The shadow play of legitimacy in Sudan’s civil war

European policymakers need to short-circuit Sudan’s warring parties’ attempts to manipulate aid to legitimate them as the government in waiting, writes Theodore Murphy.

Theodore Murphy is a senior policy fellow and director of ECFR’s Africa programme.

Sudan’s civil war creates not only a humanitarian crisis but a governmental vacuum.

That vacuum presents a conundrum to European policymakers because states engage with other states. Without a government, there is no diplomatic counterpart for the EU and its members.

Instead of a government, there are two parties in Sudan’s civil war: the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary force with aspirations to rule, and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the Army, which portrays itself as the legitimate government.

But Sudan’s government effectively dissolved when the SAF mounted a soft coup against the civilian-led transitional government. Soon after the RSF and SAF went to war with one another over a disagreement on the RSF’s integration into the SAF.

Now, as part of that war, both RSF and SAF cleverly instrumentalise the EU and its members’ need for a government counterpart as a means of creating governing legitimacy absent any democratic or constitutional grounding.

Policymakers might view this as a distant concern, but in so doing they unwittingly pour oil on the fire of the civil war.

Seeing this path to legitimacy working for the SAF has encouraged Sudan’s powerful Islamists to pursue the same tactic. Exiled from the political landscape by the civilian-led 2019 revolution that ousted them along with ex-President Bashir, they have now inserted themselves into the machinery of government by taking over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). They expect this to seamlessly segue into their re-inclusion as a legitimate political player.

Beyond the Islamists’ silent taking over the MFA with the SAF’s collusion, they have opened a second track to gain entry into a future government: establishing themselves as a third war party by establishing militia outside the SAF’s purview. This move follows the same logic as taking over the MFA but the means of inclusion differs: as a third military force, they forecast inclusion via the eventual power/wealth sharing agreement that will end the civil war.

By opening this pathway to re-inclusion, European policymakers also unwittingly expanded the civil war.

Seeing an avenue for legitimisation open has contributed to the Islamists’ decision to branch out from the SAF. In turn, the Islamists’ shifting from backer to rival, created an additional motive for the SAF to strengthen its hand by seeking new, unsavoury state backers.

For example, the SAF’s leader General Burhan re-established diplomatic relations with Iran—long since expelled from Sudan—who snapped up the opening and reciprocated with the game-changing provision of Mohajer drones. The end result is more conflict parties and more state spoilers: putting oil on the fire of the conflict.

The more European policy-makers abet this logic the greater the incentive for the parties to the conflict to find new means to secure de facto recognition as the legitimate government. The EU and its members need to engage with the RSF, SAF, and the MFA. But they can set down markers that doing so does not equate to recognising their future governing legitimacy.

Need for humanitarian access

The coming gambit will focus on desperately needed international humanitarian access following Europe’s successful humanitarian Paris pledging conference.

Having first converted aid from an obligation to a negotiation concession in the Jeddah Platform, the SAF now seeks to act as a gatekeeper for international aid arguing its state-status provides the right to decide on who can provide aid, how, and to whom.

That this will exclude areas under rival control is a foregone conclusion, and with that will come dire humanitarian consequences.

To remedy this, European policymakers can kill two birds with one stone in addressing this challenge to the universality of unfettered aid provision.

Since the SAF lacks any legitimate grounds for claiming a governing mandate, European policymakers should treat the SAF and RSF as they would any two warring non-state armed groups.

True, in such contexts, humanitarian access needs negotiating in terms of the mechanics of aid provision: ensuring aid providers’ security and so forth.

However, European policymakers should reject the core of the SAF’s argument by denying them the right granted to legitimate governments: to act as the sole arbiter of external aid.

In so doing, European policymakers can claw back the dangerous legitimation ground ceded to the SAF and arrest the mushrooming conflict driven by the backdoor entry of the Islamists into government.

European policymakers need to signal that all conflict parties are armed groups, not the government-in-waiting. This helpfully resets expectations around the coming SAF-RSF negotiations; preventing slippage from negotiating a ceasefire — a necessary step in ending the civil war — into power-sharing which would provide a backdoor into governing post-civil war Sudan.

Should the conflict parties succeed in parlaying ceasefire negotiations into power-sharing, European policymakers forfeit their paramount policy objective: securing the return of Sudan’s civilians to the leadership of a hard-won democratic transition.