To understand why Sudan is in a civil war, one must look beyond the immediate violence in Khartoum and into the deep structural fractures of the state. The current conflict, which erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, is not an isolated incident but the violent culmination of decades of political mismanagement, ideological division, and the struggle to define the nation itself. What began as a coup attempt has solidified into a protracted civil war characterized by ethnic fragmentation, economic collapse, and the complete failure of the post-colonial project.
The Fragile Legacy of Nation-Building
Sudan entered independence in 1956 as an artificial construct assembled by British colonial administrators. The primary challenge facing the new state was not governance, but integration. The northern Arab-Islamic elite based in Khartoum viewed the non-Arab, non-Muslim populations of the south, west, and east as subjects to be controlled rather than citizens to be equated. This centralization of power ignited a series of civil wars that defined the nation’s first five decades. The mantra of "Arabism" and "Islamism" imposed from the capital created a permanent sense of alienation and resistance among marginalized groups, establishing a template for conflict that persists today.
The Long Shadow of Omar al-Bashir
Consolidation of Militarized Power
The thirty-year dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir, which began with a coup in 1989, did not resolve these tensions; it weaponized them. To maintain control, Bashir perfected a strategy of divide and rule, relying on a security apparatus that brutally suppressed dissent while empowering parallel military forces. The most significant of these was the Janjaweed, a militia drawn from Arabized nomadic groups, which was deployed to counter insurgencies in Darfur and the Nuba Mountains. This strategy effectively transformed local grievances into national security crises, laying the groundwork for the systematic use of paramilitary violence as a state tool.
The Creation of the Rapid Support Forces
In the aftermath of the 2019 popular uprising that finally toppled Bashir, the international community and domestic revolutionaries believed they had a chance to build a new Sudan. However, the transitional period was dominated by a power-sharing agreement between the military, led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and civilian groups. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the direct successor to the Janjaweed, was integrated into the state security apparatus rather than being dismantled. General al-Burhan and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti) became the two primary power brokers, using the chaos of the transition to consolidate private armies, smuggling networks, and economic fiefdoms, turning the state into a prize for personal enrichment.
The Immediate Catalyst and the Breakdown of State Authority
The civil war officially began on April 15, 2023, when the RSF launched coordinated attacks on military installations across Khartoum. The stated trigger was a deadline to integrate the RSF into the regular army, a move that would have stripped Hemedti of his autonomous command. However, the deeper cause was a fundamental disagreement over the future of the state: whether it would be a pluralistic democracy or a continuation of the militarized kleptocracy that had defined the Bashir era and was now being perpetuated by the SAF. With the collapse of the power-sharing agreement, the state fractured along the lines of these two competing centers of gravity, dragging the country into a conflict where no faction claims to speak for the people, but both fight for the right to control the state’s coercive apparatus.
The Role of Geopolitics and Economic Collapse
More perspective on Why is sudan in a civil war can make the topic easier to follow by connecting earlier points with a few simple takeaways.
