The Face of Truth: How Did the Parties Hand Sudan Over…?!
Ibrahim Shaglawi
The handing over of Sudan did not occur in a single moment, nor through one complete conspiracy. Rather, it took place by installments, step by step, when political parties failed to rise from the logic of rivalry to the logic of the state. Since the fall of Omar al-Bashir’s regime in 2019, political forces did not treat the transition as a historic opportunity to re-establish the social contract. Instead, they viewed it as a spoil of power, managed with the mentality of a greedy victor, not that of a responsible partner.
The first link in this process was the replacement of politics with exclusion. Slogans of revolution and justice were raised, but practical conduct quickly slipped toward excluding opponents and defaming them instead of holding them accountable through the law. The Empowerment Removal Committee shifted from an instrument of justice into a tool of political liquidation. The principle of the rule of law collapsed, and the state began to be run by individuals rather than institutions. At that point, the social contract fell: equality before the law was lost, authority forfeited part of its moral and political legitimacy, and an important pillar of trust among youth aspiring for change eroded.
The second link lay in emptying legitimacy of its substance. Instead of resorting to the people through early elections or clear transitional paths, reliance was placed on an open-ended revolutionary legitimacy with no time horizon, managed through manufactured alliances and top-down agreements. Over time, the state turned into a vacuum, while de facto forces—armed and unarmed—expanded within its body.
This trajectory was further entrenched by attempts to pass what became known as the “Lawyers’ Constitution,” which was practically designed to exclude specific political parties under the pretext of not overcrowding the political process, despite its failure to secure even the minimum national consensus required for its adoption.
Later, as the transition faltered, the same forces turned to the Framework Agreement, accompanied by a political discourse that carried implicit threats, suggesting the possession of “alternative options” should the process be obstructed, as stated by prominent leaders, including Dr. Mariam al-Sadiq al-Mahdi. At that moment, talk began to seep among observers and public opinion about the possibility of a coup based on the Rapid Support Forces militia, whose presence in the capital Khartoum exceeded that of the army.
This narrative was reinforced by what active journalists and politicians pointed out: that what occurred on April 15, 2023, was in its early stages a coup attempt to remove the head of state, before turning into a comprehensive war due to the resistance of the military institution.
The most dangerous link, however, was seeking strength from abroad to manage the interior. Unable to resolve their differences, the parties handed the keys of the country to regional and international mediations. With every round of negotiations outside the borders, national decision-making lost a portion of its independence, until Sudan became—as described by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk—“a battlefield where proxy wars are fought out of greed for resources.” Here, external actors became covetous, and settlements were no longer fair, but tailored according to regional and international balances seeking their own interests.
In this shameful context, the major sin occurred: political normalization with weapons outside the state. Instead of adhering strictly to the principle of the state’s monopoly on force, political forces either remained silent, justified, or gambled on the Rapid Support Forces militia as a pressure tool or a potential partner in new balances. With the resilience of the military institution, the explosion became a matter of time, and the war—ongoing to this moment—erupted as a logical outcome of a corrupt political path.
Today, the picture of handover is completed through new exclusionary calls, foremost among them demands to classify the Islamic Movement and the National Congress as terrorist organizations. These calls wear the garb of an impotent politics, reflecting a mindset that fails to distinguish between justice and revenge, accountability and eradication, and between the homeland and reliance on the foreigner. They ignore the fact that Sudan is fighting an existential war, and that dismantling the internal front at this moment serves the enemies of the state more than it serves the country.
These calls also ignore a fundamental social and political reality: that these currents, regardless of disagreement with them, constitute part of the national fabric and have a real presence in society and on the ground, representing a segment of the people.
In response, the Islamist current counters with accusations of its own, describing parties linked to the leadership of Dr. Abdalla Hamdok—such as “Somoud” and “Ta’sis”—as a political façade for the Rapid Support Forces militia, accusing them of silence or complicity regarding the widespread and documented violations against civilians, which international human rights organizations have clearly condemned. Thus, the scene descends into a deadly equation: exclusion versus treason, while the blood of civilians is lost between two competing discourses.
This discourse goes further by linking these positions to an integrated political track that seeks to re-engineer power in Sudan through weakening the military institution and imposing an unbalanced settlement in which the Rapid Support Forces constitute one of its pillars, alongside the exclusion of specific social and political forces from the public sphere.
In this sense, the battle becomes a struggle over the very nature of the state: is it a national state that monopolizes arms and submits to legitimacy, or a fragile entity whose balances are managed through an armed militia backed externally and a civilian façade that provides it with political cover? From here, accusations of “collaboration” acquire a central dimension in this discourse.
Yet the danger of this scene does not lie in the mutual accusations themselves, but in what they reveal of a complete collapse of the logic of the social contract. Instead of managing disputes through independent investigations, legal accountability, and clear ethical stances toward violations, political discourse slides into comprehensive treason, matching in intensity the opposing discourse of exclusion. Thus, the political arena turns into a field of mutual accusations, where values of nationalism retreat and what remains of the idea of the state is drained.
The philosophy of the social contract, as articulated by Rousseau and subsequent political philosophers, is based on a fundamental principle: no legitimacy without consent, and no state without a minimum level of consensus among its components. The modern state is not built on the logic of victor and vanquished, but on integrating opponents within a comprehensive legal framework that ultimately defers to the will of the people through free elections that bring to power those accepted and agreed upon.
Conversely, the war has redrawn the image of some political actors, foremost among them the Islamist current, which appeared—in the eyes of broad segments—engaged in defending the state and grounded in a discourse linking a return to power with elections and recourse to the people. This transformation, regardless of its evaluation, confirms the failure of the exclusionary approach to end its role and proves that it pushes it to the forefront.
Thus, the Sudanese impasse is a crisis of political culture that has yet to grasp the meaning of the state or the logic of the social contract—a culture that sees the outside as a support, exclusion as a solution, and conspiracy as a substitute for productive political action. Exit from this tunnel will only come by moving from zero-sum politics to national contracting politics, where differences are managed within the homeland and the people are the ultimate arbiter.
The harsh conclusion, according to #The_Face_of_Truth, is that Sudanese parties were not defeated in a political battle; rather, they handed Sudan over gradually: they abandoned the law in favor of exclusion, sovereignty in favor of the outside, the army in favor of the militia, and ethics in favor of narrow calculations. Without breaking the cycle of exclusion, treason, and reliance on external actors, Sudan will continue to orbit conflict—far from the state of the social contract and close to the logic of open war.
May you remain in good health and well-being.
Thursday, 18 December 2025
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