Forgotten Sudan: Structural Fragility and the Failure of the International System

In December 2018, a massive wave of protests erupted in Sudan. Sparked in the city of Atbara by deteriorating economic conditions and rising bread prices, the protests quickly evolved into demands to oust the regime of Omar al-Bashir, who had ruled the country with an iron fist for three decades. In April 2019, the military deposed al-Bashir—a move many viewed as a response to popular pressure, even though power remained in the military.

This was followed by a fragile transitional period characterized by a power-sharing arrangement between two main parties: the Forces of Freedom and Change—a broad civilian coalition comprising opposition parties, professional associations, and activists, which led negotiations with the army to finalize the August 2019 Constitutional Declaration—and the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group with roots in the Janjaweed militias employed by al-Bashir during the Darfur war; despite being integrated into the official security apparatus, the RSF remained a parallel force to the army, enjoying significant autonomy in command and funding under the leadership of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemedti”, who had amassed vast wealth from gold revenues and political influence that made him a genuine rival to the army for power. However, this arrangement was short-lived; the October 2021 coup toppled the civilian government, once again concentrating power in the hands of the military.

In April 2023, long-simmering tensions between the Sudanese army—led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan—and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—led by Hemedti—erupted into open conflict. The dispute centered on three key issues: the integration of the RSF into the army (which Hemedti rejected, as it would diminish his influence), competition over gold revenues in Darfur, and the struggle for political power in the post-transition era. This conflict engulfed the capital, Khartoum, and vast swathes of the country; now in its fourth year, the war continues to rage, leaving behind tens of thousands of dead, millions of displaced people, and a catastrophic humanitarian crisis ranked among the most severe in the world.

In a country of approximately 48 million people before the war broke out, more than a third of the population already lived below the poverty line, amid deep economic fragility and accumulated social inequalities. But after three years of war, those figures no longer reflect reality as they seem to belong to another era entirely. Today, more than 30 million Sudanese are in need of humanitarian assistance, making this one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world. Around 14 million people have been forced to flee their homes.  Of these, millions are internally displaced within the country, and others have crossed, albeit with great difficulty, into neighboring countries.  In addition, nearly half the population faces acute levels of food insecurity, with documented cases of outright famine in some areas. Meanwhile, communicable diseases are spreading amid the collapse of the health system and in the quasi-total absence of basic services, meaning that death arrives not only through bullets, but through hunger, illness, and neglect.

Sadly, this war is not an anomaly in Sudan’s modern history.  It is rather yet another episode in a long chain of endemic crises and ruptures. Since independence, Sudan has lived under the weight of internal conflicts, multiple military coups, and the chronic marginalization of its peripheries, thus producing an environment primed to explode at any moment. But what raises the most pressing questions today is not merely the repetition of tragedy, but also the world’s inability and perhaps unwillingness to intervene effectively to stop it, or even to limit its consequences.

Since the end of the Second World War, the world has developed a body of international laws and norms ostensibly designed to govern armed conflicts and protect civilians from the ravages of war. Yet what we witness in Sudan today exposes the profound gap between these principles on paper and their application in practice. Civilians have not been mere incidental victims; they have frequently become direct targets.  This has taken the form of burning villages, raping women and girls, killing children, and forcibly displacing millions.  These are not simply “violations”; they are an expression of the failure of an entire international system to enforce even the minimum standards it set itself to uphold.

What is even more painful is that this failure is not new. It is an extension of a long record of international inertia in the face of conflicts and atrocities in various parts of the world. Today, we live through these horrors in real time, watch them in video footage, read about them in instant reports, and grasp their details with an immediacy unavailable to previous generations. And yet, this advance in awareness has not been matched by any parallel development in the capacity to act or to change course. If anything, we may have grown more accustomed to witnessing suffering and less capable of stopping it.

In this context, the stark disparity in the perceived value of human life across the world cannot be ignored. Life in Sudan does not receive adequate, if any, attention or response.  We have yet to see rapid international mobilization, precise information flows, and detailed analysis of every human loss. The tragedy in Sudan seems to be reduced to approximate figures, without names, without stories, without genuine accountability.

Thus, Sudan finds itself today at the intersection of two crises: the crisis of the post-colonial state, with all its political and social fragility, and the crisis of an international system that was never fully capable of honoring its commitments. In past decades, this system may have managed conflicts without resolving them. Today, the system seems to be experiencing an erosion and an incapacity to manage international conflicts and limit human casualties.  

Against this backdrop, looking at Sudan becomes essential not only to understand what is happening within its borders, but to illuminate far broader dysfunctions in the structure of the international order and its relationship with the global South. This is why it is necessary to step back and deconstruct the history of Sudan’s structural fragility, both politically and socially, and understand how the conditions were formed that made war a permanent possibility.

At the same time, analysis at the level of the state or the international system is not sufficient.  We propose to look into the direct human experience. War is also measured by what it leaves on the bodies of women, who bear compounded burdens of sexual violence and exploitation, and on the futures of children, who are deprived of education and pushed into trajectories of displacement and deprivation whose effects may last for generations. It is equally visible in the complex humanitarian crisis Sudanese people live every day amidst the absence of food and water, the collapse of healthcare, and the total absence of any form of safety.

This article is part of a series that attempts a deeper understanding of the context and crisis in Sudan. In the articles that follow, we will examine in detail key themes, namely an analysis of the structural fragility that preceded the war, exploration of displacement and refugee experiences, a study of the gendered dimensions of the conflict and its impact on education and the future of coming generations, and finally an in-depth reading of the complex humanitarian crisis. The goal is not merely to describe, but to build a critical understanding that situates Sudan within its local and international context and thus lays the groundwork for a more substantive conversation about what lies ahead.