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Sudan is now collapsing into one of the worst wars of our time. Years of Western-backed reforms, sanctions, and flawed peace deals set the stage for today’s bloodshed. A crisis that was predictable enough is now spinning across the Sahel and the Red Sea.
Written by Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions
As the world’s attention remains fixated on Gaza, Ukraine, or other conflicts, the devastating war in Sudan remains a largely underreported tragedy. The collapse of Sudan’s transitional experiment, the explosion of violence in El-Fasher, and the metastasizing proxy war across the Sahel, with all its complexities, are partially rooted in Western policies. The record is clear enough: a long chain of miscalculations by Washington, London, and Brussels helped create the very conditions in which the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) are now tearing the country apart.
One may recall that Western governments celebrated the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) as a triumph of “liberal peacebuilding.” The problem is that this US/UK-backed model was fundamentally flawed. By empowering armed factions while sidelining civilian society, the agreement rewarded the logic of militarized politics. According to a 2006 Human Rights Watch report, the CPA entrenched power structures that would later feed today’s war.
The roadmap failed to address Darfur, the marginalization of peripheral regions, or the toxic legacy of former leader Omar al-Bashir’s divide-and-rule tactics. Simply put, the CPA was an incomplete peace engineered from outside, thereby planting the seeds for future crises.
For one thing, The “QUAD” (US, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and UAE) played an oddly contradictory role in Sudan. While mediating peace deals, two of its members were also backing rival armed factions, while the Western partners pushed quick political fixes that empowered the same generals who later went to war again. A peace process led by actors with conflicting interests was thus doomed from the start.
Before the 1989 coup by Omar al-Bashir and the National Islamic Front Sudan once had one of Africa’s stronger state structures, with a robust public sector. Robert Kluijver (a researcher at the Centre for International Research) argues that years of IMF and World Bank-driven reforms weakened the state. According to Kluijver, Al-Bashir eventually repositioned himself during the “Global War on Terror”, winning renewed Western support by permitting South Sudan’s secession in 2011.
This opened the door for foreign capital, but only on the condition of structural reforms. As in other cases of state dismantlement, these reforms allowed a small military-business elite to seize privatized state assets, while Sudan slid into unsustainable debt.
The problems only deepened after Bashir’s fall in 2019. Western pressure for a rushed civilian transition, coupled with textbook neoliberal economic demands and uncoordinated sanctions, produced a fragile hybrid government. Instead of forging a power-sharing compromise for different groups, the arrangement excluded non-Khartoum groups and civil society, legitimized two rival military blocs — Burhan’s SAF and Hemedti’s RSF. It was a gamble that ignored local political realities, and no wonder it failed.
Even during the 2019–2021 period, Western aid came with IMF-style austerity expectations that, in practical terms, worsened living conditions. While diplomatic statements praised Sudan’s “return to the international community,” ordinary Sudanese saw inflation, subsidy cuts, and insecure borders. Be as it may, the West was more focused on migration management and counterterrorism than on real political stabilization.
Back in 2021 I noted that multiple foreign actors — including Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — were moving aggressively into the Sudanese arena, each pursuing its own the Red Sea agenda. This has not changed much, with the hydropolitical dispute over GERD (Great Renaissance Dam of Ethiopia) and a regional proxy landscape still shaping conflicts: Sudan’s internal collapse is inseparable from broader tensions stretching from the Red Sea to the Nile basin.
Under US President Obama, as I wrote elsewhere, sanctions were partially lifted not for democratic reforms but because Sudan’s intelligence service cooperated with the CIA against jihadist groups. The EU, for its part, relied on Khartoum’s notorious security apparatus to curb migration through the so-called Khartoum Process and the 2015 Valletta Summit on Migration —policies that strengthened the very RSF networks now committing atrocities. The result was a security state swollen with international support, and militias enriched by gold smuggling networks tied to external patrons.
Back to today’s crisis, Western responsibility is even harder to deny. A recent Le Monde investigation exposes the UAE’s “shady role” in fueling the war, while Western nations remain passively complicit through their “culpable indifference”. Thus, the United States is now scrambling to manage a crisis it helped enable, as El-Fasher becomes the epicenter of ethnic massacres and regional escalation. Again, it is well known that the UAE channeled arms and logistical support to the RSF while the US looked the other way.
In any case, Western governments today have very limited leverage over either faction. No one denies there is a regional proxy war, with a number of local players, but the West bears responsibility for the frameworks that entrenched militarized politics, as well as for the sanctions and pressures that weakened civilian authority while empowering the generals. Western governments also oversaw a decade of policies that turned Sudan into a buffer zone for migration control and counterterrorism — policies that strengthened Khartoum’s security elite and normalized the RSF. This catastrophe reflects the failures of Western foreign policy.
Sudan’s collapse is a humanitarian tragedy and also a strategic disaster stretching across the Red Sea, destabilizing the Sahel, and jeopardizing maritime routes critical for global trade. And this — not the West’s moral conscience — is the reason why Sudan will be in the spotlight again.
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to be frank, sudan was always a disaster zone, and always will be. western interference or not. it’s not like libya or syria or iraq which were fairly stable for a fairly long time.