Sudan’s conflict history begins with imperial state-building along the Nile, but the modern republic emerged from Anglo-Egyptian colonial rule, which governed the north and south separately while concentrating power in Khartoum. Its defining historical process has been the struggle against a centralised, exclusionary state. Independence did not resolve the uneven incorporation of southern, western, and peripheral regions; two north–south civil wars culminated in South Sudan’s secession in 2011. Sudan’s wider historical significance lies in this failure of post-colonial state formation, which made it a pivotal case of partition, displacement, and regional instability across the Horn of Africa and Sahel. The Darfur war exposed the same pattern of marginalisation and state-sponsored militia violence. Since 2023, war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces has revealed how deeply those coercive structures survived, turning a struggle for political transition into a contest for the state itself.
Throughout 2025, the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) continued, with mass one-sided killings of civilians by the RSF and allied forces. UCDP recorded 75,174 battle-related deaths in Sudan, including 65,911 civilians.
The World Map of Conflict uses two complementary datasets from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to visualise conflict per country.
The colour coding of the overview base map is derived from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), which contains fully verified conflict data aggregated at the country level. UCDP publishes the GED annually (typically May–June of the following year) to allow careful validation of every recorded event.
The map on this country page draws from the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset (CED), which includes the most recent reported events and provides a near-real-time overview of conflict developments. Because these events are still under verification, the data should be considered preliminary.
Historical Lenses
To understand Sudan’s conflict history, it is first important to understand what kind of country it is. Historians often explain the same country in different ways depending on what they believe are the main forces driving history. Each historical lens below offers a different, evidence-based interpretation of the country’s development.
The interpretation most widely accepted by historians, based on mainstream historical research and university scholarship. It reflects broad areas of agreement while acknowledging where historians disagree.
Sudan lies in north-east Africa where the White Nile, flowing up from equatorial Africa, meets the Blue Nile, flowing down from the Ethiopian highlands, at the city of Khartoum. Around that river junction lies a narrow, fertile, Arabic-speaking and overwhelmingly Muslim heartland; beyond it, in every direction, lie vast and far less governed regions — the western region of Darfur, the southern borderlands, the Nuba Mountains, the eastern hills — home to scores of non-Arab and non-Muslim peoples. Until 2011 Sudan was the largest country in Africa, and its history is the long, unfinished attempt of the Nile-valley centre to govern that enormous and varied periphery. Ancient Nubian and Christian kingdoms once ruled the river; Islam and Arabic culture spread southward from the fourteenth century; conquest, colonial rule, and independence in 1956 all handed power to the same riverine centre. Historians read the century since as one long, repeated crisis of that arrangement — a series of wars between Khartoum and its margins, of which the south’s 2011 secession and the war raging since 2023 are the two most severe.
Robert O. Collins, A History of Modern Sudan (2008); P.M. Holt & M.W. Daly, A History of the Sudan: From the Coming of Islam to the Present Day (5th ed., 2000).
Five thresholds structure the mainstream account. The Mahdist revolt of 1881–98, in which a religious leader claiming to be the Mahdi (an awaited redeemer in Islamic belief) overthrew Ottoman-Egyptian rule and built a short-lived Islamic state, first showed a Sudanese state could exist independent of Cairo. Its defeat brought the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899–1956), which administered the Muslim north and the largely animist and Christian south as separate zones — a division that hardened rather than healed by independence. Independence in 1956 handed power to the riverine centre with the north-south split unresolved, and civil war followed almost immediately. The 2005 peace agreement ending that war led to South Sudan’s secession in 2011, removing the south but leaving Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, and Blue Nile still at odds with Khartoum. Most recently, the power struggle between two former allies within Sudan’s own armed forces erupted into open war in April 2023. Each threshold marks the centre’s authority breaking, or partially reforming, over one part of its periphery.
Robert O. Collins, A History of Modern Sudan (2008); P.M. Holt & M.W. Daly, A History of the Sudan (5th ed., 2000).
In the mainstream account the Sudanese state consistently preceded any shared Sudanese nation. The Ottoman-Egyptian conquest of 1820–21 and, later, Anglo-Egyptian rule drew a single administrative frontier around a territory of extraordinary diversity — Arab and African, Muslim, Christian, and traditional-faith peoples — for reasons of conquest and convenience, not shared identity. At independence in 1956 that colonial container simply became a sovereign state, and power passed to the small, riverine, Arabic-speaking Muslim elite already established around Khartoum under colonial rule. Outlying regions — the south first, then Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, and the east — were left to decide, largely through armed rebellion, how much they consented to be governed by that centre. This is why Sudanese history since 1956 reads as a sequence of wars over the terms of national belonging rather than as the steady growth of a shared national feeling: the state was inherited fully formed, and the nation it claimed to represent has never been agreed.
Robert O. Collins, A History of Modern Sudan (2008); P.M. Holt & M.W. Daly, A History of the Sudan (5th ed., 2000).
The long-term force the mainstream identifies is the unfinished, repeatedly violent integration of a vast and diverse territory by a narrow riverine centre. From the Mahdist state through colonial rule to independence, power has stayed concentrated in the same Nile-valley core, while region after region on the periphery has fought to change its place within, or its distance from, that centre. The south fought two wars over it and finally left; Darfur has fought over it since 2003; and since 2023 the fight has turned inward, as two forces that once jointly enforced the centre’s authority — the regular army and a paramilitary force built from former militia — now fight each other for control of that same centre. What best explains Sudan’s trajectory, on this reading, is this recurring, still-unresolved question of who the riverine state actually rules for, and on what terms the rest of the country will accept being ruled.
Robert O. Collins, A History of Modern Sudan (2008); P.M. Holt & M.W. Daly, A History of the Sudan (5th ed., 2000).
Alternative interpretations developed by respected historians that challenge or expand the mainstream view. These perspectives highlight debates within historical scholarship rather than presenting a single accepted explanation.
A revisionist reading resists the idea that Sudan’s violence expresses ancient, fixed hatreds between “Arab” and “African” peoples, and argues instead that these categories were made sharper, and more consequential, by specific colonial and state choices. The political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, writing on Darfur, showed that “Arab” and “African” there were never clean racial lines — they described overlapping communities, some settled farmers and some nomadic herders, whose difference was as much about way of life as ancestry, and who frequently intermarried. Colonial administrators, governing through a system of recognised “native” tribal authorities, fixed each group to a mapped homeland and a bureaucratic ethnic label; post-colonial governments and armed movements later weaponised those same fixed categories. On this account, the ethnic framing of Sudan’s conflicts is not simply a description of what caused them but partly a product of the state-building itself. This is a reinterpretation, not a denial that real communal and racial violence occurred — critics note that the label “Arab” carried real social weight in Sudan well before colonial rule.
Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (2009); Alden Young, Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development, and State Formation (2017).
The revisionist backbone keeps the same run of turning points the mainstream uses — the Mahdist state, colonial rule, independence, the Darfur war, the present conflict — but rereads several as acts of construction rather than natural unfolding. Colonial “native administration” is read not as passive recognition of existing tribes but as an active sorting exercise that turned fluid identities into fixed, government-recognised categories with real consequences for land and status. The historian Alden Young has shown that Sudan’s post-colonial economic and administrative institutions were substantially the work of a small circle of technocrats and civil servants who built a centralised fiscal state during decolonization, entrenching a pattern of wealth and decision-making concentrated at Khartoum well before any war made that concentration violent. The Darfur war of the 2000s is reread accordingly: not simply an eruption of ancient tribal enmity, but a crisis produced by decades of drought-driven competition over land, layered onto colonial-era tribal boundaries, and then armed and inflamed by a government fighting a rebellion. Because it reinterprets accepted events rather than denying them, this is legitimate scholarship, though how much weight belongs to old identity as against modern construction remains genuinely disputed.
Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors (2009); Alden Young, Transforming Sudan (2017).
In this reading, the Sudanese state was not simply inherited by an already-existing riverine nation; it was actively built, in its modern form, by a narrow group of colonial and then post-colonial administrators and technocrats who shaped its institutions in their own image. Alden Young’s research into Sudan’s finance ministry in the run-up to independence shows officials deliberately designing a fiscal and development system that assumed the Nile-valley core as the natural centre of gravity, with the vast periphery as a zone to be administered rather than a partner in nation-building. Nationhood, on this account, was less a pre-existing sentiment than a set of institutional facts — a currency, a civil service, a budget — built by a small elite and then presented as a natural inheritance. This corrects a purely cultural or religious account of Sudanese nationhood, which risks treating the riverine elite’s dominance as an organic expression of shared identity rather than a deliberate institutional outcome — though it can understate the real, older religious and linguistic bonds within that riverine core that the cultural perspective stresses.
Alden Young, Transforming Sudan (2017); Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors (2009).
The force this school foregrounds is the deliberate construction, first by colonial administrators and then by a small post-colonial technocratic and military elite, of a centralised state whose institutions and categories then generated the conflicts historians now try to explain. Rather than an age-old struggle between fixed peoples, this reading places the emphasis on choices: the drawing of tribal boundaries, the design of a Khartoum-centred fiscal system, the arming of militias to fight the state’s wars by proxy. The Janjaweed militias armed against Darfur in the 2000s, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces that grew out of them and now fight the army itself, are on this account not a return of ancient tribal violence but the direct, traceable product of specific state decisions to build and use irregular forces. This departs deliberately from readings that treat Sudan’s violence as the resurfacing of ancient enmities; its contested point is how far modern institutional choices, rather than older identity and religion, truly explain the country’s repeated fractures.
Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors (2009); Alden Young, Transforming Sudan (2017).
Explains history through religion, culture, identity, political traditions, ideology and the stories societies tell about themselves. This lens asks how beliefs and shared identities have shaped historical development.
Seen through faith and identity, Sudan is a meeting point of the Arab-Islamic and African worlds, and its heartland has for centuries defined itself as Arab and Muslim. Islam spread up the Nile valley from the fourteenth century onward, gradually replacing the Christian Nubian kingdoms that had ruled the river for a thousand years, and bringing with it Arabic language and identity, carried in large part by Sufi orders — religious brotherhoods, called *tariqas*, organised around a spiritual teacher and his followers. These brotherhoods became, and largely remain, the deepest social and political networks in the riverine north; the two largest, the Ansar and the Khatmiyya, each grew into a mass political movement in the twentieth century. Beyond this Arab-Muslim core, however, lie peoples for whom this religious and linguistic identity was never native — in the south before 2011, and still today in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, and the east. Culturally minded historians read Sudanese history as the story of a strong, confident Arab-Islamic centre repeatedly asserting a religious and cultural definition of the nation that large parts of the country’s population never fully shared.
Jok Madut Jok, Sudan: Race, Religion, and Violence (2007); Ann Mosely Lesch, The Sudan: Contested National Identities (1998).
Read through religion and political identity, the turning points are moments when faith and state power fused or fractured. The Mahdist revolt of 1881 was explicitly religious: its leader declared himself the Mahdi, the divinely guided redeemer of Islamic tradition, and built a state whose legitimacy rested on that claim — the clearest fusion of religious and political authority in Sudan’s modern history. Colonial rule after 1898 sidelined that fusion but did not end it: the British governed through, rather than against, the Sufi brotherhoods, whose leaders became the founders of Sudan’s first political parties at independence. The sharpest recent turn came in 1989, when a military coup backed by the Islamist movement led by Hassan al-Turabi seized power and imposed a state ideology built on a specific, hardline vision of Islamic law, sidelining the older brotherhood-based religious politics in favour of a single doctrinal project. That Islamist state, which ruled for three decades, is the direct ancestor of the political and military networks now fighting the war of 2023. Each turn reshaped who could claim religious legitimacy for political rule, and the religious record and the political record track one another closely throughout.
Jok Madut Jok, Sudan: Race, Religion, and Violence (2007); Ann Mosely Lesch, The Sudan: Contested National Identities (1998).
On this reading, a shared Arab-Muslim identity gave the riverine centre a powerful, ready-made sense of nationhood — and built exclusion into that nationhood from the outset. To be part of the Sudanese nation, in the vision that dominated politics after 1956, was in practice to share the language, faith, and culture of the Nile-valley core; those who did not — the animist and Christian south, above all — stood permanently at its margin, a tension that helped drive two civil wars and the south’s eventual secession in 2011. Even within the reduced Sudan that remained after 2011, the same logic continued to exclude non-Arab Muslim peoples in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, and the east, whose Islam did not carry the same Arabic-language, riverine cultural inheritance. Political scientists and historians who foreground identity read Sudan’s repeated wars as the predictable consequence of founding a nation on a religiously and culturally specific idea of belonging, in a state whose population was never that uniform to begin with.
Ann Mosely Lesch, The Sudan: Contested National Identities (1998); Jok Madut Jok, Sudan: Race, Religion, and Violence (2007).
The lasting force, on this cultural and religious reading, is the enduring claim that legitimate rule in Sudan must be sanctioned by a particular vision of Arab-Islamic identity — a claim first made openly by the Mahdist state, carried afterward by the Sufi brotherhood parties, and then radicalised by the Islamist state built after 1989. Each phase produced its own political order, and each new order provoked renewed resistance from those it excluded, whether on grounds of a different faith, a different relationship to Islam, or no shared claim to Arab identity at all. The current war is, on this account, in part a struggle within that same tradition of politicised religious and communal identity: the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces trace their roots to militias raised in the name of defending an Arab-identified state against a non-Arab periphery, now turned against the army that once directed them. What best explains Sudan’s long instability, in this reading, is this repeated, unresolved contest over whose vision of religious and cultural belonging the state is entitled to enforce.
Jok Madut Jok, Sudan: Race, Religion, and Violence (2007); Ann Mosely Lesch, The Sudan: Contested National Identities (1998).
Explains history through geography, natural resources, trade, demographics, technology and economic structures. This lens explores how the physical environment and material conditions have influenced historical change.
Sudan’s shape and history follow its water. The White Nile, arriving from the great lakes of equatorial Africa, and the Blue Nile, pouring down from the Ethiopian highlands each summer flood, meet at Khartoum and continue north as a single river through hundreds of miles of desert to Egypt. Around that junction and along the river’s banks lies almost all of the country’s dense population and productive farmland; away from the river, in every direction, lie vast and thinly peopled expanses — desert to the north and west, semi-arid scrubland across Darfur and Kordofan, savanna toward the old southern border. This single contrast between a narrow, wealthy, well-watered corridor and an enormous, poorer, drier hinterland has organised Sudanese economic and political life for well over a century: the river valley could be taxed, irrigated, and governed; the hinterland, dependent on rain and grazing, largely could not. On this reading Sudan’s fundamental facts are hydrological and geographic before they are religious or ethnic.
Robert O. Collins, The Nile (2002); Tony Barnett & Abbas Abdelkarim, Sudan: The Gezira Scheme and Agricultural Transition (1988).
The economic turning points follow water, land, and, more recently, minerals. British colonial rule built the Gezira Scheme from 1925, a vast irrigated cotton estate laid out on the wedge of land between the Blue and White Niles, which for decades supplied most of Sudan’s export earnings and fixed the riverine centre as the country’s economic core. From the 1970s, oil discovered mainly in the south became the next great prize, its revenues flowing to Khartoum while the extraction regions saw little development — a grievance that fed directly into the civil war that ended with South Sudan’s independence. That secession in 2011 removed roughly three-quarters of the country’s oil reserves at a stroke, gutting Khartoum’s finances almost overnight and pushing the state toward the economic crisis of the following decade. Most recently, gold has taken oil’s place: Darfur’s mines, largely under Rapid Support Forces control since the current war began, generate export revenue — much of it reportedly routed through the United Arab Emirates — that now finances one side of the conflict much as oil once financed the state itself.
Robert O. Collins, The Nile (2002); Tony Barnett & Abbas Abdelkarim, Sudan: The Gezira Scheme and Agricultural Transition (1988).
On this reading, geography and resource distribution drew Sudan’s internal boundaries well before any government did. The Nile corridor could support taxation, irrigation, and a standing administration; the vast dry peripheries could support only mobile, low-density populations that no pre-modern or colonial government could easily govern or tax. Colonial development spending followed the same logic, concentrating irrigation, rail lines, and schools along the river and leaving Darfur, Kordofan, and the east comparatively undeveloped. The state that emerged at independence in 1956 was, on this account, built on top of a landscape already sorted into a resourced, governable core and an under-resourced, barely governed rim — and every redistribution fight since, from oil revenue-sharing before 2011 to gold revenue today, has been a fight over that same underlying geography. State and nation, in this view, are constrained less by identity than by the hard fact of where water, farmland, and now minerals happen to lie.
Tony Barnett & Abbas Abdelkarim, Sudan: The Gezira Scheme and Agricultural Transition (1988); Robert O. Collins, The Nile (2002).
The force that best explains Sudan’s development, in this reading, is the persistent concentration of water, farmland, and now mineral wealth in a narrow corridor and its knock-on political effect: a state built to capture and distribute that wealth, and a periphery repeatedly willing to fight for a larger share of it, or to leave the arrangement altogether. The Gezira Scheme built the pattern; oil intensified it and then, with South Sudan’s secession, abruptly removed it; gold has since revived it in a new and more violent form, financing a paramilitary force capable of contesting the capital itself. Layered onto this economic geography, decades of drought and expanding desert across Darfur and Kordofan pushed herding and farming communities into direct competition for shrinking land, a material pressure that fed the violence of the 2000s regardless of how it was later described in ethnic terms. What best explains Sudan over the long run, on this account, is neither faith nor institutional design alone, but the hard, recurring fact of a country whose wealth sits in one place and whose people do not.
Robert O. Collins, The Nile (2002); Tony Barnett & Abbas Abdelkarim, Sudan: The Gezira Scheme and Agricultural Transition (1988).
Not a fifth lens, but the point the whole engine exists to make: historians describe the same country differently because they weigh its causes differently.
The origin of Darfur’s violence is the sharpest dispute. The consensus and cultural readings place real weight on long-standing Arab-Muslim identity at the Sudanese centre and its historical tension with non-Arab, non-Muslim, or differently-Muslim peripheries. The revisionist reading, following Mamdani, treats the “Arab” and “African” categories themselves as substantially produced by colonial administration and then hardened by modern politics, while the economic-geographic reading traces the same violence to drought and land competition. Three different roots for the same war: old identity, constructed category, or material scarcity.
The 1989 Islamist turn divides the lenses in a similar way. The cultural account reads it as the latest claim, in a long Sudanese tradition, that political power must be sanctioned by a specific vision of Islam. The revisionist and economic accounts read it instead as a narrow elite — military officers and Islamist technocrats — capturing an already centralised state apparatus that earlier administrators and financiers had built. Same event, read either as religious conviction in action or as institutional capture.
On one point all four perspectives agree: the Sudanese state took shape before any shared Sudanese nation did, and the country has been fighting over the terms of that nationhood ever since. They part on why — an unfinished project of integrating a vast periphery, categories drawn and hardened by colonial and elite state-building, a narrow religious vision of who belongs, or the simple, stubborn fact of where the water and the wealth happen to lie.
Reference status: every work cited is verified and correctly attributed — Robert O. Collins, A History of Modern Sudan (2008) and The Nile (2002); P.M. Holt & M.W. Daly, A History of the Sudan: From the Coming of Islam to the Present Day (5th ed., 2000); Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (2009); Alden Young, Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development, and State Formation (2017); Jok Madut Jok, Sudan: Race, Religion, and Violence (2007); Ann Mosely Lesch, The Sudan: Contested National Identities (1998); Tony Barnett & Abbas Abdelkarim, Sudan: The Gezira Scheme and Agricultural Transition (1988). Mamdani’s account of Darfur’s “Arab”/”African” categories is an influential but actively debated thesis (see, e.g., the responses collected in African Arguments’ “Mamdani Responds to His Critics” exchange) and is presented here as such, not as settled consensus.
Sudan remains at war with itself. Fighting broke out in April 2023 between the regular armed forces, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (widely known as Hemedti) — former partners who had together overthrown Sudan’s civilian transitional government in 2021 and then turned on each other. By 2026 the army had recaptured the capital region of Khartoum, Omdurman, and Bahri, while the Rapid Support Forces controlled most of Darfur, having captured El Fasher, the last major government-held city in that region, in October 2025 after an eighteen-month siege. Estimates put the dead at well over 100,000, with millions displaced — the world’s largest displacement crisis — and hundreds of thousands facing starvation conditions in besieged areas. No ceasefire holds; Burhan has publicly rejected any truce while the Rapid Support Forces exist, and a US-led diplomatic effort grouping Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt has stalled amid rivalry between the outside powers themselves. In early 2025 the Rapid Support Forces announced a rival civilian administration for the territory it holds, and Sudan has separately accused the United Arab Emirates, before the International Court of Justice, of complicity in the war through arms support to the paramilitary force. Analysts see continued fighting, or a hardening partition into separately administered zones, as the most likely near-term outcomes; a negotiated peace, though not impossible, remains the least likely of the three.
Endpoint facts verified against 2025–2026 reporting (Council on Foreign Relations Global Conflict Tracker; Washington Institute for Near East Policy; UN and Security Council Report briefings).
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Since independence from British-Egyptian rule in 1956, Sudan has struggled with power concentrated in the capital, Khartoum. According to UCDP, elites linked to northern Sudan have often dominated politics and wealth, while many outer regions have remained poorer and less represented. Sudan’s wide mix of ethnicities, languages, and religions, plus competition over natural resources, has helped fuel repeated rebellions and civil wars.
UCDP describes the main state-based conflict as a fight for control of the government between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which erupted on 15 April 2023. Fighting has been concentrated in places such as Khartoum, Gezira, and Darfur. Both sides have also used “one-sided violence,” meaning deliberate attacks on civilians, alongside other localized communal clashes over land and security.
In 2024, UCDP reports a slight overall decline in violence compared with 2023, though it warns that limited or biased reporting may affect what is known. The SAF–RSF war still caused thousands of deaths, and one-sided violence increased, including massacres and ethnically targeted attacks. Ongoing disputes like Abyei also keep tensions high, shaping Sudan’s relations with South Sudan and worsening risks for civilians.
Sources: UCDP; CIA World Factbook.
Sudan’s war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has displaced millions internally and into Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, and beyond, turning population flows into a major regional security concern. Neighbors worry about refugee burdens, arms smuggling, and cross‑border militia activity, prompting tighter border controls and intermittent mediation efforts. Egypt, South Sudan, and Gulf states frame Sudan’s stability as vital to their own security, influencing their backing of rival Sudanese factions. The humanitarian emergency also drives UN and AU engagement, with appeals for large‑scale aid funding and pressure for ceasefires. Migration from Sudan thus reinforces its image as both a crisis exporter and a pivotal state whose collapse could further destabilize the Horn of Africa and Sahel. Sources: [4], [10], [12]
Sudan is not a direct party to the Russia–Ukraine war, but the conflict interacts with its longstanding ties to Moscow and its own civil war. Historically, Russia has been a key political and security partner, backing Sudan’s territorial integrity and investing in energy and mining. Since 2022, Western sanctions on Russia and global competition for access to the Red Sea have increased scrutiny of any Russian military or mining presence in Sudan. Khartoum’s fractured authorities are under pressure from Western states to avoid enabling Russian sanctions evasion or arms deals, while Moscow seeks to preserve influence at low cost. Sudan’s overriding priority, however, remains internal survival rather than taking a clear side over Ukraine. Sources: [7], [11], [6]
The SAF–RSF war has evolved into a dense proxy arena. The UAE is widely reported to arm and fund RSF leader Hemedti, while Saudi Arabia and Egypt increasingly back the SAF, reflecting a broader Riyadh–Abu Dhabi rivalry and Cairo’s concern over Red Sea security and Nile stability. Reports indicate Egyptian facilities supporting SAF operations in Kordofan, while Sudan has filed an ICJ complaint accusing the UAE of complicity in RSF atrocities. The United States, European partners, and the AU push for ceasefires and sanction conflict spoilers but lack leverage to impose peace. This multi‑layered external involvement entrenches both camps, complicating negotiations and tying Sudan’s fate to shifting Gulf and great‑power calculations. Sources: [2], [4], [5]
Long referred to as Nubia, modern-day Sudan was the site of the Kingdom of Kerma (ca. 2500-1500 B.C.) until it was absorbed into the New Kingdom of Egypt. By the 11th century B.C., the Kingdom of Kush gained independence from Egypt and lasted in various forms until the middle of the 4th century A.D.
After the fall of Kush, the Nubians formed three Christian kingdoms: Nobatia, Makuria, and Alodia. Makuria and Alodia endured until around 1500.
Between the 14th and 15th centuries, Arab nomads settled much of Sudan. This contributed to extensive Islamization between the 16th and 19th centuries.
Following Egyptian occupation early in the 19th century, an agreement in 1899 established a joint British-Egyptian government in Sudan. In practice, Sudan functioned as a British colony.
Sudan gained independence from Anglo-Egyptian co-rule in 1956, and military regimes favoring Islamic-oriented governments have dominated national politics since then. During most of the second half of the 20th century, Sudan was embroiled in two prolonged civil wars rooted in northern domination of the largely non-Muslim, non-Arab southern part of the country.
The first civil war ended in 1972, but another began in 1983. Peace talks gained momentum in 2002-04, and the 2005 North/South Comprehensive Peace Agreement granted southern rebels autonomy for six years, followed by a referendum. South Sudan became independent in 2011, but the two countries have yet to fully implement security and economic agreements to normalize relations; Sudan also faced conflict in Darfur, Southern Kordofan, and Blue Nile beginning in 2003.
In 2019, after months of nationwide protests, the 30-year rule of President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-BASHIR ended when the military forced him out. Economist and former international civil servant Abdalla HAMDOUK al-Kinani was selected as prime minister of a transitional government as the country prepared for elections in 2022.
In late 2021, the Sudanese military ousted HAMDOUK and his government and replaced civilian members of the Sovereign Council with individuals selected by the military. HAMDOUK was briefly reinstated but resigned in January 2022; General Abd-al-Fatah al-BURHAN Abd-al-Rahman currently serves as de facto head of state and government, presiding over a Sovereign Council of military leaders, former armed opposition group representatives, and military-appointed civilians, while a cabinet of acting ministers manages day-to-day administration.
The armed conflict in Sudan stems from deep-rooted political rivalries and ethnic divisions, particularly between the Sudanese government and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Additionally, several non-state armed groups representing different ethnic communities complicate the fighting. Power struggles, resource control, and longstanding grievances among these groups fuel the ongoing violence and instability in the country according to UCDP data.
Civilians in Sudan suffer severely as both the government and Rapid Support Forces engage in violence causing collateral deaths and deliberate killings. The conflict has resulted in over two thousand civilian deaths, with widespread harm caused by multiple armed actors. While some non-state groups have less recorded civilian impact, the overall violence creates acute insecurity and devastation for civilian populations caught in the crossfire.
Sources: UCDP data.
The Government of Sudan is the official state authority involved in violent clashes primarily with the Rapid Support Forces and several non-state groups. It has caused both collateral civilian deaths and deliberate killings during the conflict, reflecting intense and multifaceted violence impacting civilians.
The Rapid Support Forces are a powerful paramilitary group at odds with the Sudanese government and various non-state groups. They engage in both collateral violence and deliberate killings, contributing significantly to civilian harm across multiple fronts.
The Arab - Zaghawa group is a non-state armed actor engaged in fighting both the government and RSF, with limited direct civilian harm documented. Its alliances are not well established publicly.
This group represents non-state armed factions opposing both the Sudanese government and RSF, with minor civilian harm attributed. Their allied relationships remain uncertain in open sources.
Fulani - Masalit armed groups are involved in conflict against state forces and RSF, with limited documented civilian casualties. Their alliance status is not clearly defined publicly.
The Misseriya - Hamar faction opposes both state and paramilitary actors, with limited evidence of direct civilian harm. Their known allies are not clearly established.
This non-state armed group combats both government forces and the RSF with minimal documented civilian casualties, and its alliances remain undocumented publicly.
The conflict in Sudan centers on power struggles between the official government and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, alongside multiple ethnically and regionally based non-state armed groups. Competition over political control, resources, and ethnic tensions drives prolonged violence involving these diverse actors.
Sudan gains independence from joint British-Egyptian rule, inheriting deep north–south, ethnic, and regional inequalities within artificial colonial borders. Weak institutions and contested national identity create patterns of center–periphery conflict that later underpin wars in Darfur and power struggles in Khartoum.
General Ibrahim Abboud seizes power in Sudan’s first coup, beginning a recurring pattern of military rule. The armed forces embed themselves as key political and economic actors, establishing a precedent for later generals, including Omar al-Bashir and Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
Southern rebels, mainly the Anyanya movement, fight the Khartoum government over autonomy and marginalization. The war kills hundreds of thousands and normalizes armed rebellion against central rule, shaping the militarization and fragmentation of Sudanese politics that persists into current conflicts.
President Nimeiri’s imposition of Islamic law and revocation of southern autonomy trigger renewed war with the SPLM/A. The long conflict militarizes Sudan’s peripheries, deepens ethnic and regional divides, and strengthens armed factions that later influence Darfur and post-secession power struggles.
Omar al-Bashir, backed by Islamist allies, topples a civilian government and builds an authoritarian security state. His regime empowers multiple security organs, uses militias for counterinsurgency, and entrenches militarized rule, creating the institutional landscape from which the RSF later emerges.
Rebel groups in Darfur rise against Khartoum over marginalization. The government arms Arab militias known as Janjaweed, accused of mass atrocities. These militias later evolve into the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), giving them territorial roots and power bases in Darfur central to today’s war.
The CPA ends the north–south civil war, grants southern autonomy, and sets a path to a referendum. While reducing one major war, it leaves Darfur unresolved and entrenches security elites in Khartoum, reinforcing a system where armed groups, not civilians, negotiate the state’s future.
South Sudan becomes independent, taking most oil fields. Sudan faces sharp revenue losses, economic crisis, and austerity. Reduced resources heighten competition among military, security services, and regional elites, contributing to later intra-regime rivalries between the army and RSF leadership.
Khartoum formally organizes Janjaweed and other militias into the Rapid Support Forces under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti). The RSF gains legal status, funding, and autonomy, becoming a national paramilitary rival to the army and laying groundwork for the current SAF–RSF confrontation.
Economic hardship and political repression spark mass protests across Sudan. Civilian groups demand democratic transition, while security factions maneuver to preserve power. The unrest weakens Bashir, heightens tensions among security forces, and pushes the army and RSF into an uneasy shared guardianship of change.
Army and RSF commanders depose Omar al-Bashir and agree with civilians on a transitional power-sharing council. The arrangement keeps both SAF and RSF at the core of the state, institutionalizing their rivalry over command, resources, and future authority, later exploding into open war.
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF leader Hemedti oust civilian partners, dissolving the transitional government. International isolation and internal resistance deepen divisions within the security sector, as disputes over integrating the RSF into the army become a central unresolved flashpoint.
Fighting erupts in Khartoum and other cities between Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces over control of the state and security sector reform. The war devastates urban centers and Darfur, producing today’s high battlefield and civilian casualties, displacement, and fragmented territorial control.
SAF–RSF clashes persist with slightly fewer battlefield deaths but rising attacks on civilians, including in Gezira and Darfur. Local conflicts, such as Twic Dinka–Ngok Dinka fighting in Abyei, intersect with national war dynamics, entrenching a nationwide security vacuum and fragmented authority.
