Sudan War: scenarios, fake settlements and strategic deadlocks (4/4)

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.

The Sudanese war regularly leads to announcements of mediation, imminent ceasefires, and “diplomatic windows.” At almost regular intervals, an international actor thus “rediscovers” the conflict, promises an initiative, or convenes talks. These sequences essentially produce political noise, and sometimes a temporary suspension of fighting on a specific front, but they never alter the structure of the conflict. However, the repetition of the same pattern does not constitute an accidental failure of diplomacy; it is the product of a deeper misunderstanding of the very nature of the ongoing war.

The first deadlock stems from an erroneous reading of the conflict as a classic confrontation between two poles that could be brought to a compromise. However, neither the Sudanese Armed Forces nor the RSF are engaged in a logic of political negotiation. What they seek to preserve are not shares of power in a future state, but autonomous capacities for harm, networks, and exploitable territories. In this context, any mediation aimed at power-sharing or institutional transition appears unrealistic.

The proposed ceasefires stem from the same illusion. They assume that the war has become too costly for the actors involved. However, paradoxically, the prolongation of the conflict remains rational for both sides. For the army, it allows them to maintain their status as the official representative of the state, obtain minimal international support, and contain the total collapse of the military apparatus. For the RSF, it ensures the continuation of economic flows, the consolidation of their territorial control in the west, and makes it impossible for a centralized order to re-establish itself against them.

Developments reported at the end of January highlight a series of military advances attributed to the Sudanese Armed Forces, particularly in South Kordofan. The lifting of old sieges, the recapture of secondary localities, and the reopening of roads are presented as signs of a new dynamic, or even a gradual shift in the balance of power. But this interpretation needs to be put into context, as it corresponds less to a structural transformation of the conflict than to a strategic communication sequence aimed at several distinct audiences: internal support for the army, mobilization of regional sponsors, and restoration of military credibility undermined by two years of attrition warfare. On the ground, these advances remain costly, localized, and fragile. They affect neither the RSF's grip on Darfur, nor their capacity for remote harm, nor the general fragmentation of the country. Above all, they confirm a central characteristic of the Sudanese war: the increasing dissociation between visible military events and deep strategic dynamics.

In this sense, the narrative of reconquest also participates in the war. It does not necessarily announce its end but becomes an additional instrument.

To this is added a second, even more structural, impasse: the systematic marginalization of Sudanese civilian actors. Since 2019, they have been invoked, celebrated, then progressively excluded from all real decision-making processes. Diplomatic initiatives continue to call for a “return to civilian transition,” but without ever creating the material, security, and political conditions for its emergence. Civilians serve as a moral justification for processes conceived elsewhere, between regional sponsors and armed actors…

This marginalization is not only a political injustice. It is an active factor in prolonging the conflict. In the absence of a structured and protected civilian pole, war remains the only audible language, and any attempt at internal political recomposition is, therefore, crushed between the violence of armed actors and the strategic indifference of their external supporters.

The scenarios for ending the war discussed in diplomatic circles then oscillate between two equally problematic extremes. The first is that of a decisive military victory for one of the camps. However, this scenario is not very credible, inasmuch as no actor has the necessary capabilities to impose total domination over the entire territory without triggering a new phase of fragmentation or local guerrillas. An army victory risks reactivating peripheral rebellion hotbeds; a triumph of the RSF would institutionalize stateless mass violence, difficult to stabilize.

The second scenario is that of a formal partition of the country. And, here again, the obstacles are considerable. An official partition would imply international recognition, stabilized borders, and durable economic and security arrangements. However, the current fragmentation is functional precisely because it remains informal. It allows actors to benefit from the rents of war without assuming the political costs of a new order.

Between these two extremes, therefore, a third scenario takes hold, unformulated but de facto dominant: that of a prolonged conflict of variable low intensity, punctuated by peaks of extreme violence, and managed by regional actors who control its parameters without seeking to resolve it. This scenario is not an uncontrolled drift. It is the sad product of an alignment of interests. Regional powers find in it a field of influence, major international powers see it as a manageable peripheral conflict, and local armed actors find rents and strategic autonomy. As for the civilian populations, they pay the price. As always.

We must then ask the question that few analyses dare to formulate explicitly: what would be the conditions for a real change? They are unlikely today, but not theoretically impossible. They would first involve a minimal convergence among regional sponsors on the need to stabilize the African shore of the Red Sea as an area of collective security, by abandoning the logic of spheres of influence. But this goes against the global logic de facto generated by Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping. They would then presuppose a credible reactivation of the international framework, capable of producing tangible costs for armed actors, beyond declarations and symbolic sanctions. Finally, they would require a massive and protected investment in the reconstruction of a Sudanese civilian pole as a real actor rather than a mere negotiation backdrop.

However, none of these elements are present today. The Saudi-Emirati rivalry remains; the international order is more fragmented than ever, and Sudanese civilian actors are isolated, exhausted, dispersed. In this context, the war continues through strategic coherence.

It is sad to note that Sudan has become nothing less than a brutal laboratory of contemporary forms of conflict: long, barely visible wars, embedded in regional rivalries, made possible by a permissive international environment. And as long as the Red Sea remains an area of competition rather than cooperation, as long as stabilization is perceived as more costly than instability, as long as violence can be externalized without major consequences, the war will continue. Inevitably, and for a long time to come.

Because, once again, it is not spontaneous chaos, but a profoundly inhuman order, yet profoundly cynical for those who benefit from it.

Read also on the same topic:

Sudan's Collapse: War for War's Sake (1/4)

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

Iran and Its Indirect War in Sudan (3/4)