation. The “State of the River and Sea” movement argues that the north should cleave itself from Darfur and Kordofan. It is rhetoric that draws from the deep veins of anti-Darfuri and anti-pastoralist sentiment, promising that a smaller, ethnically homogeneous Sudan might finally stabilize. The campaign has since mobilized diaspora communities, gaining traction among northern elites who see the western territories as a permanent economic drain and a security liability.
For all the visible scaffolding of two separate governments, however, a formal partition cannot work. Neither faction can afford to sever the territory, and the Horn of Africa cannot absorb the shock of a multi-state collapse.
The first obstacle is geography, and it is called Kordofan. Unlike the 2011 secession of South Sudan, which followed a clear administrative boundary established in colonial times, the front lines slicing through Kordofan are jagged, constantly shifting, and studded with heavily armed communities. Kordofan is the hinge between the Nile Valley and the western provinces. Its desert roads and gum arabic orchards form a nonnegotiable strategic corridor.
Moreover, South Sudan’s only crude oil export pipeline winds through Kordofan’s Muglad Basin to Port Sudan. For the SAF, losing Kordofan would cut off pipeline revenues and sever the eastern heartland from Darfur’s gold and livestock, turning the west into a hostile bloc on its doorstep. For the RSF, relinquishing Kordofan would cut its supply lines to weapons smuggled through Libya and Chad and choke off the pastoral migration routes that sustain its tribal base. Consequently, the battle for Kordofan is existential, and it precludes any stable demarcation.
The geography of wealth further ties the antagonists together.
Darfur and Kordofan host most of Sudan’s livestock — a herd of over 100 million head, with camels, cattle, and sheep that constitute one of the world’s largest live-animal export trades. Those animals cannot walk themselves to foreign markets; they require the quarantine stations, veterinary certifications, and refrigerated shipping berths concentrated in Port Sudan.

Sudan is trapped in an unusual equilibrium that defies both unity and partition. Proponents of the latter should abandon the fantasy of a clean territorial divorce and the seductive rhetoric of isolationists.

Hafed Al-Ghwell

Western Sudan also accounts for most of the gold that made Sudan the continent’s third-largest producer before the war, with the Jebel Amer mine in North Darfur alone yielding an estimated $1 billion annually at its peak. But raw gold must be refined and stamped to enter international markets legally. That processing happens in Khartoum’s industrial zone and in Port Sudan’s mint. A landlocked rump state in the west would be forced to smuggle its entire mineral output across porous borders into Chad or Libya, accepting deep discounts that would make governance unviable.
Meanwhile, the eastern state would lose the primary commodities that generate foreign exchange and customs revenue, leaving it dependent on handouts from international backers. A formal split would thus deliver immediate economic strangulation to both hypothetical entities.
What is more, the international community has its own reasons to resist a breakup.
The first is the risk of cascading border failures. Chad, already hosting more than 700,000 Sudanese refugees, would face an expanded Darfuri statelet bristling with militias linked by blood to Chadian Arab groups. Weapons and mercenaries would flow freely along the Ouaddai corridor, reigniting cycles of rebellion that have destabilized N’Djamena for decades.
Elsewhere, South Sudan’s entire economic architecture is tethered to Sudanese territorial unity; its oil pipeline is a single thread that any warlord along the 1,500 km route can sever. The Central African Republic and Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region would similarly absorb blowback from a stateless belt stretching from the Sahel to the Horn.
An already staggering humanitarian emergency would tip into an uncontrollable catastrophe. Under a formal partition scenario, the legal vacuum would collapse the humanitarian coordination architecture that, however fragile, still enables the World Food Programme to negotiate access with both sides. Without a recognized state framework to sign memoranda of understanding and guarantee safe passage, aid convoys would become untenable.
For external powers with strategic interests along the Red Sea, a unified Sudan — however hollow — remains indispensable.
Port Sudan sits within striking distance of the Bab Al-Mandab chokepoint, through which roughly 10 percent of global seaborne oil trade passes. Egypt, for instance, views eastern Sudan as its strategic depth, essential to protecting the Nile’s flow and preventing encirclement by hostile actors on its southern border. Other actors have poured billions into Red Sea hubs, logistics corridors, and investments that rely on a single sovereign partner to secure land rights as well as port contracts. None of these powers can protect their interests by negotiating with a scattering of ethnic fiefdoms.
Sudan is, therefore, trapped in an unusual equilibrium that defies both unity and partition. Proponents of the latter should abandon the fantasy of a clean territorial divorce and the seductive rhetoric of isolationists. Instead, mediators must concentrate on what is achievable. After all, a catastrophic divorce is not the only alternative to a failed marriage. The alternative is a prolonged, messy but managed cohabitation within a single fractured home.

• 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