Sudan Findings
Key findings from PeaceRep’s research in Sudan (2021 – 2026)
PeaceRep’s Sudan research brought together distinct research strands across Coventry University, LSE CCRG, the University of Edinburgh and partner organisations.
Sudan’s trajectory since April 2023 continues to unfold within a landscape of profound political unsettlement (Pospisil 2023; Pospisil & Jenner 2022). The collapse of the transition and the eruption of the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have produced a fluid and violent competition over statehood in which neither authority nor territorial control is constant. A fragmented and continuously renegotiated arena persists, shaped by military actors, regional sponsors, civic forces, and local communities, while core questions of governance, sovereignty, and the future political order remain unresolved. As in other unresolved transitions, formal institutions survive in name, but effective power is exercised through ad hoc coalitions, coercive resource extraction, and hardening military alignments (Benson et al. 2022; Berridge 2025).
Browse key findings and publications in the tabs below.
Transition management
The war is as much a contest over statehood and legitimacy as it is over territory, and this contest is materially anchored in the coercive revenue complex that underpins Sudanese governance. This revenue complex encompasses both monetary and non-monetary forms of extraction, including formal revenues, off-budget security-sector income, checkpoint rents, commodities, diverted aid, assets, and control over trade routes. Fiscal fragmentation and militarised revenue systems have repeatedly placed public resources beyond civilian oversight, allowing armed actors to preserve autonomous economic power even when formal transition or peace frameworks promise reform. Peace and transition frameworks have therefore often performed fiscal reform while leaving off-budget and security-sector revenue systems largely intact (Benson et al. 2022; Benson-Strohmayer 2026; Benson-Strohmayer et al. 2025).
PeaceRep analysis shows that the conflict fuses three intertwined axes:
- the structural role of the security sector;
- the unresolved struggle between Islamisation and civic rule
- and the regional–geostrategic rivalries that now anchor each belligerent.
This dynamic has produced a competitive marketplace of transition management in which multiple, rival processes replace any single authoritative framework (Pospisil 2023). Stabilisation has therefore become the lowest common denominator, repeatedly prioritised at the expense of democratisation or even politics in a broader sense (Sarkar 2024).
Competitive regionalism and multi-mediation
Regional alignment has hardened wartime incentives and fragmented mediation. Egypt’s backing of SAF and the United Arab Emirates’ support for the RSF sit within a wider constellation that constrains multilateral diplomacy and sidelines Western leverage. Competitive regionalism predates April 2023: it accelerated after the 2021 coup and now shapes the conflict’s political economy (Pospisil & Jenner 2022). These alignments generate ad hoc bargaining spaces, empower military veto players, and further weaken prospects for a unified mediation architecture (Pospisil 2024; 2026). Against this backdrop, Sudan becomes a test case for a pragmatic and realistic approach to multi-mediation: harmonisation and streamlining efforts are symbolic at best, and meaningful progress requires targeted aims rather than the pursuit of a fragile grand settlement (Peter and Houghton 2023).
Mediation efforts that avoid political fundamentals consistently underperform. PeaceRep findings show that process-heavy formats that lack substance on civilian rule, predatory finance, and the security-sector political economy tend to stall or inadvertently legitimise armed veto actors. These dynamics illustrate a broader pattern of predatory peace, in which political settlements stabilise elite coexistence while reorganising, rather than constraining, the revenue practices and war economies that sustain authoritarian or military rule (Benson-Strohmayer 2026; Benson-Strohmayer et al. 2025; Sarkar 2024). Repoliticising mediation requires plural tracks, structured civic inclusion that does not overstate the influence of peripheral actors in the current polarised landscape, and explicit bargaining over the financial and territorial foundations of coercive power (Peter and Houghton 2023; Pospisil 2026).
The role of civic actors
PeaceRep research finds that civicness – medania – remains a central counterweight to militarised rule. Resistance Committees, Emergency Response Rooms, women’s organisations, professional syndicates, and diaspora networks should be understood as overlapping but distinct civic formations whose roles have shifted across revolution, transition, and war, rather than as a simple organisational succession. These actors sustain non-violent visions of justice, freedom, and accountable governance, even as their fragmentation reflects substantive political debate as much as organisational weakness (Makawi & Benson-Strohmayer 2025; Makawi 2026). Crucially, Sudanese civic formations have increasingly articulated fiscal claims, from revenue transparency and public audit to participatory budgeting and civilian oversight of security-sector finance, which constitute forms of civic fiscal resistance. These claims challenge not only corruption but the underlying fiscal practices that reproduce militarised governance and enable wartime predation (Benson et al. 2022; Benson-Strohmayer et al. 2025).
Revenue politics drive both war-making and public demands for change. Sudan’s wartime economy is sustained by a coercive revenue complex, in which intermediaries extract rents at checkpoints, customs sites, commercial hubs, and urban markets, often with little connection to fiscal legislation (Benson et al. 2022). Sudan’s formal fiscal authority remains highly centralised in principle, but actual revenue authority is fragmented across subnational, security-sector, military-commercial, and intermediary networks, creating a coercive system largely insulated from public audit, civilian oversight, and democratic accountability. Civic coalitions demanding accountability, transparency, military divestment, and redistribution directly confront this architecture, underscoring the centrality of revenue governance to wartime dynamics and any future political settlement (Makawi & Benson-Strohmayer 2025; Benson-Strohmayer et al. 2025).
Protection vacuums and partition anxieties now shape public narratives. The dismantling of national policing and the absence of a legitimate protection apparatus have enabled both the SAF and the RSF to claim guardianship of sovereignty and territorial integrity. Army media and wider public narratives have framed military rule through memory, legitimacy, and defence of the nation, while events in early 2025 heightened fears of fragmentation and fed xenophobic currents with direct spillover into South Sudanese public debates and cross-border relations (Berridge 2024; Berridge 2025; Pospisil 2025).
Sudan’s conflict remains embedded in a wider system of militarised governance, regional competition, and increasingly pressured but persistently mobilised civic resistance. Transitions will not follow linear designs. A durable political settlement will depend on recognising multiplicity, integrating civic actors, restructuring the coercive foundations of authority, and designing pathways with sufficient capacity to hold parallel processes without collapsing under their contradictions (Pospisil 2023; Berridge 2024).
References
PeaceRep’s key findings series presents a top-line overview of findings from the breadth and depth of the consortium’s data-driven and in-country research between 2021 – 2027. To view all PeaceRep publications, visit the publications database.
Researchers and contributors
Muzan Alneel, Matthew Benson-Strohmayer, Willow Berridge, Kasia Houghton, Alice Jenner, Raga Makawi, Mateja Peter, Jan Pospisil, Aditya Sarkar
Citation
Pospisil, J. & Benson-Strohmayer, M. (2026). PeaceRep Key Findings: Sudan. PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Evidence Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh.
References
Benson, M., Alneel, M., & Makawi, R. (2022). The Everyday Politics of Sudan’s Tax System: Identifying Prospects for Reform (PeaceRep Report). Conflict and Civicness Research Group, The London School of Economics. http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/5119
Benson-Strohmayer, M. (2026). From War Economies to Predatory Peace: How Peace Settlements Legitimise Extraction (PeaceRep Policy Brief). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Benson-Strohmayer, M., Makawi, R., Berridge, W., & Detzner, S. (2025). Security, Fragmentation, and Civic Futures: Rethinking Reform in Sudan’s Militarised Political Economy (PeaceRep Policy Brief). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Berridge, W. J. (2024). The African Union in Sudan: Perspectives from the Sudanese Media (PeaceRep Policy Brief). Conflict and Civicness Research Group, London School of Economics. http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/5118
Berridge, W. (2025). Reframing the Nation: Army Media, Memory, and Militarised Legitimacy in Sudan’s War (PeaceRep Policy Brief). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh. http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/6511
Makawi, R. & Benson-Strohmayer, M. S. (2025). Sudan’s Civic Future: Mapping Medania, Resistance, and Democratic Aspirations (PeaceRep Policy Brief). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh. http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/6459
Makawi, R. (2026). The Pitfalls of Women and Peacemaking in Sudan: Shifting Feminist Narratives in Revolution and War (PeaceRep Policy Brief). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh.
Peter, M., and Houghton, K. (2023). Congestion and Diversification of Third-Party Mediation in Sudan and South Sudan: First Look at some Longer-Term Trends (Global Transitions Report). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform. http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/5247
Pospisil, J. (2023). Post Architecture: The Competitive Marketplace of Transition Management in Sudan (PeaceRep Report). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh. http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/5196
Pospisil, J. (2024). A Stalemate That Does Not Ripen: On the Stagnant Busyness of Sudanese Conflict Mediation. PeaceRep blog. 31 Jan 2024. https://peacerep.org/2024/01/31/a-stalemate-that-does-not-ripen/
Pospisil, J. (2025). Sudan war: ethnic divisions are being used to cover up army failures – peace scholar. PeaceRep blog. 9 Feb 2025. https://peacerep.org/2025/02/09/sudan-war-ethnic-divisions-are-being-used-to-cover-up-army-failures/
Pospisil, J. (2026). From Architecture to Ecosystem: Repoliticising Mediation in Sudan’s Fragmented Peace Landscape. Austrian Forum for Peace Working Paper, No. 1/2026. Austrian Centre for Peace.
Pospisil, J. and Jenner, A. (2022). Fragmented Transitions in the Context of Competitive Regionalism: The Case of Sudan (PeaceRep Report: Global Transitions Series). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh. http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/5117
Sarkar, A. (2024). Peacemaking, Precarity, and Accumulation by Dispossession in the Horn of Africa (PeaceRep Report). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh. http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/5236