اخبار السودان – وطن نيوز
اخر اخبار السودان اليوم – اخبار السودان العاجلة
W6nnews.com ==== وطن === تاريخ النشر – 2026-02-09 12:51:00
32 seconds ago Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Badawi 1 visit Ibrahim Al-Badawi Abdul Sater Sudan did not reach this disastrous war by chance, and its tragedy cannot be reduced to a “conflict of two generals” or a “sudden explosion of violence.” What the Sudanese are experiencing today is the result of a long path of clientelist authoritarian rule, followed by an aborted democratic transition, then a military coup that reproduced the failure in a more devastating form, paving the way for this war as the largest national catastrophe in the country’s history. Global indicators of governance and democracy show – clearly and unambiguously – that what happened should have been expected, and that the humanitarian cost that the Sudanese people are paying today is the accumulated price of decades of misrule and wrong choices. Political history – and the experiences of the countries around us – teach us that the democratic transition is not protected by good intentions alone, but by institutions capable of imposing rules, controlling weapons, and providing reliable guarantees to all. In Sudan, these guarantees were not available. With their absence, the armed elites entered into a dangerous game of doubt and fear: Who will rule tomorrow? Who will be excluded? Who will be held accountable? In such a climate, a coup, or even a devastating ethnic civil war, becomes a “rational” option for some actors. Overview of the World Governance and Democracy Indicators The World Bank’s World Governance Indicators (WGI) measure the quality of governance and state capacity, through six dimensions, including voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, quality of regulatory frameworks, rule of law, and control of corruption. Its results are presented in the form of a global percentile ranking (0–100), which makes it an important tool for monitoring structural transformations in state performance, without directly classifying regimes as democratic or authoritarian. The Diversity of Democracies (V-Dem) project provides an in-depth measurement of democracy as a multidimensional system, including liberal and electoral democracy, civil liberties, and levels of political exclusion. Its indicators are characterized by their ability to capture gradual and fragile transitions, which makes them an analytical tool suitable for complex transitional situations. The Economist’s Democracy Index (EIU) provides a simplified annual classification of countries according to their degree of democracy, on a scale of 0 to 10, and classifies them into complete or flawed democracies, and hybrid or authoritarian regimes. Its strength lies in its clarity and ease of media circulation, although it is less detailed than V-Dem, and less focused on state capabilities compared to WGI. Sudan and the Theory of Conflict Outbreak: From Entrenched Authoritarianism to Total Collapse Across all major global indicators of governance and democracy, including those we reviewed above, Sudan’s recent journey reveals an extremely damaging sequence of political balances, the cumulative impact of which has been devastating to state capacity, social cohesion, and human well-being. During the long era of clientelist authoritarian rule (1990-2019), Sudan remained consistently ranked among the worst-performing countries globally in the areas of voice and accountability, the rule of law, and government effectiveness, which reflects a system based on the extraction and misdistribution of oil and mineral rents, coercion, and the systematic exclusion of large segments of society on identity and ideological grounds. This balance has proven sustainable, but it has been costly: it has curbed overt political competition, entrenched regional marginalization, normalized widespread violence against civilians, and emptied state institutions of substance, leaving millions vulnerable to poverty, displacement, and chronic insecurity. The December 2018 revolution has upset this balance – albeit temporarily – by expanding political inclusion and civic space, as demonstrated by the improvement of civil liberties and political voice according to these indicators. However, conflict theory warns that political liberalization in the absence of reliable institutional guarantees – in particular an effective rule of law and unity of control over the tools of violence – may raise the risk of large-scale conflict. Governance indicators during the transitional phase in Sudan confirm this diagnosis. While freedoms improved, the rule of law and the effectiveness of the state, especially with regard to the restructuring of military-security institutions and dismantling the clientelist empowerment of the deep state associated with the bailout regime, remained very limited, as a direct result of the nature of the sovereign partnership with a military-security institution immersed to its toes in the deep state project. This imbalance has severely exacerbated the problems of commitment. As the so-called armed struggle movements bet on an alliance with the military-security establishment and the Islamist movement, they had a strong incentive to defect from the transitional deal rather than risk marginalization in an upcoming civilian regime. The October 2021 coup represents a classic authoritarian regression, as predicted by models of elite conflict in light of institutional weakness. By dismantling the transitional contract and restoring explicit military dominance, the coup temporarily reduced uncertainty about political control, but radically increased the fragmentation of elites within the coercive apparatus itself. Governance indicators record a rapid collapse in accountability and civil liberties, but more importantly for conflict dynamics, the coup removed any remaining reliable engagement mechanisms between competing armed elites. With the absence of civilian oversight and increasing contestation over rent-sharing arrangements, the military sphere has become the main arena for political competition. The outbreak of all-out war in 2023 represents the final stage of this sequence: the transformation of elite competition into open armed conflict in light of the collapse of the state. Governance indicators fall to the lowest levels globally, capturing the disintegration of state authority and the disappearance of enforcement mechanisms capable of curbing violence. Conflict eruption theory specifically predicts such an outcome when problems of commitment among fragmented elites intersect with broad political exclusion and the erosion of central control of power. In Sudan, violence turned from oppression to predation, and civilians became strategic targets in regional and economic competition. The subsequent humanitarian catastrophe—mass displacement, risk of famine, and collapse of basic services—was not an accidental consequence of the war, but the direct result of a political economy that combined long-term institutional erosion by clientelist rule, superficial transition, and forced fragmentation brought about by the coup, making large-scale conflict a rational choice for elites and devastating for society. Comparative Paths to Civil War: Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and EthiopiaThis section charts Sudan’s descent into large-scale civil war. Within a broader comparative framework derived from the theory of conflict outbreaks. Across the four cases, civil war does not arise simply because of poverty or ethnic diversity, but rather as a result of the interaction of problems of commitment among elites, the fragmentation of coercive power, and political exclusion within weak or collapsed institutions. The difference lies in how these mechanisms are formed and sequenced. As noted above, Sudan represented an exemplary case of an aborted transition followed by forced fragmentation; For decades, a clientelist authoritarian regime maintained a violent equilibrium based on repression and the distribution of rents. Although the 2019-2021 transition expanded political inclusion and civic space, it failed to consolidate the rule of law and security sector unity, exacerbating compliance problems and pushing armed elites to defect. Then came the 2021 coup to destroy the civil-military contract, and the 2023 war completes this path with the collapse of the state and widespread targeting of civilians. Libya embodies the path of authoritarian collapse without the establishment of an alternative monopoly on violence. The fall of the regime dismantled central coercion, but it did not produce an authority capable of enforcing political deals. Governance indicators reflect chronic fragmentation, not simple repression. The conflict theory here highlights the multilateral problem of compliance: militias and political factions repeatedly enter into and withdraw from agreements due to the absence of a reliable guarantor of compliance. Then the violence becomes cyclical and recurring – closer to a chronic failure to negotiate under militia pluralism and external support, rather than a decisive conflict. As for Yemen, it is following a similar but more externally intertwined path, represented by a negotiated transition under fragmented sovereignty. Political openness has increased uncertainty about the future distribution of power, at a time when state capacity and regional control have eroded. The problems of commitment were multiplied by the presence of multiple armed actors and regional interventions, which increased the returns to dissent and weakened negotiated settlements. The result is a long-term, high-intensity conflict, in which exclusion, weak enforcement, and internationalization interact to fuel violence. Ethiopia is an important borderline case. Unlike Sudan, Libya, and Yemen, Ethiopia entered its recent conflict with a relatively higher international capacity and a stronger monopoly of force. However, conflict theory predicts that when the ruling coalition fractures and commitment mechanisms between the center and a powerful regional actor break down, even capable states can descend into devastating civil war. In the Ethiopian case, existing coercive power did not prevent the outbreak of war, but rather doubled its intensity after the failure of political bargains. Comparative Conclusion: Across these cases, the risks of civil war rise sharply when political openness or authoritarian shocks occur in the absence of reliable enforcement institutions, when armed elites fear exclusion from future settlements, and when coercive power fragments or is contested. Sudan’s tragedy lies in the convergence of three mechanisms together: long-term institutional erosion due to clientelist rule, a superficial transition that expanded inclusion without a parallel state building, and a coup that transformed the fragility of authoritarianism into a catastrophic collapse of the state. Conclusion: The existential challenge and opportunity for the national project Sudan stands today at an extremely dangerous historical crossroads; Either the country will slide permanently into the fate of a collapsed state, or this tragedy will be captured as a moment of utmost awareness that forces rebuilding the national project from its roots. The ongoing war is not just a struggle for power, but rather an existential test of the country’s unity, and its ability to transform its identity and economic diversity from a source of conflict into a lever for renaissance, and from fuel for war into a basis for sustainable peace. Exiting this dark tunnel cannot be achieved through top-down compromises or limited elite deals, but rather requires broad national consensus around the project of a social democratic state, managed by political pluralism, and built on a balanced modern economy based on integration between agriculture, industry and services, and improving the use of economic rents – whether The rent from land, resources, or location was for productive investment, not for the reproduction of clientelism and corruption. This project also requires the establishment of a solid social protection system that puts people, not weapons, at the heart of the security equation, and breaks the historical cycle between poverty, marginalization, and violence. At the heart of this national project, there is the urgent need for a new social contract agreed upon by the national democratic forces, which organizes their efforts and frames their differences in a constructive and peaceful manner, and prevents intellectual and political diversity from slipping into zero-sum conflict or civil strife. A contract that recognizes pluralism, believes in competition, and invokes pluralistic democracy as the only legitimate mechanism for managing difference. In this context, a comprehensive national project cannot be based on the rule of exclusion, including the exclusion of the proponents of the true Islamic project, provided that they explicitly and unambiguously accept pluralistic democracy and the project of a civil state in which there is no political exploitation of religion or identity, in which freedom of belief is preserved, in which equal citizenship is respected, and in which the rule of law prevails over any partisan or ideological reference, including the subjugation of those who sparked this war and committed crimes against it. This oppressed people must be held accountable and held accountable. The harsh lesson of Sudan – as revealed by global indicators and the experiences of past decades – is that authoritarianism, no matter how long it lasts, does not produce permanent stability, that a democratic transition without state building remains fragile, and that coups do not “save” countries but rather push them towards chaos. The most important lesson is that salvation can only come from a comprehensive national project that redefines authority as a public service, redefines diversity as a national wealth, and restores respect for the state as an instrument of justice, development and peace. See also the story of three cities – Merwa, Nyala, and Port Sudan – in the context of the renaissance transition from the narrow “militarization…
