This week we talk about the RSF, coups, and the liberal world order.
We also discuss humanitarian aid, foreign conflicts, and genocide.
Recommended Book: Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer
Transcript
In 2019, a military government took over Sudan, following a successful coup d'état against then-President Omar al-Bashir, who had been in power for thirty years. al-Bashir’s latter years were plagued by popular demonstrations against rising costs of living and pretty abysmal living standards, and the government lashed out against protestors violently, before then dissolving local government leaders and their offices, replacing them with hand-picked military and intelligence officers. After he responded violently to yet another, even bigger protest, the military launched their coup, and the protestors pivoted to targeting them, demanding a civilian-run democracy.
Just two months later, after unsuccessful negotiations between the new military government and the folks demanding they step aside to allow a civilian government to take charge, the military leaders massacred a bunch civilians who hosted a sit-in protest. Protestors shifted to a period of sustained civil disobedience and a general strike, and the government agreed to hold elections in 2022, three years later, and said that they would investigate the massacre their soldiers committed against those protestors. They also established a joint civilian-military unity government that would run things until the new, civilian government was eventually formed.
In late-2021, though, the Sudanese military launched another coup against the unity government, and that council was dissolved, a state of emergency was declared, and all the important people who were helping the country segue back into a democracy were arrested. A new military-only junta was formed, incorporating the two main military groups that were running things, at that point.
In 2023, those two military bodies that were working together to run Sudan via this military junta, the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group that were made into a sort of official part of the country’s military, while remaining separate from it, and the official Sudanese army, both started aggressively recruiting soldiers and taunting each other with military maneuvers. On April 15 that year, they started firing on each other.
This conflict stemmed from the Sudanese military demanding that the RSF dissolve itself, all their people integrating into the country’s main military apparatus, but some kind of stand-off seemed to be a long time coming, as the RSF started its recruiting efforts earlier that year, and built up its military resources in the capital as early as February. But as I mentioned, this tinderbox erupted into a shooting war in April, beginning in the capital city, Khartoum, before spreading fast to other major cities.
So what eventually became a Sudanese civil, which at this point has been ongoing for nearly 2.5 years, began in April of 2023, was long-simmering before that, is between two heavily armed military groups that ran the country together for a few years, and which both claim to be the rightful leaders or owners of the country, and they’re fighting each other in heavily populated areas.
This war was also kicked off and is now sustained in part by ethnic conflicts between the main belligerents, which includes the aforementioned Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces, but also the Sudan Liberation Movement, which governs a fairly remote and self-sufficient mountainous area in the southern part of the country, and the al-Hilu movement, which supports the RSF’s efforts in the region.
What I’d like to talk about today is what’s happening on the ground in Sudan, in the third year of this conflict, and at a moment when the world’s attention seems to have refocused elsewhere, major governments that would have previously attempted to stop the civil war have more or less given up on doing so, and the Sudanese civilians who have been pulled into the conflict, or who have been forced to flee their homes as a consequence of this war, have been left without food, shelter, or any good guys to cheer for.
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Sudan has been plagued by coups since it gained independence from the UK and Egypt in 1956; it’s seen 20 coup attempts, 7 of them successful, including that most recent one in 2019, since independence.
This region also has a recent history of genocide, perhaps most notably in the western Darfur region, where an estimated quarter of a million people from a trio of ethnic groups were killed between 2003 and 2005, alone, and something like 2.7 million people were displaced, forced to flee the systematic killings, strategically applied sexual violence, and other abuses by the Sudanese military and the local, rebel Janjaweed militias, which were often armed by the government and tasked with weeding out alleged rebel sympathizers in the region.
This new civil war is on a completely different scale, though. As of April of 2025, two years into the conflict, it’s estimated that about 12.5 million people have been displaced, forced from their homes due to everything being burned down or bombed, due to threats from local military groups, killing and assaulting and forcibly recruiting civilians to their cause, and due to a lack of resources, the food and water and shelter all grabbed by these military forces and denied to those who are just trying to live their lives; and that’s true of locally sourced stuff, but also humanitarian aide that makes it into the country—it’s grabbed by the people with guns, and the people without guns are left with nothing.
More than 3.3 million Sudanese people are estimated to have fled the country entirely, and recent figures show that around 25 million people are facing extreme levels of hunger, on the verge of starving to death, including about five million children and their mothers who are essentially wasting away. There are reports of people eating leaves and charcoal, just to get something in their stomachs, and photo evidence of these unmoving crowds of skeletal people who are desperate to get anything, any kind of nutrition at all, any clean water, still make it out of the country, though less and less, as it’s becoming more difficult for reporters to make it into and out of the area, safely, and the internet and other communication services, where they’re still available, are often shut down.
Aid agencies have said that this civil war has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and even the US government, which especially right now has been very hesitant to say anything about foreign conflicts, has made it pretty clear that they consider this to be a genocide; there are conscious, intentional, obviously planned efforts to systematically wipe out different ethnic groups, and to cleanse areas of hated political and religious rivals, but this genocide is being carried out at the exact moment that many of the world’s major, wealthy governments, which historically would have tried to step in and remedy the situation in some way—often ham-handedly, sometimes by supporting one side or the other to try to gain influence in the region, but almost always by also airdropping food and medical goods and other resources into the area to try to help civilians—these governments are mostly pulling back from those sorts of efforts.
Some analysts and regional experts have suggested that this points toward a new normal in the global geopolitical playing field; the so-called liberal world order that helped organize things, that established rules and norms from the end of WWII onward, and which incentivized everyone playing nice with each other, not invading each other, not committing genocide, and focusing on trade over war, is falling apart, the United States in particular deciding to stop funding things, stop participating, deciding to antagonize the allies that helped it maintain this state of affairs, and to basically drop anything that seems to much like a responsibility to people not in the United States. And a lot of other governments are either scrambling to figure out what that means for them, or deciding that they can afford to do something of the same. China, for instance, while stepping in to fill some of those voids, strategically, has also pulled back on some of its humanitarian efforts, because it no longer needs to invest as much in such things to compete with the US, which no longer seems to be competing in that space at all, with rare exceptions.
Conflicts in Africa, also with rare exceptions, also just tend to get less attention than conflicts elsewhere, and there are all sorts of theories as to why this might be the case, from simple racism to the idea that areas with more economic potential are more valuable as allies or supplicants, so wealthy nations with the ability to do something will tend to focus their resources on areas that are more strategically vital or wealth-generating, so as to recoup their investment.
Whatever the specifics and rationales, though, Sudan has long been conflict-prone, but this civil war seems to be locking the area into a state of total war—where nothing is off the table, and terror against civilians, and to a certain degree wiping out one’s enemies completely, salting the earth, killing all the civilians so they can never threaten your force’s dominance again, is becoming fundamental to everyone’s military strategy—and that state of total war, in addition to be just horrific all by itself, also threatens to roil the rest of the area, including the far more globally integrated and thus well supported and funded Horn of Africa region, which is strategically vital for many nations, due to its adjacency to the Middle East and several vital ports, and the Sahel, which is a strip of land that stretches across the continent, just south of the Sahara desert, and which in modern history has been especially prone to military coups and periods of violence, at times verging on genocide, and which in recent decades has seen a bunch of democratic governments toppled and replaced by military juntas that have done their best to completely disempower all possible future opposition, at times by committing what look a lot like mini-genocides.
This conflict, all by itself, then, is already one of the worst humanitarian situations the world has seen, but the confluence of international distraction—much of our attention and the majority of our resources focused on the also horrible situations in Gaza and Ukraine, and the specter of great power competitions that might arise as a result of Ukraine, or of China deciding to invade Taiwan—alongside the pullback from humanitarian funding, and the seeming distaste previously internationally involved entities, like the US and China, now seem to have when it comes to playing peacemaker, or attempted peacemaker, in these sorts of conflicts.
All of which would seem to make it a lot more likely that this conflict, and others like it, will continue to play out, and may even reach a scale that permanently scars Sudan and its people, and which possibly even cascades into a series of regional conflicts, some interconnected, and some merely inspired by the brazenness they can clearly see across the border, and the seeming lack of consequences for those committing these sorts of atrocities in order to attain more power and control.
Show Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_genocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023%E2%80%93present)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/09/sudan-civil-war-humanitarian-crisis/683563/?gift=201cWZnM2XBz2eP81zy0pG9Zt_k9jZnrEhnY7lvH1ZQ
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/08/13/sudan-humanitarian-global-world-order-neglect-conflict/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/19/world/africa/sudan-usaid-famine.html
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/world-food-programme-reduce-food-support-sudan-due-funding-shortages-2025-04-25/
https://www.eurasiareview.com/25042025-sudan-war-is-a-global-crisis-in-the-making-analysis/
https://apnews.com/article/un-sudan-darfur-war-anniversary-paramilitary-government-dbfff6244d935f595fb7649a87a6e073
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sudans-world-war
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/04/1162576
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/04/1162096
https://reliefweb.int/report/sudan/sudan-situation-map-weekly-regional-update-18-aug-2025
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2wryz4gw7o
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/opinion/sudan-genocide-famine.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023%E2%80%93present)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Sudanese_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudan_People%27s_Liberation_Movement%E2%80%93North
https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/horn-africa/sudan/stopping-sudans-descent-full-blown-civil-war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coups_d%27%C3%A9tat_in_Sudan
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