Killing Without Bullets: When War Is Waged Against Life in Sudan
By: Dr. Abdelnasser Selum Hamed
In Sudan, death is no longer confined to the battlefield. It has become a slow, managed process—a quiet erosion of society itself. In Darfur, Khartoum, Al Jazira, and Kordofan, the cruelty of war is measured not only by explosions or gunfire, but by what happens off-camera: roads sealed without announcement, markets paralyzed without formal decrees, supplies looted into disappearance, and patients unable to reach care because access itself has become a gamble.
This is a war against the conditions of life: food, healthcare, mobility, and the fragile minimum of everyday security.
In this war, control is not measured by the land you take, but by the lives you can make unlivable.
Numbers strip away any temptation to treat this as metaphor. By 1 December 2025, nearly 11.9 million people had been forcibly displaced inside and outside Sudan, while more than 30 million were estimated to require humanitarian assistance in 2025 alone. These figures do not simply describe an emergency; they point to a structural breakdown—an environment in which survival becomes contingent, negotiable, and increasingly controlled.
What makes this moment particularly dangerous is not only the scale of suffering, but the growing international normalization of slow violence. As the war drags on, deprivation is increasingly treated as background noise rather than as a deliberate strategy. This normalization does not merely delay action; it actively reshapes expectations about what civilian suffering is allowed to look like.
On an ordinary day under war, a civilian does not carry a rifle and is not chased by aircraft. He carries a short list: bread, medicine, water. He returns home missing two of the three. He was not officially banned, not formally charged, and no shot was fired at him. Yet he learns, day after day, that tomorrow will cost more than today—and that staying home is not safety.
In war psychology, the ability to predict the next day is one of the foundations of mental stability. When that capacity collapses, people do not break all at once. Anxiety becomes chronic. Waiting turns into exhaustion. Time itself becomes a threat. This is not the trauma of a single event; it is the trauma of a permanent climate—an atmosphere of uncertainty that drains the body and mind long before hunger or illness finishes the work.
When food is blocked, care is unreachable, and roads are sealed, death becomes a foreseeable outcome that requires no bullet.
Since April 15, 2023, civilian harm has expanded dramatically. Yet the most dangerous transformation lies not only in scale, but in how control is exercised. In conventional wars, control is measured by territory. In Sudan, territory alone often means little. The fate of entire communities is determined by who controls roads, fuel, supply chains, and the ability to freeze—or selectively reopen—markets.
In this landscape, services become instruments of war, and scarcity becomes a mechanism of governance.
Political sociology teaches that there is a moment in war when the meaning of the state itself changes. When the state can no longer perform its most basic function—protecting everyday life—an undeclared parallel authority takes shape. It may not issue constitutions, but it issues permissions. It may not pass laws, but it controls passage. Checkpoints, travel approvals, fuel access, and warehouse keys become the true levers of power. Life is no longer organized by rights, but by access; not by citizenship, but by mediation.
This is the sovereignty of scarcity: power measured by the ability to grant life, delay it, or price it out of reach.
This pattern is not random. It reflects the pragmatic logic of asymmetric conflict. Targeting the conditions of life is often cheaper than prolonged direct confrontation, and more effective at breaking societies without producing the dramatic images that force the world to look. Civilians are not incidental victims; they become the terrain on which endurance is tested and collapse is manufactured.
Hunger here is not simply a humanitarian consequence—it is a method of rule, managed through roads, warehouses, and crossings.
Sudan is not an anomaly, but an extreme case of a wider global shift toward managing wars through deprivation rather than direct confrontation—a model that minimizes political cost while maximizing civilian exhaustion.
At the height of the crisis in September 2025, an estimated 21.2 million people—around 45 percent of the population—faced acute food insecurity. At this scale, hunger ceases to be an individual condition and becomes a social structure. Societies reorganize around survival. Priorities shift. Norms erode under pressure. Moral life is renegotiated in the language of necessity.
Over time, repeated failed attempts to cope—searching for food and returning empty-handed, waiting for corridors that never open, relying on aid that arrives too late—produce what psychologists call learned helplessness. People stop trying not because they no longer want to live, but because experience teaches them that effort no longer changes outcomes. Surrender becomes a survival strategy rather than a moral decision. Defeat moves inward—from front lines into homes, memories, and the self.
Persistent fear does not kill instantly. It dismantles the capacity to act—and turns survival into a daily burden.
Funding shocks intensify this indirect violence. When food assistance is reduced or delayed—as international agencies warned toward the end of 2025—scarcity becomes a force multiplier. The impact is not only physical but symbolic. When communities conclude that the world cannot—or will not—deliver even the minimum, a corrosive sense of abandonment sets in. In this war, abandonment is not a background condition; it is part of the mechanism.
Darfur illustrates these dynamics with brutal clarity. Displacement is not only the loss of shelter; it is the loss of a map of life—livelihoods, schools, neighbors, routines, and the everyday memory that makes a community coherent. As populations concentrate in resource-poor areas, pressure on water, healthcare, and food intensifies, creating conditions ripe for disease and exploitation. In camps, survival is tested—but dignity is tested too.
Displacement does not only strip people of homes; it strips them of their entire map of life—work, school, neighbors, and memory.
Fear then becomes a tool of social control. When detention is unpredictable, disappearance unexplained, and rules enforced without pattern, society loses its ability to adapt. Trust erodes. Initiatives are postponed. Silence becomes the least costly option. Even humanitarian acts come to be perceived as risks. A society without trust is a society without the capacity to resist—or to recover.
Healthcare offers the sharpest example of killing without bullets. When hospitals are disabled, supplies looted, or access made dangerous, treatable illnesses become death sentences: a woman unable to reach safe childbirth, a child denied basic treatment, a patient cut off from chronic medication. Care itself becomes a battlefield, because its withdrawal redistributes the chances of survival—favoring those with money and connections, and condemning others to quiet death.
Children bear the deepest scar. A child raised in an environment where food, safety, and the ability to return home are never guaranteed does not develop temporary fear alone; fear becomes formative. When an entire generation grows up in a world that cannot be predicted, the post-war period becomes harder than many imagine. Societies do not heal simply when fighting stops; they must rebuild trust, meaning, and a sense of future.
Children who grow up in an unpredictable world inherit not only fear—but a world stripped of stable meaning.
International humanitarian law does not only prohibit the direct targeting of civilians. It also restricts practices that foreseeably result in widespread deprivation of the essentials of life. When civilian movement is constrained in ways that lead to starvation, denial of healthcare, or the collapse of basic services—and when objects indispensable to civilian survival are systematically looted or destroyed—death cannot be treated as incidental. Depending on scale, pattern, and intent, such practices may amount to war crimes, and potentially crimes against humanity. Responsibility does not end with direct perpetrators; questions of command responsibility arise where abuses are known, tolerated, or repeatedly left unchecked.
The danger of this kind of war is not only that it kills slowly, but that it teaches the world to accept slow death as normal. When suffering becomes routine, accountability becomes optional. And when accountability becomes optional, violence no longer needs to justify itself.
Most dangerously, slow killing is easy to normalize. It produces no single shocking moment. It spreads across days, neighborhoods, and camps—until it is reclassified as a chronic crisis. War is redefined: not as confrontation, but as the management of hunger, fear, and deprivation. More dangerous than death is the loss of shock—because without shock there is no outrage, and without outrage there is no will to rescue or to hold anyone accountable.
When death is managed this way, silence is not neutrality—it is indirect participation.
In the end, killing without bullets is not a metaphor. It is a description of a war waged against life itself. History will not judge only those who commit direct violence, but also those who accept slow death as normal—and those who learn to treat silent suffering as background noise. In that silence, it is not only people who are exhausted, but the very idea of a human being protected by law and conscience.
Abdelnasser Selum Hamed
Senior Researcher & Director, East Africa and Sudan Program, FOx Research
Researcher in Crisis Management & Counter-Terrorism