The structural roots of Sudan’s ongoing devastation

One of the militias created through this strategy was the RSF, now one of the two main warring parties in the current conflict. The RSF seized control of the capital in April 2023 and expanded its control to Gezira by December of that year — the first time in Sudanese history that warfare reached the nation’s economic heartland. The consequences extended far beyond the immediate geography of military operations. Millions were displaced from the capital, which had previously housed over a quarter of Sudan’s population. These displaced populations sought refuge in other states that lacked even basic infrastructure for their native inhabitants, let alone capacity to accommodate newcomers.

The destruction of the industrial base in Khartoum and agricultural projects in Gezira led to catastrophic economic losses, with estimated sectoral GDP reductions of 70 percent in industry, 49 percent in services, and 21 percent in agriculture within the first year. These economic shocks translated directly into plummeting quality of life, vanishing incomes, and disappearing job opportunities nationwide. The current devastation thus stems from a dual legacy: both the immediate violent atrocities of the ongoing war and the accumulated developmental injustices of previous decades.

Old patterns with a new twist

Despite this reality, descriptions of the current war often emphasize its “unprecedented” violence and crimes against humanity, a framing that erases the suffering of millions who already endured decades of war and underdevelopment. The atrocities committed by the RSF, SAF, and allied militias on both sides merely continue long-established patterns of violence.

RSF-controlled areas are witness to their characteristic brand of chaos: fragmented governance through decentralized gangs with loose ties to a central leadership, widespread random violence, rapes, and systematic looting as both recruitment tool and reward for fighters. These are not new tactics — the same strategies were employed by the RSF in Darfur and other parts of Sudan for 20 years. The only difference now is that they are no longer taking place under the orders of the central government, but indeed against them.

In SAF-controlled zones, the violence follows a more bureaucratic pattern: forced evictions of low-income communities under the pretext of “safety” and without providing alternatives, mass arrests of street vendors and underprivileged communities accused of collaborating with the enemy, and extrajudicial killings carried out by proxy militias deliberately distanced from the state — a tactic perfected with the RSF itself in earlier years.

Both factions prioritize attacking each other’s territory while neglecting civilian needs in their own. Their sole focus remains securing military assets, as seen when the SAF repeatedly abandons populations to RSF brutality in favour of protecting weapons and personnel. Al-Fashir in North Darfur exemplifies this: besieged by the RSF for over 18 months, the SAF remains barricaded in its fortified central base while outsourcing combat to the so-called “Joint Forces”, a new militia cobbled together from signatories to the Juba Agreement, a deal signed in 2020 between the transitional government and several armed groups, advertised as a path to ending long-standing conflicts, particularly in Darfur and other regions

This systemic disregard for human life reflects deeper historical pathologies. In fact, the placement of military headquarters in every urban core reveals a colonial-era logic: state infrastructure takes absolute precedence over civilian survival. Giving that the Sudanese army itself, as well as several major governance entities and tools, did not undergo any review or reform since its creation by the British colonizers, such a result is only logical. This dynamic, whereby the state treats its people as colonial subjects rather than citizens, is by no means new but indeed foundational, dating back to Sudan’s inception as a state never fully decoupled from its oppressive origins.

Caught in the crossfire

Sudan’s popular resistance, which first showed its face in the 2019 revolutionary uprising, sought to oppose the erasure of past injustices while exposing ongoing ones. Yet the current war has subjected the movement, which demonstrated remarkable resilience in recent years, to a very severe test — partly as a consequence of the aforementioned centralization.

When protests first erupted against deposed president Omar al-Bashir in late 2018, they represented a quantitative transformation away from the previous civil disobedience under his 30-year rule. These included isolated protests against water shortages, underdevelopment, forced displacement, the detention and murder of activists, and other state-led crimes, as well as scattered labour struggles like the 2016 strike in opposition to rising medication prices. The December 2018 uprising spread simultaneously across dozens of cities and villages nationwide, facilitated by the emergence of neighbourhood resistance committees designed to coordinate protests while minimizing state repression's impact.

These committees became the vanguard of resistance against both al-Bashir and the subsequent transitional government as it increasingly betrayed the revolution’s goals. Representing a qualitatively new political force, they broke the monopoly held by traditional parties in a political arena closed to new actors for decades. Their members, drawn from a young demographic with bleak economic prospects, were rooted in local communities, more attuned to local realities, and less prone to compromise. This manifested in their steadfast opposition to economic liberalization and the normalization of military rule, in sharp contrast to the established parties that joined the August 2019 power-sharing deal with the military.

Following the October 2021 military coup, the committees spearheaded a revitalized resistance movement, now unshackled from transitional government propaganda. At their peak, over 8,000 committees nationwide coordinated protests and developed comprehensive political charters advocating complete military withdrawal from governance. Through sustained demonstrations, they successfully immobilized the coup regime for more than a year.

The establishment’s response to this grassroots movement followed predictable patterns: either outright dismissal or co-optation. Traditional reformist parties sought to hijack protests, claiming they supported restoring the pre-coup partnership government — a manoeuvre that backfired as protesters publicly expelled their representatives from protests. Similarly, international actors like the UN Mission in Sudan pushed for renewed military-civilian partnerships despite popular opposition, even attempting (unsuccessfully) to draw resistance committees into these negotiations. This persistent pattern of rewarding military factions with political legitimacy directly enabled their continued violence, including the current war.

While retaining revolutionary demands for civilian rule and the core slogan of “freedom, peace, and justice”, the committees could not fully escape Sudan’s structural centralization. Although they introduced new voices to political discourse, they remained constrained by elitist frameworks, as the following examples and manifestations expose. Their nominally horizontal structures, both internally and in inter-committee coordination, proved inadequate to overcome centralized power dynamics.

Several manifestations of these limitations emerged:

• The charter drafting process, while theoretically inclusive (with state-level deliberations preceding a national synthesis), saw Khartoum’s document disproportionately dominate discourse, often being mistaken for the national consensus — a direct consequence of infrastructural centralization in education and communications that gave Khartoum committees a louder voice than others.
• Internal committee dynamics reproduced patriarchal norms, valorizing militant protest roles over organizational work, leading to declining female participation compared to the revolution’s early days.
• Despite some electoral practices, most committees failed to develop truly inclusive decision-making structures, remaining dominated by politically active young men rather than becoming genuine neighbourhood assemblies.
• Their political proposals focused on capturing existing state institutions through electoral strategies rather than capitalizing on the situation of dual power to build alternative, community-controlled systems for resource management.

The Sudanese experience confirms a century of Marxist theoretical observations: while the oppressed naturally recognize injustice and possess tremendous revolutionary energy, transforming this potential into lasting change requires both scientific organizational methods and direct popular control over resources, tasks historically fulfilled by revolutionary Marxist parties.

When war erupted in April 2023, most resistance committees initially rejected the conflict and refused to support either warring party — both being military factions the movement had opposed for years. The resistance collectively mobilized through what were called “Emergency Rooms”, new community organizations formed to provide essential services to war-besieged and displaced populations as state institutions abandoned their responsibilities. To this day, these “Rooms” remain the primary support system for those most affected by the war.

Yet the Sudanese movement’s chronic lack of a comprehensive revolutionary political programme manifested again in critical ways. The Emergency Rooms largely framed their work as temporary volunteer charity rather than recognizing their potential to establish genuine bottom-up systems of service provision and community organization — a missed opportunity for transformative praxis.

No liberation without organization

The resistance committees themselves, despite their principled anti-war stance, gradually shifted towards an untenable middle position: opposing the war while paradoxically supporting what they conceptualized as “the Sudanese state” — an entity they portrayed as transcending its military apparatus, existing as a benevolent, apolitical institution. This fundamental misunderstanding of the state as a neutral body rather than as the ruling class’s instrument particularly influenced urban committee members, some of whom ultimately embraced overt SAF support under the justification of wartime exigency.

Proponents of this approach — within both the committees as well as pro-revolutionary intellectual circles — rationalize their position by invoking what they characterize as an unprecedented existential threat to Sudan’s state and people. While historically inaccurate given Sudan’s long history of conflicts, this perspective becomes comprehensible when considering the effects of centralized development discussed earlier. The predominance of urban voices within the resistance movement — largely from areas previously insulated from Sudan’s peripheral wars — has meant that personal wartime experiences now distort political analysis, eclipsing the longstanding grievances of marginalized regions that predate the current conflict.

In examining both the war’s devastation in Sudan and the resistance movement’s limitations, two stark realities emerge: the catastrophic consequences of centralized power and development, and the impossibility of fundamentally challenging these structures without a coherent revolutionary theory and a disciplined party committed to its implementation. By reaching Sudan’s urban political and economic core, the current war has not only spread destruction nationwide, but also exposed the critical weakness of a resistance movement that — despite remarkable resilience — lacked what it needed most: a revolutionary organization dedicated to transforming foundational power structures rather than merely resisting their symptoms or negotiating superficial leadership changes.

The path forward becomes clear through this painful lesson: lasting liberation requires moving beyond spontaneous resistance to build organized revolutionary capacity. Only with an objective analysis of state and economic power, as well as the impacts of the colonial legacy — combined with disciplined organization that unites urban and rural struggles — can Sudan break its cycle of violence and underdevelopment. The alternative is the perpetual recurrence of today’s tragedies under different guises, as the root causes remain unaddressed and the structures of oppression persist.