From Architecture to Ecosystem: Repoliticising Mediation in Sudan’s Fragmented Peace Landscape

Author: Jan Pospisil

Sudan highlights a form of mediation that no longer corresponds to inherited assumptions about peace processes. Since April 2023, the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has become fully regionalised and internationalised. Regional actors shape military and political dynamics while simultaneously engaging as mediators. In this environment, mediation operates as a political instrument within legitimacy struggles rather than as a neutral mechanism for conflict resolution. A dense landscape of parallel initiatives that coexist without converging into a single process has emerged.

Conventional mediation frameworks misinterpret this environment. Fragmentation is commonly treated as dysfunction and answered with calls for harmonised and linear attempts of peacemaking. In a context such as Sudan, however, fragmentation reflects the absence of a shared political horizon among external actors. It also reflects the strategic use of mediation itself. Attempts to impose coherence reduce political space and obscure how mediation functions under contemporary conditions. Track-based distinctions further distort analysis by relying on assumptions about orderly progression and controllable influence that do not apply in such settings.

Mediation and dialogue work in Sudan operate in a multimediation environment best understood as a mediation ecosystem. Within this ecosystem, legitimacy emerges through conduct and sustained effort rather than through formal mandates or official recognition. Effective practice prioritises participant-driven engagement, durability over speed, nonextractive formats, and careful attention to how individual initiatives affect the wider political environment. The Sudan dialogue initiative reflects this approach by sustaining political agency and outcome-oriented dialogue without forcing alignment. Mediation remains effective where it preserves political space and keeps political options open.

This working paper provides the conceptual grounding for an ongoing Sudan dialogue initiative that operates within this environment. It does not present that work as a model or a case study. Instead, it uses Sudan as the lens through which the limits of prevailing mediation assumptions become visible, and through which alternative ways of thinking about mediation, and political engagement in more general terms, can be developed.