Sudan — three years of war unlike any other
Members of Sudan’s armed forces stand guard in the eastern city of Gedaref, Sudan. (AFP) Three years into Sudan’s war, a basic question refuses to yield a simple answer: Just what kind of war is this? Conventional frameworks — civil war, coup, proxy conflict — each capture a fragment, yet none fully explains a conflict where the state is not just collapsing but fighting itself in duplicate. It is possible to arrive at a satisfactory answer if we strip away labels and ask: What happens when a regime designs its own internal rival, arms it, legitimizes it, and then loses control of it? Sudan offers a rare, perhaps singular, answer. War here is not the breakdown of sovereignty. War is sovereignty splitting into two competing systems, each claiming continuity of the same state. The Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces are not adversaries in the traditional sense. Both are products of the same political ecosystem, shaped by decades of militarized governance and deliberate fr...
