By Reem Abbas and Emily Sample
Consistently in the top ten most fragile countries, the hope brought by the 2019 coup has since been dampened by the continued cycle of unstable governance. This has escalated even further in 2023 as the tentative alliance between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary force, collapsed violently in April. While this most recent coup is not reflected in this year’s Fragile States Index, it is illustrative of the wider pattern of sustained fragility that has plagued Sudan.
Similar to the 2019 ousting of Omar al-Bashir, the October 2021 coup was executed from the inside. Mohamed “Hemedti” Hamdan and Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the leaders of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), respectively, worked in tandem to cut the civilian transitional government out of power and establish their own co-rule. Despite months of promises to build a joint military and civilian government, the citizens of Sudan were once more made voiceless in official governing. Unlike the years under Al-Bashir, though, the citizenry would not be cowed into total silence. Protests, mostly peaceful, continued in Khartoum, reminding Hemedti and al-Burhan that they would not be allowed to lead Sudan quietly into another authoritarian rule.
In his book “When Peace Kills Politics: International Intervention and Unending Wars in the Sudans,”[1] Sharath Srinivasan argues that the certain types of peace agreements instead instigate never-ending war because they reward armed groups while stymying civilian-led and non-violent participations that is critical to ending violence and establishing governance. This has been central to Sudan’s persistent fragility.
Sudan’s post-colonial history is a series of conflicts and subsequent shoddy peace agreements between the central government and regional armed groups. Even armed groups that start with a clear manifesto and sets of policy documents highlighting their goals and grievances concerning economic and political marginalization for the populations they represent, ultimately agree to peace agreements that are in fact power-sharing agreements that benefit the top ranks of the armed groups.
In 2006, the former government of Omar Al-Bashir was simultaneously implementing three major peace agreements. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) to end Africa’s longest-running war while the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA), known as the Abuja Agreement, was signed with the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army led by Minni Minawi and several armed groups from the Darfur region. At the same time, it was implementing the Eastern Sudan Peace Agreement (ESPA) with the Beja Front and the Rashaida Free Lions.[2]
The peace agreements have failed to consolidate power in the center and they have also failed to enable the national army to monopolize violence, which is critical to the stabilization of the state. In fact, the peace agreements led to further splintering of the armed groups as well as of the state itself through two critical ramifications. Firstly, they lead to more conflict and polarization. The ESPA for example transformed the conflict in Eastern Sudan from a “low intensity conflict to a complex conflict replete with tribal politics.”[3] Secondly, they inspired more armed groups who joined the fight to gain positions and benefits provided through the power-sharing agreements. The DPA for example led to the splintering of Darfuri armed groups and this continued even when the Doha Peace Process for Darfur (DDPD) was signed in 2011, another attempt to bring peace to Sudan. And yet, by late 2019, there were over 80 known armed groups in Darfur. Hottinger argued that the DPA led to fragmentation of both the armed groups and the communities in Darfur and led to in-fighting between the armed groups.[4]
Literature on Sudan’s failed peace agreements has argued that root causes of conflict were never addressed and instead the parties “get locked into debating who gets what when it comes to power sharing.”[5] This translates into ongoing insecurity on the ground, uneven development, marginalization, and discrimination, which themselves fail to be interrogated and addressed.[6]
The emergence of Hemedti and the RSF have deep roots in decades of failed peace agreements and militarization by the central government of the peripheries to join their counterinsurgencies. Hemedti’s career transpired in the backdrop of the DPA when in 2007, he began to express his grievances against the central government and decided to fight on the side of the armed groups by creating his own armed group.
As with other armed groups, Hemedti was lured back by the central government, rewarded with an army rank and money. At the time, this was possible by the oil money which allowed Al-Bashir to expand Sudan’s political marketplace. In the post-2019 period, the state continued to manipulate the slogans of the revolution to reward Hemedti for his supposed siding with the revolution and it also rewarded the armed groups in Darfur and in the new South Sudan through the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement (JPA). The level of violence seen after the revolution and the signing of the JPA was unprecedented and displacement continued to grow in Darfur, Blue Nile and other parts of Sudan. This violence came to a head once more in April 2023 when Hemedti and the RSF were negotiating the process of integrating into the SAF through the framework agreement, a process led by the international community.
Conflicts in Sudan show clear regional divisions. In addition to a Fractionalized Elites score that has never dipped below a 9.1, Sudan has a Group Grievance score that is only now reflective of its lowest ever score, a 9.3, which will almost undoubtedly increase again next year based on the current crisis. These two scores are illustrative of a highly divided society who have had to turn to other means of support and protection when the government is either unwilling or unable to provide safety and stability. As a result, fissures have deepened across Sudan, where ethnicity, race, and religion have been factors in grouping ‘us’ versus ‘them.’ The state has low legitimacy in the South and Western Sudan; this translated into taking up arms against the state and in some cases, declaring “free territory” within Sudan. Kauda for example, a small town in South Kordofan state is controlled by the SPLM/A (North Sudan faction) and is called liberated land as in liberated from the supposed occupation by the central government. This shows the deep extent of alienation between the central government and the periphery, an alienation perpetrated by colonial policies and borders and further deepened through policies by the post-colonial military governments.
As the RSF and Sudanese army negotiate a tentative ceasefire, the international community has the opportunity to bring peacebuilders to the negotiating table, and not continue the cycle of rewarding those who wage war. There is hope for Sudan to not spend the next 18 years as one of the top ten most fragile states, as it has the last, but only if the Sudanese citizens are able to regain their stake—and their trust—in the government.
[1] Srinivasan, Sharath. When Peace Kills Politics: International Intervention and Unending Wars in the Sudans. London: Hurst & Company, 2021.
[2] Munzoul Assal, Musa, Abdul-Jalil and Omer Egem. May 2020. “Lessons learned from Sudan Peace Agreements” Unpublished report. Peace Research Institute: The University of Khartoum.
[3] Munzoul Assal, Musa, Abdul-Jalil and Omer Egemi. May 2020. “Lessons learned from Sudan Peace Agreements” Unpublished report. Peace Research Institute: The University of Khartoum.
[4] Hottinger, Julian. 2006. “The Darfur Peace Agreement: expectations unfulfilled” in Mark Simmons and Peter Dixon (ed), Piece by Piece: Addressing Sudan’s Conflict. Accord: An International Review of Peace Initiatives. London. Issue 18:2006. p. 47.
[5] Al-Battahani, Atta. 2006. “A Complex Web: Politics and Conflict in Sudan”, in Mark Simmons and Peter Dixon (ed), Piece by Piece: Addressing Sudan’s Conflict. Accord: An International Review of Peace Initiatives. London. Issue 18: 2006, p. 10.
[6] Munzoul Assal, Musa, Abdul-Jalil and Omer Egemi. May 2020. “Lessons learned from Sudan Peace Agreements” Unpublished report. Peace Research Institute: The University of Khartoum.
Photo by Ammar Nassir, Unsplash