Red Sea, Gulf and Horn of Africa: the Regionalization of the Sudanese Conflict (2/4)

Analytical focus on the war in Sudan which, since 2023, has already resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and millions of displaced people, with a particularly overwhelming human cost in Darfur, where mass violence, sieges and forced displacement have taken on a dimension that many international actors now qualify as genocidal.

Analyzing the Sudanese war according to the parameters of a conflict confined to the national territorial space would be aberrant, as the country's geography is a structuring factor. A Red Sea littoral state, backed by the Horn of Africa and located in immediate proximity to the Arabian Peninsula, Sudan occupies a strategic position that makes it particularly vulnerable to regional power projections.

For a decade, the Red Sea has become an area of active competition again. Trade routes, maritime security, control of migratory flows, ports, military and logistical bases overlap there. The Yemen conflict, for example, is one of its most manifest expressions. So is the Sudan crisis. In this narrow but decisive space, the growing rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, long masked by a rhetoric of strategic coordination, has gradually crystallized.

Sudan is one of the theaters where this rivalry takes a particularly brutal form. The Emirates have favored an indirect approach, based on networks, non-state armed actors, parallel economic circuits, and logistical hubs. Repeated accusations of supporting the RSF, which Abu Dhabi officially denies, are part of this logic. The trade in Sudanese gold, the routes passing through Chad and eastern Libya, access to Gulf markets and infrastructure form a coherent whole that allows the RSF to maintain their war effort despite sanctions and international condemnation. This approach does not necessarily aim for the military victory of the RSF, but for their ability to endure, to remain an indispensable actor, and to prevent any stabilization that would not go through their networks. War thus becomes a lever of influence and a means to weigh on the regional architecture without exposing oneself frontally.

Conversely, Riyadh favors a more classic logic of state stabilization. Support for the Sudanese army, often coordinated with Egypt, aims to contain the collapse of a Red Sea littoral state, to secure maritime routes, to limit uncontrolled migratory flows, and to prevent a lasting space of chaos from settling opposite Saudi coasts — because Cairo also supports the SAF with the aim of maintaining a state lock to the south against armed fragmentation dynamics and competing interferences — notably Emirati and Iranian — likely to challenge the security of the Nile and the regional strategic balance.

A regional festering sore

But if this approach is less flexible and more institutional, it is also more politically costly. The divergence between these two doctrines thus directly fuels the entrenchment of the conflict. Each Sudanese camp becomes the local relay of a distinct regional rationality, without either of the patrons having an interest in a clear victory likely to reconfigure the general balance. The Sudanese conflict then becomes a management file, not a problem to be solved. A kind of regional festering sore.

To this regional rivalry is added a more discreet but decisive layer: that of Russia and China. Certainly, neither Moscow nor Beijing play a direct patronage role in the Sudanese conflict. Their influence is exerted elsewhere, in the background of the international system, by creating the conditions for a lasting entrenchment.

Russia adopts an opportunistic stance. Without engaging frontally, it benefits from a weakening of the international normative framework. Every blockage in the Security Council, every watered-down sanction, every legal debate without operational translation contributes to establishing the precedent of an international order incapable of producing binding effects.

China, for its part, favors a silent and economic approach. Sudan remains for Beijing an area of long-term interest, both for its resources and for its position on maritime routes connecting Asia, Africa, and Europe. True to its doctrine of non-interference, China avoids any strong political condemnation and accommodates a conflicting status quo as long as its essential interests are not directly threatened.  

This Russo-Chinese positioning neutralizes any prospect of real international constraint. Legal qualifications, including that of genocide recognized by the United States, thus remain without operational translation. International law exists, but it no longer produces strategic rupture. Welcome to the global disorder of the 21st century.

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The Collapse of Sudan: The War for War (1/4)   

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