The war in Sudan has evolved into a confrontation that no longer resembles just a struggle over power or territory. It has become a battle over the survival of the state itself and over who defines authority, who commands legitimacy, and whether Sudan can remain a unified political entity.
Since the fall of Al-Fasher to Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militias on 26 October, this deeper truth has become unavoidable. Sudan is not simply experiencing conflict; it is negotiating the terms under which the state either persists or dissolves.
However, despite this shift, international mediation continues to rely on frameworks that assume Sudan is still governed by a coherent political centre, disrupted only by two rival armed actors. These frameworks rest on the belief that the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF are symmetrical actors whose rivalry can be managed through balanced negotiations.
But this symmetry is illusory and dangerously misleading.
The SAF, despite its institutional strain, remains the historic military arm of the Sudanese state. Its authority is tied to constitutional memory, national identity, and the idea of a unified Sudan. The RSF, by contrast, emerged from the margins of the state and built its influence through coercion, economic predation, and territorial domination. It is not an alternative wing of the state; it is an alternative political project. Treating the two as interchangeable is not neutrality. It is a profound misreading of Sudan’s political landscape.
This misreading has allowed diplomacy to drift into a role it rarely acknowledges – that of a political actor. By framing the SAF and RSF as equivalent stakeholders, mediation has already taken a position on the nature of Sudan’s future. It implicitly recognises territorial control, even when achieved through siege and displacement, as a valid basis for political negotiation. In doing so, diplomacy risks transforming the outcomes of violence into the foundations of a post-war settlement.
The situation in Al-Fasher illustrates the gravity of this dynamic. For 18 months, the city was subjected not only to military pressure but also to a deliberate campaign of dismantlement. Water networks were sabotaged, markets suffocated, hospitals attacked or occupied, and displacement camps, especially Zamzam, shelled repeatedly.
Humanitarian access was turned into a weapon, and civilians were targeted simply for carrying food or water. None of this was incidental. It was a systematic attempt to break the city’s capacity to resist and impose a new political order shaped by scarcity, fear, and coercive control.
When RSF fighters finally entered the city, they did not restore governance. They replaced it with a mosaic of armed micro-zones, controlled through checkpoints, disappearances, and extortion. Violence became not a tool, but the operating system of rule determining who could move, who could trade, who could eat, and who could remain alive.
Al-Fasher’s fall was therefore not just a military event; it marked the collapse of the last functioning political centre in the western state of Darfur in an event with implications extending far beyond the region.
This transformation has unfolded alongside a humanitarian catastrophe on a historic scale. Sudan has become home to the world’s largest displacement crisis. More than nine million people have been uprooted internally, while 4.5 to five million have fled across borders. In total, 13 to 14 million Sudanese have been displaced. Over 30 million people require humanitarian assistance.
Independent field documentation indicates that more than 250,000 people have been killed since the war began. These figures are not merely statistics; they reflect the disintegration of the state and its replacement by competing territorial sovereignties.
In such a landscape, mediation that assumes a unified national framework becomes not only inadequate but counterproductive. The SAF is fighting to preserve what remains of Sudan’s territorial integrity, while the RSF is using war to construct an alternative political geography rooted in coercion, demographic restructuring, and control over humanitarian and economic lifelines.
When diplomacy treats these opposing visions as equivalent, it strengthens the actor whose authority is derived from force rather than legitimacy.
This is why the warning issued by Abdel-Fattah Al-Burhan, chair of Sudan’s Transitional Military Council, that certain proposals “dismantle the army and preserve the militia” has resonated so deeply inside Sudan. Even critics of the army recognise that a state without a national military institution is not a state at all. The SAF’s imperfections do not alter the fundamental truth that it remains the only institution capable of anchoring Sudan’s continuity. To flatten this distinction is to participate in the unmaking of the country.
If the current diplomatic trajectories continue, Sudan may emerge from the war not as a unified state but as a collection of armed jurisdictions loosely connected by international agreements. This outcome, a managed form of fragmentation, would not end the conflict as much as institutionalise it.
Diplomacy’s greatest failure lies not in a lack of effort but in a conceptual misunderstanding. It continues to treat violence as a temporary symptom of political disagreement and something that will recede once a political balance is reached. But in the RSF-held areas of Sudan, violence is not incidental. It is the logic of rule. It governs movement, access to food and humanitarian aid, and the right to remain in one’s home.
To integrate such an order into a political settlement is not to tame it but to legitimise it.
Sudan is not negotiating a ceasefire. It is negotiating the conditions under which it may continue to exist. The danger is that diplomacy, by failing to distinguish between a sovereign institution and a militia, may mistake the outcomes of violence for political facts. A settlement that places the SAF and RSF on an equal footing will not produce stability. It will entrench the forces that dismantled Sudan’s political centre and accelerate its fragmentation.
For diplomacy to play a constructive role, it must begin with clarity: a sovereign state and an armed militia are not equal. Any settlement that ignores this truth cannot produce peace. Sudan’s survival depends not on balancing rival armed actors but on restoring the authority, coherence, and legitimacy of the state itself.
Anything less will not halt Sudan’s disintegration. It will merely give it institutional form.
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