By Abdul Mohammed
Sudan is approaching a point at which continued war is becoming indistinguishable from partition. No borders have been agreed and no partition declared. Yet it is being constructed every day as institutions, war economies, communities and competing external alliances on either side of the front lines are separated from one another and reshaped. Those who wish to preserve Sudan’s unity must confront a difficult truth: the war must stop.
This reality does not diminish the significance of recent military developments. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have recovered dramatically from the humiliating setbacks of the early war. The recovery of Khartoum was militarily and psychologically important. SAF has regained the upper hand in important theatres and restored confidence in an institution that at one point faced an existential challenge. This recovery deserves acknowledgement.
But an upper hand is not victory.
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) retain substantial military capacity and territory across most of Darfur, remain active in Kordofan and retain access to extensive stretches of Sudan’s international borders, providing strategic depth and external supply routes. The balance has changed, but the strategic equation has not: neither SAF nor RSF has a credible military pathway to governing a unified Sudan. Each retains enough capacity—and access to outside support—to deny decisive victory to the other.
This is the war trap. Every advance renews expectations that tomorrow’s negotiating position will be stronger; every setback produces renewed mobilization and a search for weapons and sponsorship. Military time overwhelms political time. The war moves strategically while diplomacy too often moves tactically—from consultation to consultation and communique to communique. The danger is that the peace process becomes trapped in process while the war continues to transform the country.
The deeper danger is that war becomes habitual. Armed institutions adapt to it. War economies consolidate. Communities seek armed protection. Political constituencies organize around military patrons. Civilian formations risk becoming militarized in their alliances, language and political imagination. Mediation can also adapt to war, shifting gradually from ending it to managing its consequences.
This is how civil wars become forever wars. Once a war survives three years without a viable political settlement, it begins acquiring institutions, economies, constituencies and external relationships of its own. War ceases to be merely an instrument of politics and develops its own momentum. The experience of Sudan and the wider Horn of Africa should therefore force us to ask: what sustainable political outcome have our recent wars actually produced?
Territory changes hands and victories are proclaimed. Thousands die and millions are displaced. Cities, universities, hospitals, markets and livelihoods are destroyed. Yet the political questions that generated the conflicts remain. There may ultimately be no victors, only the vanquished: the people, institutions, economy and social fabric. Even the apparent victor may inherit a devastated state.
For Sudan, there is an additional danger: prolonged war is creating the material foundations of partition. Rival territorial authorities, separate security structures, war economies and divergent external relationships are gradually transforming military front lines into political realities. A country cannot preserve its unity merely by repeating the language of sovereignty while its territory, institutions and people are progressively separated by force.
External entanglement compounds this danger. Sudan’s internal war has become intertwined with the interests and rivalries of outside powers. Weapons, financing, logistics and political sponsorship do not merely influence the conflict; they sustain its capacity to reproduce itself. External intervention that enables rival armed centers also enables rival territories. A war externally sustained in this manner carries partition within its logic.
Many external actors are, at best, indifferent to Sudan’s democratic aspirations. Their interests do not necessarily require a democratic, sovereign and politically coherent Sudan; a weak, dependent or fragmented Sudan may be easier to influence. What may be strategically useful to an external patron may therefore be existentially disastrous for Sudan. The answer is not isolation, but the recovery of Sudanese agency: Sudanese must themselves to define the national interest, preserve their unity and prevent their country from becoming an arena for other states’ rivalries.
This is why the political history preceding the war matters. Behind its fog stands the democratic uprising of 2019—one of the broadest civic mobilizations in Sudan’s modern history. Sudanese demanded not simply different rulers but a different relationship between citizen and state: freedom, peace, justice, accountable government and equal citizenship. That unfinished aspiration must not become another casualty of war.
The central task is therefore to protect the political possibility for Sudanese to jointly determine the character of their state. A minimum convergence already exists across much of Sudanese political opinion: Sudan should remain one country; there is no sustainable military solution; the state must be preserved; civilian legitimacy and constitutional government must ultimately anchor political authority; and Sudan’s future must be determined through a genuinely Sudanese-owned and inclusive process.
This convergence now needs an autonomous political arena. An intra-Sudanese national dialogue is essential, but its autonomy must be protected. It cannot become an instrument through which any existing authority consolidates power or manufactures legitimacy. Nor should it be militarized—appropriated by armed movements, militias or belligerents until civilian voices merely reproduce the alignments of the battlefield. The dialogue must not import the war into politics. Its purpose is the reverse: to restore the primacy of politics over war.
Civilian forces, resistance communities, professional associations, women, youth, regional constituencies, political parties and other social actors must reclaim the national political arena. The objective should not merely be another power-sharing arrangement among existing elites, but the negotiation of legitimate governance, security, justice, constitutional order and ultimately a new Sudanese social contract.
A comprehensive cessation of hostilities remains essential. But Sudan should not wait for a perfect ceasefire before reducing violence. Every attainable and verifiable de-escalatory measure should be pursued to protect civilians, expand humanitarian space and rebuild confidence in politics. Practical forms of cohabitation—arrangements concerning humanitarian access, essential services, movement, civilian administration and local protection — may be necessary among armed actors, civilian authorities and communities. Such arrangements must neither legitimize territorial acquisition by force nor freeze partition. Their purpose should be to prevent unavoidable military coexistence from hardening into permanent political separation.
De-escalation must therefore be a bridge: from war towards cessation of hostilities, from armed authority towards civilian space, and from territorial fragmentation towards one national political arena.
International and regional mediation should reinforce this direction. Sudan does not need an endless proliferation of competing fora, initiatives and communiques. It needs coherent and complementary action: reduced external support for escalation; greater humanitarian and civilian space; serious engagement with the belligerents; and growing authority for a Sudanese-owned political process. Mediation should be judged not by how many meetings it convenes, but by whether belief in military victory weakens and politics becomes more authoritative than the battlefield.
None of this requires equating SAF and RSF, abandoning accountability or rewarding violence. Sudanese can disagree profoundly about responsibility for this war while agreeing on the necessity of saving their country. That distinction is vital in a deeply polarized society. If every call for negotiation is interpreted as support for one belligerent, and every acknowledgement of military reality as hostility towards another, the political space necessary for peace disappears.
There is another patriotism available to Sudan: the patriotism of preserving Sudan itself.
Sudan must remain one country. Military advantage must not be confused with sustainable political victory. Civilian political agency must be restored. The democratic aspirations of 2019 must remain part of Sudan’s national project. External relationships must serve Sudanese interests rather than transform Sudan into an arena for the interests of others.
Every additional month of war deepens de facto partition, militarizes politics and makes national recovery harder. Sudan’s unity cannot be saved after the war. It must be saved by ending the war.
The choice is increasingly stark: a forever war producing multiple armed territories and a fragmented society, or a negotiated political settlement that restores one national political arena and returns Sudan’s future to its people.
The latter is not surrender. At this moment in Sudan’s history, it may be the highest expression of patriotism.
The only victory worthy of Sudan is not the triumph of one armed formation over another while the country itself is destroyed, it is the preservation of Sudan, the restoration of politics over warfare, and the recovery of the promise of 2019. Sudanese themselves should be the authors of their state and their future.
Sudan must not become the final casualty of Sudan’s war.
Abdulgadir (Abdul) Mohammed is Former Senior Political Advisor and Head of Office, Sudan Mediation, United Nations.
