Sudan: inside the world’s worst humanitarian crisis

Summary

The Rachman Review

Episode: Sudan: inside the world’s worst humanitarian crisis
Date: January 15, 2026
Host: Gideon Rachman (Financial Times)
Guests: Khouloud Khayya (Director, Confluence Advisory) and Alex de Waal (Director, World Peace Foundation, Tufts University)

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Overview

In this episode, Gideon Rachman explores the catastrophic situation in Sudan, regarded by the UN as the world's worst humanitarian crisis. He’s joined by Khouloud Khayya and Alex de Waal, both experts on Sudan, to discuss the ongoing civil war, the unprecedented atrocities (including up to 100,000 killed in a single massacre), the complex political and military landscape, and the international neglect that has allowed the crisis to escalate. They examine whether there is hope for peace and what a resolution might require.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Scale and Nature of the Crisis

• Sudan's Catastrophe:

  • Three years of relentless warfare have led to the displacement of millions and widespread hunger (01:30).
  • 70% of Sudan's population—approximately 30 million people—require urgent aid (01:33).
  • Huge camps for displaced people are scattered across the country, especially in Darfur.

• Al Fashir Massacre:

  • The capture and subsequent massacre in Al Fashir by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) marked a horrific turning point, albeit one that only briefly grabbed global attention (02:01).
  • Estimates for the death toll range from 5,000 to possibly 100,000, but the true figure is unknown due to data scarcity and governance collapse (04:58).

  “The UN recently was able to, for the first time, go to Al Fashir since pretty much the beginning of the war. And they say it looks like a crime scene.”
  —Khouloud Khayya [06:07]

2. Current State of the Conflict

• Dynamic Stalemate:

  • The conflict is a “dynamic stalemate” with shifting frontlines—mostly in the Kordofans and Darfur—heavily contested by both sides (02:50, 03:46).
  • The Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, hold the east, north, and central areas including Khartoum; the RSF now controls much of Darfur and parts of Kordofan.

• Collapse into Anarchy:

  • The war has led to a “generalized decay of any form of governance, a collapse of much of the country into what we could characterize as anarchy.”
    —Alex de Waal [03:52]

3. Nature of Atrocities

• Ethnically Targeted Violence:

  • RSF and allied militias carried out what Khayya brands “genocidal violence” in Al Fashir, displaying “a culture of impunity” and targeting specific ethnic groups, notably the Zarawa (06:07, 06:49).
  • Atrocities were often broadcast by the perpetrators themselves on social media.

  “We saw much of the violence that they committed from their own videos, from their own live feeds that they then posted on social media...how callous a lot of their actions were and how targeted some of them, particularly ethnically speaking.”
  —Khouloud Khayya [06:07]

• A New Form of Mercenary/Nihilistic Violence:

  • Alex de Waal describes the RSF as a hybrid between a mercenary enterprise and revolutionary nihilism, drawing comparisons to 19th-century slave traders where “human life was meaningless except insofar as they could accrue power and wealth” (08:39).

  “There is a spirit of cruelty. An idea that simply by the exercise of violence at this scale, they will create a completely new reality for Sudan.”
  —Alex de Waal [07:49]

4. International Response (or Lack Thereof)

• Neglect from the World:

  • Despite the scale—larger than crises like Ukraine or Gaza—there is little sustained international attention or intervention, partially attributed to geopolitical disinterest in African crises and desensitization due to violence in other parts of the world (10:01).

  “The international system has become very immune to the scale of violence that we have seen...especially when atrocities are happening in Africa.”
  —Khouloud Khayya [10:01]

• Humanitarian Collapse:

  • Famine has been consistently present for 18 months; half the population needs food aid, a quarter are homeless, health services are decimated, and funding cuts—especially from the US—have exacerbated the situation (11:24).

5. Local Survival and Positive Innovations

• Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs):

  • The only somewhat functioning "state" is a network of local volunteer groups, rooted in Sudanese tradition (nafir), tracing their origins to the civilian committees that led protests against the previous regime (13:09).
  • These grassroots organizations are providing essential services, evacuations, and even some measure of security.

  “I would argue that they might be the only thing keeping…what we know as Sudan together.”
  —Khouloud Khayya [14:18]

6. Responsibility of Both Warring Sides

• Not Simply “Good vs. Evil”:
  • The SAF, despite being recognized by the UN, is itself responsible for atrocities, especially ethnic cleansing in Jazeera and denial of famine documentation (14:39).
  • Historically, the SAF “has exclusively fought its own people” and now positions itself as a lesser evil—despite having enabled the RSF in the first place (14:39).

7. Foreign Involvement and Regional Politics

• Fueling the War:

  • The UAE is the RSF’s main supporter (weapons, finance, diplomacy), although it officially denies this; Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia back the SAF (17:12).
  • The conflict is enmeshed in a larger Saudi-UAE rivalry, with ramifications across the Red Sea and wider region (17:12, 21:16).

  “Sudan is embroiled in the rivalry across the greater Middle East between the Saudis and the Emiratis…One part of this strategic jigsaw, this rivalry.”
  —Alex de Waal [17:12]

• Global Power Disinterest:

  • There’s little political motivation from the US or Europe to pressure Gulf states—Sudan does not register as a top priority, even after Al Fashir (19:12, 21:16).

  “Sudan just does not feature in the top five, sometimes top 10 agenda items when these world leaders meet. And I don’t think Al Fashir has shifted that.”
  —Khouloud Khayya [21:16]

8. Barriers to Peace and Potential Solutions

• Peace Is Always Politically Mediated:

  • Sudan’s history shows wars end with political settlements, not military victory—but peace deals often lay groundwork for future conflicts by entrenching militarism instead of resolving root grievances (24:58).

  “Unless you end militarism in Sudan as the founding principle of government…you’re not going to be able to end the kinds of wars that we have seen.”
  —Khouloud Khayya [24:58]

• Civil Society’s Potential:

  • There are building blocks for civilian government from the post-2018 revolution landscape, but international appetite for supporting such a transition is lacking (24:58).

  “Only through answering those questions will we actually get a peace agreement that can 1) hold and 2) actually stop a further conflict from arising.”
  —Khouloud Khayya [27:15]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On RSF atrocities:

  “No less disturbing than the numbers is what we see in those videos, which is the relish, the glee with which those fighters torment, torture and murder the people in their captivity.”
  —Alex de Waal [07:49]

• On the international reaction to Al Fashir:

  “We heard a lot of ‘this can’t go on, this shouldn’t happen on our watch’ from governments, and then nothing.”
  —Khouloud Khayya [10:01]

• On grassroots resilience:

  “They are the only, I would say the only thing right now that is keeping people alive, that is able to evacuate people, helping women and others who have been raped. They are effectively modeling the state in every way by providing services, by providing security.”
  —Khouloud Khayya [13:09]

• On the risks of external, superficial interventions:

  “You get actually a new form of political contestation that is then solidified in a peace agreement.”
  —Khouloud Khayya [23:50]

• Hope for the future:

  “We do have these civil society organizations, we have these civilian coalitions and entities within the country and outside of the country now in the diaspora because of the mass displacement... they are working hard at answering some of these questions about how do we build a civilian state where everyone can be equal.”
  —Khouloud Khayya [24:58]

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Important Timestamps

• Start of episode/purpose: [00:36]
• Sudan’s humanitarian scale: [01:30–02:01]
• Current frontlines explained: [02:50]
• Intensity and anarchy of conflict: [03:52]
• Detail on Al Fashir massacre: [04:58–07:47]
• RSF as a new sort of mercenary force: [08:39]
• International neglect and negligence: [10:01–11:24]
• Famine and humanitarian disaster: [11:24]
• Emergency Response Rooms/localization: [13:09]
• Atrocities by both sides: [14:39]
• Foreign intervention and regional dynamics: [17:12–21:16]
• Barriers to peace and lessons from history: [24:58]

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Conclusion

The episode offers a deeply sobering but nuanced overview of Sudan’s collapse into starvation, violence, and state failure. Both Khouloud Khayya and Alex de Waal stress the critical role of local resilience—particularly volunteer networks like the Emergency Response Rooms—while painting a damning picture of international neglect. They highlight that, unless external powers prioritize Sudan and peace efforts tackle deeper, systemic militarism, the violence is likely to continue. Yet, the seeds of a better future—rooted in Sudan’s 2018 revolution and civil society—still exist, however fragile.

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For listeners and readers:
The crisis in Sudan, as depicted here, is not just another faraway war but a vast, multifaceted human tragedy—one that is both neglected and enabled by global indifference, and that desperately requires fresh diplomatic, humanitarian, and political urgency.

Transcript

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[D]

Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I'm Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week's podcast is about Sudan. Why Sudan? You might ask why not Iran or Venezuela? The answer is that the world's largest humanitarian emergency is taking place in Sudan. That's according to the un, which this month pointed to three years of warfare, widespread hunger and the displacement of millions of people. And as you'll Hear, up to 100,000 people may have been killed in a single massacre late last year. My guests are Khouloud Khayya, Director of Confluence Advisory, and Alex Duvall, Director of the World Peace foundation at Tufts University. So is there any hope of ending the war in Sudan?

[A]

A thousand days of war in Sudan.

[C]

Has led to this a catastrophe of displacement and starvation. With camps like this one in North Darfur scattered across the country. 70% of Sudan's population are now in dire need of aid. 30 million people. Many of the people in this camp have fled the regional capital Al Fashir, massacred by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces as they took control of it.

[D]

The capture of the town of Al Fashr late last year and its bloody aftermath put Sudan briefly into the global headlines. But the conflict there has not commanded remotely the same amount of attention as wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Partly for that reason, international efforts to end the war in Sudan have been fitful. The fighting continues and this week the military led government returned to the capital Khartoum for the first time in three years.

[C]

The country's prime minister has announced the official return of the government to the capital, Khartoum. We are back today, Prime Minister Kamal Idris declared on Sunday, calling it the return of a government of hope to Sudan's national capital.

[D]

But the civil war has taken many twists and turns. So what's the current state of the conflict? A question I put first to Khoulood Khayya.

[C]

It's what you might call a dynamic stalemate. I think if you track what's happening in Sudan on a day to day, week to week basis, you see that there's quite a dynamism in terms of the territory that's being captured or regained by one side or the other. But broadly, we see a frontline currently in the Cordofans region. That's a region in the southwest of the country that's being heavily contested over in this dry season. The dry season is usually late September, October to June, and that's when we see most of the territorial combat. What we have seen is that by and large, Sudanese armed forces, which is the national army, has control over the east, the center of the country, including the capital, Khartoum, and the north of the country, with some control of parts of the south. And the rsf, the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group, has a hold over now almost the entirety of the five Darfur states and large parts of Kordofan as well.

[D]

Alex, how intense is the fighting? I mean, this war's been going on for a while. Is it in an intense phase at the moment?

[B]

So this month Sudan passes a very tragic milestone, which is 1,000 days of this war. And I'm afraid there is no immediate end in sight. And it's a combination of a very widespread war among these two rival coalitions of forces. As Kholoud said, you have the Sudan army, which is itself itself a stitched together coalition, and the Rapid Support Forces, which is a coalition of its own. An occasional intense fighting, occasional intense massacre, but a more generalized decay of any form of governance, a collapse of much of the country into what we could characterize as anarchy.

[D]

And for long periods, the war has not really drawn much international attention. But then at the end of last year, suddenly this news came out of this terrible massacre in Al Fashar. Tell me, Khouloud, what happened and do you have a sense of what the death toll was? Because some people have put it as high as sort of 60, 70,000, others have said 5,000. I mean, either figure's horrific, but obviously they're different orders of magnitude.

[C]

What happened well before the genocidal violence, I think is probably the best way to put it, took place committed by the Rapid Support Forces and allied militias on 26 October. The UN had estimated that around two half of whom 130,000 children lived in Al Fashir city and the surrounding areas. Now we're seeing figures of people inside Al Fashir that are vastly fewer than that figure. What we're hearing from aid organizations that work in neighboring cities, like, for example, Towela, they're saying that they're seeing tens of thousands of people leave. Others have left through the north of Al Fashir. Some have gone into Chad, but we don't know what the actual figure is. And so there's a bit of a grim exercise of arithmetic right now where different aid organizations. The Yale Observatory, which tracks these things from space, is trying to figure out exactly how many people have died. But as Alex said, there is no governance capacity in many parts of Sudan, including and especially in Darfur, So we have no official figures to go off of. But I think 100,000 people killed by the RSF sounds about right, considering the number of people in that sort of.

[D]

Single period of the fall of the.

[C]

Town in just those few weeks. The UN recently was able to, for the first time, go to Al Fashr since pretty much the beginning of the war. And they say it looks like a crime scene. Now, what we've seen is evidence of atrocity from the 26th onwards for about a few weeks. And much of that is actually from the RSF themselves. They have relied on a culture of impunity almost through their entire existence. And as a result of that, we saw much of the violence that they committed from their own videos, from their own live feeds that they then posted on social media. And through that, we're able to get a sense just of how callous a lot of their actions were and how targeted some of them, particularly ethnically speaking.

[D]

So, I mean, if it's anything like 100,000, they were obviously not just taking on rival fighters, they were massacring civilians.

[C]

So before the atrocities took place, they had said very clearly and very publicly that they are treating Al Fashir as a place that is devoid of civilians. So if you look at what the RSF are saying, they're saying, we haven't actually killed any civilians. All of those that we killed are combatants. Now, it's very hard to believe that all 260,000, half of whom were children, were combatants. So those claims are, I think, not to be taken seriously. But certainly what we've seen is evidence from the Yale Observatory of mass graves in different parts of the city sort of building up over different weeks. We also saw satellite imagery of the RSF effectively going door to door targeting people, particularly those from the Zarawa ethnic group. And so there is a sort of picture building up here, and I think we haven't done a proper forensic analysis. No one has yet, but there is a picture building up here. Very spec. Ethnically targeted violence.

[D]

Yeah. Alex, what do you make of all that?

[B]

So I think no less disturbing than the numbers is what we see in Those videos, which is the relish, the glee with which those fighters torment, torture and murder the people in their captivity. And this speaks to, first of all, as Kholoud said, a sense of impunity. But something even more disturbing than that, really, a spirit of cruelty. An idea that simply by the exercise of violence at this scale, they will create a completely new reality for Sudan. They will tear down the Sudan that we have known and create something which is thoroughly sinister and terrible in its stead.

[D]

What are they trying to create?

[B]

Well, I think we can no longer look at the RSF through the traditional lens of a non state actor, a rebellion seeking state power. This is a new sort of hybrid of a transnational mercenary enterprise and a sort of revolutionary, nihilistic spirit. And in order to understand this, I think we have to go right back to the 19th century, to the way in which in the Nile Valley in the 19th century, we saw extraordinary cruelty by warlord, slave trader, mercenaries for whom human life was meaningless except insofar as they could accrue power and wealth to themselves. Boundaries were meaningless. The existence of an independent polity, an independent state, was part of what they could put within their portfolio. They could take it over and possess it as part of their grand ambitions. And we see a sort of revival of them. This, and I'm afraid, not just in Sudan. This is beginning to be a more transnational phenomenon on both sides of the Red Sea and across much of Africa.

[D]

Khalil, in other conflicts, you know, when you've had a massacre of that scale and international attention, it's been a turning point. People get involved. They say this can't go on. But there doesn't seem much sign of that in Sudan.

[C]

No. And there was a lot of difficulty in getting attention on Sudan before Al Fashir, when the atrocities happened. And because they were effectively livestreamed, there was an uptick in attention, media attention, but also policy attention. You know, we heard a lot of this can't go on. This shouldn't happen on our watch from governments, and then nothing. And I think part of it is that, as Alex said, there is a trajectory that we're on on both sides of the Red Sea, where this idea of the state is being contested daily, this idea of the sanctity of life is being undermined heavily. But even more broadly than that, I think what has been happening in Gaz Gaza has also shown that actually the international system has become very immune to the scale of violence that we have seen. And when you add to that the fact that the Sudanese atrocities are happening in Africa, oftentimes that translates to even less attention and less prioritization. So it doesn't surprise me at all that we're not seeing Al Fashir and the violence there becoming the turning point that is required. And actually it's becoming part of a greater expression of violence and expression of political counter station that we're seeing across the region.

[D]

Yeah. And Alex, even before Al Fashr, there were references and studies which said Sudan was one of the worst, if not the worst, humanitarian crises in the world. So just give us a sense of what's already happened before this terrible massacre.

[B]

So Khouloud mentioned the difficulty of estimating the numbers who were killed in the Al Fasha mega atrocity. We face the same difficulty with the humanitarian statistics. And it's really almost two years now that the voluntary agencies first began to say, we have data that indicate that famine conditions exist in different parts of Sudan. And the United nations has something called the Integrated Food Security Phase classification system, a very cumbersome, very data intensive method of assessing the magnitude and the severity of humanitarian crises. And they came to the conclusion about 18 months ago that famine did exist. And it has continued to exist ever since then. Sudan has about 46 million people. About half of them need food aid in order to sustain anything approaching a dignified livelihood. About a quarter of the people have lost their homes. They are homeless, displaced. Many of them are refugees, internal refugees, most of them internal. Perhaps 4 or 5 million have actually crossed the borders. We don't know the death toll, but it's certainly in the tens, if not the hundreds of thousands. Health services have essentially collapsed through most of the country. And the assistance that was coming in was very heavily reliant on funding and support from the United States. And a year ago, when the Trump administration failed, the US Agency for International Development, a huge amount of that aid was cut. And the most efficient form of assistance was something called the emergency response rooms. And I think Kholloud can speak better than I can to their experience. And what has happened since that cut in aid?

[C]

Well, the international community has been speaking about localization for upwards of 10 years, but there's never really been any will to see it happen. What we're seeing in Sudan is a very organic localization that is not top down. It's not emanating from some UN policy. It is the result of a very embedded Sudanese cultural norm or custom called nafir. But what's, I think, very special about the emergency response rooms is that they also emanate from the resistance. These are committees that held protests in 2018 and they brought down a 30 year dictatorship over Omar Al Bashir. And once the war started, they immediately converted themselves into these volunteer based mutual aid organizations on the ground. And they have faced a lot of targeting from the saf, from the rsf, from the various militias that are allied to one or the other. But they continue to work. They are the only, I would say the only thing right now that is keeping people alive, that is able to evacuate people, helping women and others who have been raped. They are effectively modeling the state in every way by providing services, by providing security. And because they are a network across the country, given the level of fragmentation we're seeing across the country right now, I would argue that they might be the only thing keeping country, what we know as Sudan together.

[D]

So that's a rare positive thing that's actually happening. I just also wanted to ask you about the other side of the conflict, the saf. You mentioned the kind of self documented atrocities by the rsf, the Rapid Support forces. But unfortunately it's not a kind of goodies and baddies. I mean, you also say that the Sudanese government have committed their own share of atrocities.

[C]

The Sudanese armed forces is in charge of a government in Port Sudan right now because of the coup of 2021. There is no constitutionally founded government in Sudan. They are the government that is acknowledged by the United Nations. But as the de facto authorities, they of course are also waging a war. And what we have seen that translate to is atrocities in Jazeera, particularly against ethnic communities in what is known the Kambus. These are informal housing or what is known as informal housing of particularly those who come from West Sudan or across the Sahel that was very ethnically targeted. They saw them as belonging to the RSF or familiar with the RSF and targeted them ethnically. We have seen, which I would count as an atrocity, the denial of famine. That has been very easy to see, that has been put through this rigorous documentation process by the United nations and found to be the case that has been denied by the de facto authorities effectively by the Sudanese armed forces. But what we have seen is also that if you look at the Sudanese armed forces history, they've never really protected the people of Sudan. In fact, the Sunnis armed forces might have the unfortunate distinction of being one of the few armies in the world that has exclusively fought its own people. And that has been a campaign that has been going on really since before Sudan even became independent. What they have tried to do now is position themselves as the lesser evil. You know that the RSF are so much worse than they are. But of course the RSF was emboldened and was enriched and was able to become the entity we know today, largely because of the Sydney's armed forces. They needed them to fight the rebell commit atrocities and genocides in Dar over 20 years ago and they've needed them to put down civilian uprisings ever since.

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[D]

So that's the local bit of it. But Alex, this is a conflict that has been fed by outsiders, and the role of the United Arab Emirates in particular in supporting the RSF seems to be very important.

[B]

I think that's absolutely correct. I mean, the first thing to say is that the UAE strenuously denies that it is supporting the rsf. But the overwhelming evidence is that from day one in this war, it has been the number one supplier of weaponry, possibly finance, mercenaries and diplomatic cover to the rsf. Meanwhile, we have Egypt, Turkey, and to some extent Saudi Arabia supporting the other side. And what this means is, first of all, that Sudan is embroiled in the rivalry across the greater Middle east between the Saudis and the Emiratis as to who is going to be the dominant power in the Arabian Peninsula and in the broader Red Sea arena. And we see that conflict playing out not just in Sudan, but also in Yemen, in the tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea in Somalia and Somaliland. Sudan is one part of this strategic jigsaw, this rivalry. But because the UAE refuses to admit publicly what it is doing, it's impossible to engage in a conversation with them about why they are doing it. So we have to infer, we have to make inferences from their patterns of behavior, what it is they're up to, rather than being able to sit down with Emirati diplomats and say, what is it that you want? What is your bottom line? You are an active agent in this war, and therefore you need to be an active agent in a settlement. And we simply haven't got there in terms of beginning to figure out what would be the formula for settling this.

[D]

Is that, do you think, partly because both the United States and European powers have too much at stake in the Gulf. So they don't really want to put pressure on either the Saudis or the uae. I was very struck. I think almost the week of Al Fasher, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, was in the UAE signing a deal. I doubt she wanted to really have a conversation about Saddam.

[B]

I think that's absolutely correct. So this analysis was very clear from the very first weeks of the war that the route to a peace settlement had to involve the Saudis and the Emiratis. And the Biden administration was well appraised of this, but decided not to do anything about it. Decided to put the Sudan file in the Africa bureau in the State Department, which is a way of saying, don't bother us. It's not important to us. And so the war was unresolved. Now, to his credit, the Secretary of State under Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, said, okay, I'm going to act on this. And he convened the quad, which is the U.S. egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE to begin talking about it at a diplomatic level. And they issued a key statement in September. But the real political weight which had to come from the White House, was not put behind it. And when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited Washington in the immediate aftermath of the Al Fasher massacre, he raised it with Donald Trump. And Donald Trump announced that he was going to do something. Now, the problem with Donald Trump raising it and saying he's done it at the behest of the Saudis is that Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates is therefore put in a corner. He is not going to be in a position to sort of say, I am responding to the pleas of my rival in Riyadh. And so things have remained stuck ever since then. And until there is the possibility of the US in particular, saying this is sufficiently important within the greater context of the Middle east, the Abraham Accords, which are brokered by the uae, all the other issues at stake with Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and, of course, relations with Israel, until Sudan is raised to a high enough priority in the Trump White House, I'm afraid I think it's very unlikely the US Is going to move on this.

[D]

Khulu, do you agree with that analysis that basically, until there's external intervention, this is just going to go on and on?

[C]

I think this war is taking place on three levels. It's taking place at a hyperlocal level where we're seeing a lot of the violence, a lot of the sort of vengeful violence that Alex spoke of earlier that is being driven mostly by local considerations and previous Conflicts in Sudan having been unresolved. Then there's a national level conflict which I think we all focus on mostly, which is the SAF versus RSF and then the various militias and civilian entities that back either side in this war. But the third level is this regional picture. And now I think with Yemen, we see it in a much more crystallized way just where some of these fault lines are. There is a larger Saudi camp, let's say, which includes Qatar, Turkey and Egypt versus a UAE Israel camp. And the worst aspects of that is washing up on the shores of Yemen, but also on the western coast of the Red Sea. And I think we haven't fully looked at what that is means in terms of the integrity of a lot of these very weak states in the Greater Horn of Africa. But Alex is absolutely right. Until Sudan becomes important enough, let's say, to the United States, which it isn't, it will not feature in the kind of conversations that one would expect between, for example, senior officials in Washington and senior officials in Abu Dhabi or Riyadh. And we haven't seen that actually from any other Western leader. We haven't seen that with the uk. We haven't seen it with the various European units countries or the European Union. Sudan just does not feature in the top five, sometimes top 10 agenda items when these world leaders meet. And I don't think Al Fashir has shifted that. I don't think that anything in the near term will necessarily shift that. I think there is a recognition that Sudan is in a very facile way too big to really contend with. The Americans have tried to give it a shot through this quad mechanism, but it's very, let's say, hit and miss in terms of their approach. The United States government has cut off the biggest agency they had, which I would say was the Institutional memory on Sudan, usaid, but also the Conflict Stabilization Office, which is housed within the State Department, that's now gone too. And a lot of the people who used to work on Sudan since really the late 1990s have all gone. So even if you get Marco Rubio to really focus on Sudan, even if you get Mazat Boulos, Trump's senior advisor for Africa and the Middle east, to focus on Sudan and do they have the teams to be able to sort out some of these issues? The concern here is that this kind of engagement could actually do more harm than good by having some kind of ham fisted, high level, regional, quote, unquote solution to Sudan that misses a lot of the national level and hyper local level conflicts, you get actually a new form of political contestation that is then solidified in a peace agreement.

[D]

So if Rubio picks up the phone and says, get me our Sudan experts, they'll say, we've just.

[B]

And I would add that there is a huge institutional experience, not just in the United States, but also in the United nations, in the African Union and Europe, in dealing with Sudan, which is not being utilized. And we know so much of what the diplomatic formula will be. We know peacekeepers will be needed, but there is no appetite, really, for going down any of this route. The formula that the Trump administration is following for peace is a combination of drama and theatrics and profit, and Sudan is not suited to either of those. So it's unlikely, I'm afraid, that the pieces are going to get put in place, at least while the file is held by the Trump White House and by the Saudis and the Emiratis.

[D]

But Khouloud, at some point, this conflict has to end. Do you have a sense of what a better future for Sudan might look like or how we would get there? What would a peace settlement look like? Would it have to involve, in the end, a compromise between these two deeply flawed and often very brutal protagonists?

[C]

Absolutely. History shows that we've had a lot of wars in Sudan of this nature, where you have the central military, Sunnis, armed forces, fighting a paramilitary group or rebel group, you know, what have you. In all of those conflicts, there has never been a military victor. There's always been a politically mediated agreement, a negotiated agreement that has ended wars. Unfortunately, we've also had agreements that actually lay the foundation for the next war. And we saw this very clearly in the past 20 years or so of the various peace agreements that we've had in Sudan. You know, ironically, peace agreements that end up leading to war. And that is because every peace agreement that Sudan has had, almost without exception, have been signed by military governments that have no interest in getting rid of the very reasons why people take up arms in the first place, which is to contest a military government. So unless you end militarism in Sudan as the founding principle of government, as the organizing principle of the state, you're not going to be able to end the kinds of wars that we have seen, because any group that has agreements with the government will not be able to go to the ballot box, for example, or go to their local representative. They will pick up arms because that's the only way to contest a military government. So I don't see with that kind of framework that we're going to necessarily see a difference unless within that framework for a peace, there is very much a push against the military state and an instituting of or reinstituting of civilian rule in Sudan. And we have all the building blocks for that, I would say, coming out of the 2018 revolution, because, as I said earlier, we do have these civil society organizations, we have these civilian coalitions and entities within the country and outside of the country now in the diaspora because of the mass displacement that are working hard at answering some of these questions about how do we build a civilian state where everyone can be equal, where some of these core grievances at different constituencies have had for decades can actually be resolved, where we can do fiscal federalism in a way that Sudan's very vast wealth and resources are actually shared between people rather than centralized and kept in the hands of the few. And only by answering those questions, which, as Alex said, no one really has the appetite for, certainly not the Arabs and certainly not the Trump White House. From what we have seen, only through answering those questions will we actually get a peace agreement that can 1 hold and 2 actually stop a further conflict from arising.

[D]

That was Khouloud Kaya ending this edition of the Rahman Review. You also heard from Alex Duval. Thanks for listening. Next week's episode will probably come from the World Economic Forum in Davos. That's the plan anyway. Please join me then for another edition of the Rachman Review.

[B]

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[C]

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[D]

Leaders at Capital Group on the Capital Ideas podcast. Subscribe and start listening today. Published by Capital Client Group Inc.