Sudan is unraveling

After two years of destructive fighting, Sudan’s civil war has reached an uneasy stalemate. Since the beginning of 2025, the Sudanese Armed Forces and allied militias have made significant gains against the Rapid Support Forces, the powerful militia accused of genocide, as the two factions vie for control of the country. By late March, the SAF had recaptured the capital, Khartoum, reclaiming Sudan’s presidential palace and clearing most of the city of RSF fighters. Nevertheless, the SAF is unlikely to defeat the RSF outright: the militia continues to maintain strong control over approximately a quarter of the country’s territory, largely in the west. And the RSF, in turn, seems unlikely to be able to retake the ground it has lost in the eastern, northern, and central parts of the country and is now focusing its efforts on fortifying its hold over the vast Darfur region. Over the past few weeks, fighting began to ebb, but it is again intensifying in North Darfur’s provincial capital, El Fasher, the SAF’s last remaining stronghold in Sudan’s west.

Because the war’s frontlines seem mostly set, historical precedent suggests that now would be an ideal time for a cease-fire or even peace negotiations. In many previous African conflicts, a battlefield deadlock encouraged international actors to push for negotiations, as happened in 2005, when U.S.-backed talks ended the second Sudanese civil war after more than two decades of fighting between southern rebels and Khartoum. Indeed, it might even seem that de jure partitioning, akin to the 2011 secession of South Sudan, could be the least bad option. The Sudanese people certainly need a reprieve: the latest conflict has devastated the country, leaving as many as 150,000 Sudanese dead, nearly 13 million displaced, and up to 25 million facing severe food insecurity or famine.

But in the case of Sudan’s current civil war, any hope that negotiations, if they can be started, will result in lasting peace is illusory. The conflict has deepened existing ethnic and regional fault lines; the atrocities that the RSF, in particular, has perpetrated have made negotiations unpalatable for many of the SAF’s backers. Simultaneously, a wide variety of actors—including powerful foreign countries—have an interest in seeing the factions they have backed stay as powerful as possible. That makes crafting a peace settlement that generates a single government difficult.

History strongly suggests, however, that any kind of territorial fragmentation will also fail to bring stability. South Sudan’s secession did not dampen the conflict consuming the region; it merely displaced the fighting, as the rebel group that had fought Khartoum fragmented and its factions began to battle one another. If the warring sides continue to refuse a cease-fire or peace talks, that could yield a situation similar to what has occurred in Libya and Yemen: a de facto split in which Sudan remains intact in name only. Rival power centers will take hold in different parts of the country, and many of the groups that are fighting today, alongside new ones that will likely emerge, will continue to fight.