Sudan As A Mirror For Today’s World

Sudan has often served as a mirror for judging the health of the liberal world order because it has repeatedly been a laboratory for multilateral interventions to prevent atrocities and stabilize the humanitarian situation.

During the second Sudanese civil war, which stretched from 1983 to 2005, an estimated more than two million people died. In Darfur during the first decade of the 2000s, international observers estimated that 300,000 people died and another 2-3 million people were displaced.

At the time, finding a solution to Sudan’s conflicts was a priority for the United States and the coalitions it galvanized. For instance, Sudan’s second civil war came to an end only after intense mediation by the troika of the United States, the United Kingdom and Norway, as well as Sudan’s African neighbors, in 2005.  The level of Western concern and diplomatic resources mobilized to intervene in Sudan’s conflicts in the early 2000s feels almost unimaginable today.

In the 2000s, Sudan hosted two massive UN peacekeeping missions: the more than 13-year-long African Union-United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur, which ended in 2020 and the more than six-year-long United Nations Mission in the Sudan, which ended in 2011. The goals of these missions were to prevent genocide in Darfur and to guarantee the implementation of the peace agreement ending the civil war between the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement/Army and the government in Khartoum. This mission, which included approximately 10,000 soldiers and numerous civilian authorities, ended with a referendum on the independence of South Sudan in 2011.  A few months later South Sudan was welcomed by the international community as the newest country in the world.

It was in this context — of the international efforts to end Sudan’s civil wars and the resulting mass displacements — that South Sudanese diplomat Francis Mading Deng developed the idea of “sovereignty as responsibility.” Deng served as the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General on internally displaced persons from 1992 to 2004, and many experts credit Deng’s idea of sovereignty as responsibility as the intellectual genesis of the international principle of the Responsibility to Protect. The UN General Assembly’s adoption of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principles in 2005 marked a high-water point for the legitimacy of the liberal world order. R2P, as formulated by Deng and others, tried to balance sovereignty as a state’s right to non-interference with the international community’s duty to ensure that a state protects the welfare of its own citizens.

Today, the conflict in Sudan can be described as a world war in microcosm. The numbers are massive and stark, making it hard to comprehend the magnitude of the tragedy unfolding there. At least 14 million people have been internally displaced since the latest round of fighting in April 2023, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. Meanwhile, there are at least 4.4 million Sudanese refugees who have fled the country, many to neighboring countries like Chad, Egypt and South Sudan, which can ill-afford to support this influx. Three years on, intense fighting persists in Sudan’s central region of Kordofan, in Darfur and in its southeastern Blue Nile state.

In one of the most widely discussed recent commentaries on the crisis in Sudan — a conflict often overshadowed despite its horrific violence by other wars — the American journalist and historian Anne Applebaum wrote that “no statistics can express the sense of pointlessness, of meaninglessness, that the war has left behind” after she reported from behind the lines of both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and their opponents, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). In the face of the physical destruction of cities like Khartoum, Applebaum declared the conflict the most nihilistic on Earth, writing with a tinge of hopelessness that “the liberal world order has already ended in Sudan, and there isn’t anything to replace it.”

In many ways, what is happening in Sudan represents the international community’s abandonment of the longstanding principles of the liberal world order, particularly by the West. Instead, Sudan has become the plaything for a wide array of actors stretching across the Middle East and Africa, to Russia and Ukraine, and as far afield as Colombia. After the Trump administration’s cuts to organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development, even the commitment to prevent the spread of famine has declined. Applebaum ended her piece by lamenting that Sudan is now a victim of an anarchic, post-American world. A world that has yet to fully take shape in which “colonialism is long past, the Cold War has ended,” and the international order has irreparably broken down.

But what is taking place in Sudan and elsewhere is not the emergence of anarchy; it is a return to precolonial patterns. Many observers have mistakenly assumed the former because of what the historian Richard Reid calls the “foreshortening of African history,” by which he means “the detachment of Africa’s turbulent present — and its recent past — from deeper patterns of both change and continuity.” Perhaps no country has suffered more from the reification of the colonial past by social scientists and modernizing elites alike than the Congo, once known as Zaire.

At the end of the 19th century, Henry Morten Stanley earned the name Bula Matari or the breaker of rocks, for “his feat of driving a caravan of porters bearing dismantled steamers over the torturous terrain between the Zaire River estuary and the vast navigable watercourses extending inward from Kinshasa.” As Zala Lusibu N’Kanza, the first woman to hold the position of minister in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, notes, “for all Bakongo the name of Bula Matari signified terror.” The precolonial was smashed in the wake of an ascendant and modernizing colonial and post-colonial state. For the founding generation of American political scientists like the late Crawford Young, the political, economic and social institutions of the precolonial period were left in ruins because they lacked the resilience to create an alternative to the modernizing state.

A Return To The Pre-Colonial Era

Despite the depths of the human tragedy playing out across northeast Africa — engulfing not only Sudan but South Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Somaliland — Applebaum’s post-American world is not just chaos. Clear patterns are emerging even amid the violence of state fracture. One of the clearest is the development of political and trade patterns resembling those of the pre-colonial era. The long dominance of the colonial state was not the result of smashing African societies, as American political scientists long suspected. Just as the chaos marring the post-colonial period is not a result of ethnic rivalries. Rather, the endurance of colonialism in countries like Sudan is a product of the legacies of its infrastructure.

The peculiar durability of the infrastructure built during European control of the Nile basin resulted from a set of historical conjunctures. In his new book, “The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow,” the political theorist Timothy Mitchell argues that around the turn of the 20th century a new ability to discount the future was invented. Mitchell considers this ability a political technology “derived from the fact that time can be controlled — by the construction of a political apparatus that will reliably capture and colonize the future.” While this sounds incredibly abstract, Mitchell goes on to explain that:

“That the scale and extension of transportation lines and energy networks, along with urban development, irrigation projects, and other immense schemes, depended not just on material durability but upon the durable arrangements of law, authority, compulsion, and justification.”

Sudan, though often imagined as a colonial backwater, was the site of one of the British Empire’s largest investments in industrial agriculture ever. The giant Gezira irrigated agricultural scheme, one of the only monuments to colonialism visible from outer space, was originally planned in the 1920s to irrigate more than a million acres. British officials spoke openly of the Gezira Scheme’s potential to be a second man-made Nile Delta, a giant cotton farm for the Empire. From the 1920s until the scheme ran into financial problems in the 1970s, the railways, dams, ports and even Sudan’s labor force were geared to serve this project, not to mention the country’s financial and economic infrastructure.

This changed in the 1990s as the oil sector rose to prominence, but even then, pipelines and refineries tended to be located according to patterns established during the colonial era. These patterns endured in part because irrigation canals and railways cut into the earth and were reinforced with steel, and because Sudan integrated into global financial markets through loans for investments backed by access to export markets. Originally, it was cotton, later crude oil and now gold.

The Fragile Liberal International Order

When the Princeton political scientist G. John Ikenberry wrote about the liberal international order, he remarked that, “there is an optimist assumption lurking in liberal internationalism that states can overcome constraints and cooperate to solve security dilemmas, pursue collective action, and create an open, stable system.” Yet Ikenberry also admits that the system’s collective nature was always more aspirational than practical. Ikenberry admits that since 1945 the United States has served as the owner and operator of this system and has been afforded special privileges and responsibilities. Applebaum describes the chaos that unfolds in Sudan once the United States is no longer willing to bear its historic burden.

But what if what looks like chaos is simply the dissolution of the political orders that made colonial and postcolonial state investments durable? While cotton and crude petroleum are different commodities, the central state could largely control their export, either by managing production directly or by issuing licenses for production and sale to favored clients. The boom in gold exports from Sudan since 2013 is remarkable because of the state’s utter inability to control the trade. For Sudan, the tragedy is magnified by the almost 200% rise in gold prices during that period, meaning the Sudanese state lost out on this windfall due to incapacity and now war. Part of the challenge for Sudanese authorities is that artisanal gold production, unlike control of oilfields and pipelines or cotton irrigation, lacks the central infrastructural chokepoints the colonial and postcolonial state had become so adept at taxing.

The other dilemma for the Sudanese state is the regional collapse of the taboo against dealing with subnational actors. As a result, gold from the mines of Darfur often ends up in the souks of Dubai without ever passing through the central government. Similarly, Sudanese soldiers guarding the Saudi-Yemeni border can be hired and deployed without ever contracting with the SAF. The RSF, a paramilitary-slash-merchant company, carries out many of these transactions, managing large portions of Sudan on behalf of its investors.

Precolonial Patterns Return In Contemporary Guises

What looks like chaos reveals patterns. In the 3 ½ years since fighting broke out between the SAF and the RSF, new trade and military supply routes have become increasingly visible. During the first few decades following Sudan’s independence in 1956, most economic activity flowed from the provinces to Khartoum, then along the railroad lines to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. The government earned most of its revenue by taxing the imports and exports that followed this well-trodden route. During the first two years of fighting, the Rapid Support Forces controlled Khartoum and did everything in their power to break the old colonial trade route. During this time, Sudan’s government retreated to Port Sudan, and the RSF set up a rival capital in Nyala in southern Darfur.

Inadvertently, the war revealed older patterns of state formation from the 19th century. Sudan’s city of Suakin and its other Red Sea ports claimed allegiance to a distant Ottoman government and resisted incorporation into the Kingdom of Sennar, to say nothing of Darfur. Elites in Suakin often sought incorporation into the Ottoman province of the Hijaz or Aden on the Arabian Peninsula. This pattern threatened to repeat itself when Sudan’s government was again temporarily forced to relocate to Port Sudan after Khartoum fell in 2023.

But perhaps more dramatically, the war saw the re-emergence of old trade routes to the north, west and south of Darfur. With the SAF in control of Port Sudan, the RSF began to turn to the old trade routes across the desert, the most famous of which was the Darb El Arba’īn, or “40 Day Road,” leading from northern Darfur to Asyut in southern Egypt. Other trade routes led north into Libya, where the RSF is suspected to have established bases under the protection of the Libyan militia leader who rules the eastern part of the country, Khalifa Haftar. Similarly, the trading routes from southern Darfur into South Sudan have been reactivated to resupply the RSF. These routes often end in Uganda, Kenya and the Central African Republic. All outside the control of the center.

The new prominence of the old trade routes was capped by the declaration of TASIS, or the Sudan Founding Alliance, of a new government in April 2025, exactly two years after the outbreak of the war. Speaking from Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, TASIS leaders tried to solidify an alliance between the RSF, parts of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), a militant group and political party, and the leadership of the Baggara confederation. The Baggara includes more than six million Arab and African people stretching from southern Kordofan to Lake Chad.

The RSF’s organization, founded in 2013 — with the Darfurian Arab family of its leader Muhammad Hamdan Daglo Musa at its center — itself echoes an episode from the late 19th century. The first is the creation of a private-merchant empire by al-Zubayr Rahma al-Mansur, usually known as Zubayr Pasha. Originally a lackluster merchant assistant for an Egyptian trader, by the 1860s Zubayr had established one of the largest merchant companies operating in what we today refer to as South Sudan.

His operations were described in a remembrance in the “Middle East Monitor” as such: “[He sent] men ‘through the lands of the Dinka, Jur and Bongo, the company reached the Golo, then living between the Kuru and Kpongo rivers.’ They purchased ostrich feathers and ivory for trade in Khartoum, Cairo and beyond.” By the 1870s, he had grown from a successful trader into the ruler of a territory often called Deim Zubayr, controlling a large area of present-day South Sudan’s Bahr al-Ghazal and Darfur with an army of some 12,000 soldiers, many of whom were enslaved. According to the historian Tsega Etefa, writing in the Journal of Oromo Studies:

“By the late 1860s, al Zubayr was ‘the most prominent and successful of the merchant princes operating in the Bahr al-Ghazal.’ He traded in slaves and ivory; however, antislavery movements by Egyptian and European explorers in the Nile Valley began to put pressure on him. Therefore, ‘he arranged with the Baqqara tribes of southern Darfur for his slave caravans to pass through their territory northward, bypassing the Nile.’ Toward the end of the 1860s, ‘he attained the position of practically an independent ruler.’ The Egyptian government’s expeditionary force ‘was completely defeated by him, and the Egyptian authorities, realizing with what a commanding character they were confronted, made him Governor of the district.’”

Initially, Zubayr’s base was in the southern borderlands between Darfur and Bahr al-Ghazal. Darfur, as an independent political entity, was not conquered until 1874, when Zubayr’s forces achieved what the Ottoman-Egyptian armies of Muhammad Ali had been unable to do in 1821: conquering the Fur Sultanate at its capital of El Fasher. The parallels with the RSF appear to write themselves. These became particularly notable when the RSF took El Fasher after months of siege at the end of October 2025. In the process, the RSF captured the last major stronghold in Darfur and solidified their ability to resupply to the north through Libya and to the south across the expanse of South Sudan into East Africa.

Yet another echo of the 19th century was the emergence of Kordofan as a contested region. The armies of Muhammad Ali, de facto ruler of Egypt from 1805 to 1848, partially pacified the region in the decades after the 1821 invasion from Egypt, but could not maintain stable control. In many ways, this resembles the situation in Kordofan today, where cities like El-Obeid, with a population over 600,000, remain under frequent attack as rival forces contend to dominate the region. Still, the 19th-century echoes perhaps become clearest in the relative autonomy of the SPLM-N, a political party and militant group with its strongholds based in southern Kordofan.

The SPLM-N has been both a broker and spoiler for South Sudan since its secession in 2011. The flat plains were easily conquered, but the Nuba Mountains were very difficult to ultimately control. One faction, SPLM-N Al-Hilu, which mostly controls the areas around the Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan, sided with the RSF, while another faction, SPLM-N Agar, which controls parts of the Blue Nile state, has sided with the SAF.

In the process, the two groups have maintained the autonomy of the border regions between the RSF, SAF and South Sudan. A borderland organization more interested in preserving its own autonomy than in the outcome of the war has found itself operating on both sides of the conflict. In this way, they are implementing strategies with other surprising parallels in the past, such as the Kingdom of Taqali, a kingdom in the northeastern Nuba Mountains of Sudan that flourished between about 1780 and 1884, with relative autonomy that extended well into Sudan’s post-independence period until 1969.

Our research in the Sudan Collection at the University of Bergen in Norway shows that during the 19th century, Taqali leaders used a similar strategy of seeking protection and recognition from both the waning states of Darfur and Sennar — pledging vassalage to both simultaneously as they worked to maintain autonomy.

The breakdown of the Sudanese state we are witnessing today is also not random. Rather, along with the retreat of the liberal world order, we are witnessing the reappearance of political orders that last manifested themselves with such clarity in the 19th century. These patterns repeat because they are based on trade and political and economic linkages that do not rely on the infrastructure built during the colonial period. The durability of this infrastructure has decayed as the institutions of the liberal world order that maintained it have crumbled.  In the place of the patterns of trade, infrastructure and political order that once felt like inevitable parts of the postcolonial world, we are witnessing the reappearance of the older routes of exchange.

For instance, we see the re-emergence of the Trans-Saharan routes, the trading routes into East and Central Africa and East-West connections across the Sahel and the Red Sea. In South Africa, there are calls to dissolve the Union of South Africa, which in 1910 joined the British Cape Colony with the independent Boer republics of the Transvaal and Free State as well as Natal. Yemen has been redividing for over a decade now in ways that are reminiscent of the 19th century, and of course Russian aggression has called into question the stability of eastern Europe’s borders.

These are just a few examples of how the stability that defined the second half of the 20th century cannot be taken for granted.  As we think of what models might best explain statecraft after the liberal order, it increasingly makes sense to look at the 19th-century map as an example of political competition and shifting boundaries.

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