Support Sudan’s Revolution, Not an Elite Peace Deal

The standard peacemaking formula is deceptively neat. Secure a cease-fire to end violence, fasten it down with interim power-sharing among armed actors, roll out a timetable for institutional (security, economic, constitutional) reform, and then bring in civil actors toward the end goal of democratic elections. Yet this formula repeatedly fails. It too often rewards violence and undervalues civil politics.

Securing cease-fires and power-sharing deals to end violence is seductive. Diabolically so. Such deals can silence the guns for a time, but they often shore up troublemakers’ grip on power, making hollow their commitments to real political change. Seasoned belligerents are adept at navigating peacemakers’ road maps, frameworks, and milestones such that they come out intact and stay on top.

Sudan is no exception. Four years after a nonviolent popular uprising drove dictator Omar al-Bashir from power, a series of neat peacemaking blueprints kept two generals—Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed “Hemeti” Hamdan Dagalo, who had cut their teeth under Bashir—in control of the state until they violently fell out with each other and tore the country apart.

Now, peacemakers are repeating the same mistakes. While violence escalates and civilians bear the brunt in horrific and targeted ways, failed cease-fires come and go. Courting the belligerents to make peace only legitimizes them as the primary protagonists in deciding Sudan’s future, right when they are brutally destroying it. Worse, every ounce of political capital spent on the generals is an ounce stolen from the Sudanese citizens who are still pursuing their country’s transformation.

Instead, diplomats need to put Sudan’s revolutionaries front and center. The country needs radically different diplomatic action in solidarity with its courageous citizenry. That starts with discarding the focus on peace and transition embraced by diplomats in recent years and prioritizing the revolutionary power that toppled Bashir.

When Sudanese on the street continued to demand their revolution, protesters were brutally massacred. Carefully coordinated by multiple security units seeking to crush the revolution after their palace coup, the RSF killed more than 100 peaceful civilians and threw scores of dead bodies into the Nile.

Foreign peacemakers had no other ideas than to court the military coup-makers to desperately get the transition they were so wedded to back on track.

Yet, at the precise moment when the ancien regime’s legitimacy was at its lowest, diplomats propped up the generals as necessary peace partners. A joint civilian-military Sovereign Council to oversee a 39-month transition to democracy gave the generals continued control for the first 21 months. The power of collective civic action was halted in its tracks.

A truly democratic transition was further undermined by the installation of a technocratic government to oversee an institutional reform timetable. When civil actors demanded that bread and fuel subsidies not be hastily removed—for fear of exacerbating socio-economic hardship and political grievances—technocratic ministers, chasing neoliberal reforms for debt relief mandated by the International Monetary Fund, won the day. This was to be a technocratic revolution, devaluing civil politics until democratic elections at the end of the transition.

When formulaic power-sharing brought a number of armed rebel groups into the transition process under the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement, Sudan’s revolutionary civilian spirit was further weakened. The balance of power was now heavily tilted towards security and technocratic elites, not the popular revolution. For proponents of the transition template, Sudan’s burgeoning neighborhood resistance committees, forged during the popular uprising, were an unpredictable and impatient risk to their road map. Foreign peacemakers effectively said to these resistance committees: “Don’t worry about debating, discussing, and imagining Sudan’s political future now—wait for democratic elections.”

Such peacemaking often encourages further political violence. That’s because cease-fires that provide a route to power-sharing send the message that violence pays. And as the past four years of so-called transition have repeatedly shown, if power-sharing locks in an armed actor’s grip on authority (and economic gain) for a time, there are few incentives to move on from interim arrangements.

Those already participating in peace talks can threaten violence, and those excluded can use violence or its threat to provoke cease-fire talks to get in. Longer-term technocratic attempts at institutional reform, notably around the security sector, often feed this dynamic, creating lucrative revenues for warlords whose guns-for-hire need financing.

Second, peacemaking reinforces the currency of violence by damaging civil politics. When peacemaking seeks neat deals among belligerents, it often simplifies underlying conflicts: this war “between two generals,” Sudan’s “north versus south” war, Darfur’s “tribal conflicts” between Arabs and Africans—and the list goes on. Yet Sudan’s conflicts are multifaceted, and expedient simplifications violate this truth. And that leads to new motivations for resistance for excluded actors.

Peacemakers’ alibi for such short-term expediency is an institutional destination on a road map: democratic elections. Yet idealizing such end states defers serious attention to civil political action in the here and now, in turn debilitating it. Civil actors are left with either collusion or cynicism, rejection, and resistance to peace. In the very process of peacemaking, they lose faith in the future.

The plan for Hemeti’s RSF to be subsumed into a single Sudanese army was an existential threat much like what Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group faced in Russia.

Sudanese activists amplified their rally cry on the streets: “No negotiation. No partnership. No legitimacy.” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres appealed to the protesters’ “common sense” to save a chance for “a peaceful transition towards a true democracy.” But a peaceful transition is exactly what the coup-makers had scuppered.

The resistance committees resisted peacemakers’ fetishization of an elite-centered technocratic transition and its illogical appeasement of Sudan’s warlords. They have been proved right all along. Yet another transition plan was hatched in late 2022, and this fell apart violently in April precisely when, once again, the generals were scheduled to begin conceding some power, to each other (by merging their forces) and to civilian leadership.

The plan for Hemeti’s RSF to be subsumed into one Sudanese Armed Forces was an existential threat much like what Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group faced in Russia. Hemeti rejected Burhan’s proposal that this happen in two years and instead proposed 10 years. Moreover, he demanded that, first, the RSF assume significant command-and-control authority within this unified force. The peacemakers sought a middle ground, but the middle ground was war.

Sidelined all along by the transition process and suspicious of it, the resistance committees’ power lay in acting in concert in underground meetings and on the street. After the coup, resistance committees across the country engaged in a bottom-up process aimed at reaching a consensus on Sudan’s future. Tellingly, such a process produced not one but two charters. Nascent, organic, plural, decentralized, leaderless—the resistance committees represent a kind of organic politics that makes deal-making diplomats and transition technocrats uncomfortable.

Now, in the face of brutal violence, the resistance and revolutionary spirit of the Sudanese somehow remains heroically alive. When diplomats were busy evacuating themselves and their nationals, abandoning Sudanese to the bloody fate that their failed transition made possible, it was Sudanese, including through the resistance committees, who coordinated routes to safety, organized access to food and water, and innovated to create impromptu health services.

A deep belief of the resistance committees is that Sudan’s future must start now, not later. Peacemaking defers such urgency, labeling it as impatient and idealistic. After violence erupted in April, Sudanese activist and writer Muzan Alneel captured their frustration.

“We were asked to be realistic after a massacre and accept those war criminals. We were asked to be realistic after a coup. And we are even, I think, will be asked to be realistic after a war,” she told PBS NewsHour, 10 days into the crisis. Anticipating the now failed U.S. and Saudi-led cease-fire talks in Jeddah, she added, “I’m hearing news of some sort of negotiation … [diplomats want] to bring back the same old agreement that brought us all [what] we are going through right now.”

Western countries and regional powers cannot now recycle the same peacemaking orthodoxies that degenerated a popular revolution into a flawed transition that led to this war. This time, the revolution, not the transition, must be central to diplomatic efforts.

There’s no neat formula for this. Twenty years studying peace interventions in Sudan has taught me that work plans and templates create more trouble. Thinking differently starts by asking, how can the outside world lend strength to the formidable sovereign power of Sudan’s resistance?

At a minimum, any peace initiative cannot weaken civil politics in the attempt to end violence. That invariably backfires. The generals cannot come away from a peace deal with a slice of political power. Moreover, any initiative must be answerable to Sudan’s civil resistance. It is sovereign. Second, there must be expanded political space for civic activism. Prior to this crisis, that at least meant ensuring the right to convene on the street. Yet military leaders violently crushed this with impunity. Now, foreign powers must help enable civic activists to convene, including virtually or in safe places.

Most importantly, radically fresh thinking is needed on how to support the resistance committees as centrally important in shaping Sudan’s future. There’s always a risk of damaging a social movement’s power and legitimacy in an attempt to provide it with support. That must be avoided. Instead, support requires listening to the resistance committees on their demands and good reason and winning their trust and confidence over time. Beyond this, the resistance committees must decide their place in any initiative to decide Sudan’s future, not foreign peacemakers.

If they are distrustful of elite politics, they should not be dismissed impatiently. They know their power, in horizontal networks, inclusive discussion forums, and on the street. They alone have been Sudan’s saviors when all else has failed. Any future peacemakers must answer to Sudan’s civil resistance and be accountable to it. The revolution must have the last word.