When the World Misdefined the Crisis: Why International Initiatives Failed in Sudan

By Mohannad Awad Mahmoud
There is an uncomfortable truth that goes a long way towards explaining why every major international initiative aimed at resolving Sudan’s crisis has faltered.
These initiatives did not fail because they were poorly designed, lacked political will, or because Sudanese people reject peace. Rather, they failed because they were built upon an incomplete understanding of the crisis itself.
Public policy is shaped not only by facts, but by how those facts are interpreted. If the diagnosis is flawed, even the best-intentioned and most professionally executed initiative will ultimately produce only limited results.
Most international efforts were preoccupied with one question:
Who should govern Sudan?
The question that should have come first was:
How can the Sudanese state be rebuilt?
Between those two questions were lost years of negotiations, dozens of conferences, and hundreds of pages of agreements—culminating in the largest war in modern Sudanese history.
The distinction between these questions is not merely one of wording; it reflects two fundamentally different philosophies upon which peace initiatives have been constructed. If the crisis is defined as one of political transition, then establishing a transitional government, sharing power, and negotiating political agreements naturally become the path towards resolution. But if it is understood as a crisis of the state itself, the priority becomes rebuilding institutions, restoring the rule of law, and re-establishing the state’s legitimate monopoly over the use of force. Political competition can only follow within the framework of a stable state capable of protecting the constitutional order, regardless of who happens to govern.
Here lies the greatest strategic error.
Most international initiatives assumed that Sudan was experiencing a crisis of political authority, when in reality it was confronting a crisis of statehood. The distinction is profound.
A crisis of authority concerns who holds political power. A crisis of statehood concerns whether state institutions can survive, whether they retain the legitimate monopoly on the use of force, and whether they can continue to perform their essential functions irrespective of changing governments or political alliances. When a crisis of statehood is addressed with tools designed for a crisis of political authority, even apparently coherent solutions prove incapable of reaching the roots of the problem.
This might be described as the illusion of political transition before state-building.
Most initiatives assumed that creating a transitional authority would automatically produce a stable state. Sudan’s experience has demonstrated the opposite: it is a stable state that makes a successful political transition possible, not the other way round.
The initiatives attempted to construct the roof before laying the foundations.
This explains why both the Trilateral Mechanism and the Quad approached Sudan primarily as a country facing a stalled democratic transition. Their efforts therefore centred on reviving the political process, establishing a transitional government, and completing civilian governing institutions, on the assumption that agreement over political authority would naturally unlock progress on every other issue.
Reality proved otherwise.
Sudan’s crisis was never simply a political disagreement over the composition of a government. It involved far more fundamental questions concerning the very nature of the state, the relationship between the national armed forces and other armed formations, the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and the creation of institutions capable of preventing the collapse of the constitutional order during periods of political instability.
When negotiations finally reached these issues, the entire political process collapsed, because what had been treated as secondary matters were, in fact, the core of the crisis itself.
War then erupted, and international attention shifted to the Jeddah talks. Yet the underlying approach remained unchanged; only the subject of negotiation was different.
Instead of concentrating on power-sharing, the emphasis shifted to ceasefires, civilian protection, and humanitarian access. These were undoubtedly essential humanitarian objectives, but they addressed the consequences of war far more than its underlying causes.
The Jeddah platform was designed to manage the war, not to end it.
Its success was measured by the ceasefires it brokered and the humanitarian arrangements it facilitated, while the questions that had produced the conflict remained unanswered. How would the Sudanese state be restored? How would the security sector be reorganised? How would the state re-establish its monopoly over the use of force? And what political order could prevent conflict from returning once the guns fell silent?
It is therefore unsurprising that successive ceasefires collapsed and fighting resumed. The treatment alleviated the symptoms while leaving the disease untouched.
Today, the Quint mechanism seeks to revive the political process, but it faces precisely the same challenge.
If it continues to treat Sudan as a collection of separate files—a political file, a security file, a humanitarian file, and an economic file—it risks reproducing the very approach that limited previous initiatives.
This raises an important observation.
It is no coincidence that international mediation efforts often approach crises in this way. By their very nature, mediation institutions tend to break complex crises into separate, manageable components: one political, another security-related, another humanitarian, and another economic. Such an approach may improve administrative efficiency in crisis management, but it becomes inadequate when the crisis itself is one of statehood, because its various dimensions are deeply interconnected.
Once security is separated from politics, or state-building is detached from political transition, partial solutions risk becoming part of the problem itself, however well-intentioned they may be.
A further difficulty also emerged during various stages of Sudan’s political process: the limited breadth of consultation.
Some initiatives relied upon a relatively narrow circle of political actors, while many influential political, social, professional, and community groups remained outside the consultation process.
The issue is not whether one group or another deserves representation—that is the legitimate right of all Sudanese—but whether any political process genuinely reflects the diversity of Sudanese society and transforms negotiated agreements into a viable national compact.
Peace cannot be measured simply by the number of signatures on an agreement. It must be measured by society’s willingness to uphold it, defend it, and translate it into durable institutions and public policies.
For much of the past several years, the international community has approached Sudan primarily through the lens of crisis management, whereas Sudan has required state reconstruction.
That is the essential distinction.
Crisis management seeks to contain tensions, minimise losses, and prevent immediate collapse. State-building, by contrast, seeks to address the structural causes that allow crises to recur and to establish institutions capable of enduring regardless of changes in governments or political alliances.
Experience from many countries demonstrates that political agreements concluded before institutions are rebuilt may temporarily halt fighting, yet they often fail to produce lasting stability. Peace cannot flourish in an institutional vacuum. Legitimate, capable, and effective state institutions sustain it.
Today, Sudan needs less another international initiative than a correction of the point of departure.
The central question is not who will govern Sudan tomorrow, but how to build a state capable of enduring the day after tomorrow, regardless of who governs it.
Sudan’s experience has shown that peace-building does not begin with drafting agreements; it begins with rebuilding the state that will protect those agreements. Governments change, political alliances shift, and mediators come and go. The state alone provides the enduring framework that gives all these processes meaning and continuity.
Perhaps the most important lesson Sudan offers the international community is that its crisis was neither simply a failed political transition nor merely an unexpected war. It was, above all, a crisis of statehood whose true nature the international community recognised only too late.
And when the world misdefines a crisis, it is only natural that its initiatives should struggle—not because they lack determination, but because they have been searching for the right answer to the wrong question.
Translator’s note: This article is an opinion piece. The arguments and interpretations presented are those of the author and should not be understood as established fact or as reflecting the views of the translator.

Shortlink: https://sudanhorizon.com/?p=16223