Notes

From revolution to civil war to genocide. The U.S. State Department just published a report finding that Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a militia fighting a civil war against the country’s military, had committed genocide during Sudan’s ongoing civil war. Washington has meanwhile backed this finding up by imposing sanctions against the RSF’s leader, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as “Hemedti,” and seven companies owned by the RSF in the United Arab Emirates, which have been backing the militia in the conflict.

As we noted on Monday, it’s a conflict that’s driving tremendous suffering in the country, where upward of 25 million people are experiencing acute hunger—and both armed forces have been using starvation and the control of humanitarian aid as weapons of war. The U.S. says both sides have committed war crimes during the civil war, which has killed more than 28,000 people and displaced more than 11 million—almost a quarter of Sudan’s population—since fighting began in April 2023.

And yet this is the same country where, in 2016, a mass uprising toppled the longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir, who’d subjected Sudan to 30 years of autocratic rule. Why couldn’t Sudan seize the opportunity to build a stable democracy?

Unity among Sudan’s revolutionaries enabled them to form a civil-military council for managing the planned transition to democracy. They even scheduled elections for 2022. In October 2021, however, the military launched a coup, arresting the prime minister and dissolving the government. The military was able to contain the widespread protests that followed the coup, but the persistent opposition ultimately led to the civil war. It was a pattern familiar from other Arab countries where longstanding tyrants fell during the Arab Spring: Civil wars continue in Yemen, Libya, and Sudan, while new autocrats have seized power in Tunisia, Egypt, and Algeria—with a new transition just beginning in Syria.

In November 2021, just after the military coup, James Robinson explored the obstacles facing countries trying to build democracies after despotism. The key, Robinson says, is to create political institutions and an economy that include a vast majority of the people. But in Sudan—as in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world—the military under Bashir controlled a significant share of the economy, and the popular coalition that overthrew him was unable to give the armed forces enough incentives to give up their economic power.

—Michael Bluhm