Beyond the RSF: Is Sudan Moving Toward an Endless War?

By: Dr. Abdelnasser Selum Hamed

Fragmentation within armed alliances may reshape the balance of conflict, but the more urgent question may no longer concern the war itself — rather, the kind of state that will emerge in its aftermath.

In prolonged wars, major turning points do not always begin on the battlefield. Often, they emerge quietly within the alliances that have kept warring parties intact for years. When resources decline, influence shifts, and leadership struggles to maintain loyalties, cracks begin to appear from within — long before they become visible in military maps or political calculations.

Sudan appears to be standing at precisely such a moment.

More than three years after war erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the central question is no longer simply who controls a city or loses a front line. Increasingly, the question is whether the war itself is changing shape.

A recent report by ACLED, the conflict-monitoring organization, suggests that growing divisions within RSF alliances may provide the Sudanese army with greater room to maneuver. At the same time, however, those fractures could push Sudan into a more complex phase of conflict — one in which centralized warfare gives way to overlapping local and ethnic confrontations.

This reveals a paradox that may seem counterintuitive: the weakening of one side in a conflict does not necessarily bring peace closer. In some cases, it may do the opposite.

In fragile environments, the decline of major armed actors often leads not to stability, but to the emergence of smaller groups — more flexible, less accountable, and harder to contain. What follows is not necessarily de-escalation, but fragmentation.

Viewed from this angle, the significance of the ACLED report extends beyond speculation about the weakening of the RSF itself. Instead, it points toward a potentially more dangerous scenario: Sudan’s war evolving from a confrontation between major actors into a fragmented conflict in which violence becomes more dispersed, more localized, and increasingly difficult to control.

According to the report, internal fractures within the RSF accelerated after the group lost territories in central Sudan, including Khartoum, and became more visible following the consolidation of influence across parts of Darfur in 2025. The importance of these developments lies not only in their timing, but also in what they reveal about the nature of the force itself.

The RSF did not evolve as a conventional centralized military institution. Rather, it developed through a broad network of tribal, military, and economic alliances. Its cohesion depended less on rigid institutional discipline and more on resource distribution, battlefield rewards, patronage, and the balancing of competing interests.

Within such systems, the loss of resources becomes more than an economic setback; it becomes a crisis of loyalty.

When leadership loses the ability to distribute influence and benefits, alliances begin reassessing their positions. Defections then shift from isolated incidents to recurring possibilities. In this sense, fragmentation is not merely a symptom of battlefield pressure; it is a structural vulnerability built into the model itself.

From this perspective, defections highlighted in the report — including influential figures from the Mahamid and Rizeigat communities joining the Sudanese army — may signal deeper reassessments within the social environments that have long formed part of the RSF’s support base.

Still, interpreting these developments as evidence of imminent collapse may be premature. Sudan’s recent history has repeatedly shown that fragmentation among armed actors does not necessarily lead to their disappearance. More often, it reproduces them in smaller, more adaptable, and sometimes more violent forms.

This is where the Sudanese experience becomes especially important. Armed groups in Sudan have often survived not by remaining cohesive, but by mutating. They split, realign, change patrons, localize their objectives, and re-enter the conflict under different arrangements. What appears at first as decline can later become redistribution of violence.

Regional experiences reinforce this concern. From Libya to phases of conflict in Darfur, the fragmentation of armed groups has rarely produced immediate stability. Instead, it has often created new spheres of influence that later prove difficult to integrate into state institutions.

Perhaps one of the most consequential implications of the ACLED report is this: the real danger may not lie in the weakening of the RSF itself, but in the vacuum its decline could leave behind.

Security vacuums rarely remain empty for long.

The report notes that shrinking resources have coincided with increased looting, kidnappings, extortion, and violence against civilians as alternative sources of financing for some armed groups. This is more than a rise in abuses. It may indicate something deeper: the transformation of war into an economic system in its own right.

When violence shifts from being a tool for political or military objectives to becoming a means of economic survival, conflict becomes harder to end. Wars sustained by ideology or political goals can sometimes conclude through negotiation or military defeat. Wars sustained by livelihoods often persist.

Groups that depend on conflict for survival do not disappear automatically when the larger force they once aligned with weakens. Instead, they seek new alliances, new territories, and new reasons to continue.

At this stage, violence no longer exists merely as a consequence of war; it becomes part of the mechanism through which war sustains itself. Conflict ceases to be temporary and instead becomes an entrenched system of interests — one difficult to dismantle even as balances of power shift.

That may be one of the most dangerous transformations in Sudan today: the possibility that war is no longer only a struggle over power, but also a structure of survival for armed actors who may have little incentive to return to peace

From this point onward, the question gradually shifts away from the future of the RSF itself and toward something more fundamental: what happens to a state when armed actors fragment, but the conditions required to restore central authority do not emerge?

Perhaps it is too early to reduce Sudan’s crisis to the fate of the RSF or the prospects of the Sudanese army alone. The current war has produced more than security fragmentation; it has also exposed longstanding structural weaknesses within the Sudanese state — particularly the fragile relationship between the center and the periphery, and the historical difficulty of monopolizing force outside networks of armed patronage.

For this reason, it may be misleading to view the current conflict as a complete rupture with Sudan’s past.

Sudan has endured repeated crises for decades, many tied to unresolved questions surrounding the distribution of power and resources, as well as the relationship between central authority and marginalized regions. From this perspective, the present war may represent less a temporary confrontation between two armed actors and more a continuation of a deeper state crisis whose core questions have remained unresolved for generations.

The implications of this distinction matter.

If the war is understood merely as a conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF, then weakening one side may appear sufficient to move toward stability. But if the conflict reflects a broader crisis of governance, representation, and state authority, military outcomes alone become far less decisive.

The ACLED report points to increasing tensions within groups allied to the RSF itself — across Darfur, Kordofan, and wider affiliated networks. Such developments may indicate that Sudan is gradually moving from a war with identifiable centers of power toward multiple overlapping conflicts shaped by competition over resources, tribal tensions, and localized struggles for influence.

Conflicts of this kind are inherently more difficult to resolve.

Ending war is no longer dependent on agreement between two principal actors; rather, it requires managing an interconnected web of local disputes, competing authorities, and fragmented security structures.

In environments like these, peace agreements often prove easier to sign than to implement.

From my perspective, Sudan’s greatest challenge may no longer be ending the war between the army and the RSF itself. The deeper challenge may be avoiding a point at which the state loses the capacity to reconstruct the political and security sphere under a single authority.

Wars sometimes end. States do not always recover at the same pace.

At the same time, the Sudanese military may now face an opportunity extending beyond immediate battlefield gains. Internal divisions within the RSF could create openings to restore state presence in areas where official authority had eroded over years of conflict. In this sense, military advances may represent more than tactical victories; they could provide space for re-establishing parts of the state’s security architecture and reducing the proliferation of competing armed centers.

Yet the central question remains unresolved: are military gains alone sufficient to rebuild institutions and address the social and security fragmentation produced by years of war?

Even if the army secures additional advances through divisions among its opponents, the larger challenge lies beyond the battlefield — in whether military advantage can be transformed into durable political and institutional stability.

This may be the deeper implication underlying the ACLED analysis: Sudan is confronting not only a struggle over power, but also a test concerning the nature of the state that will survive after the war.

The issue, then, extends beyond the future of the RSF.

It concerns whether Sudan can prevent security fragmentation from becoming a permanent reality.

That is why the country may not be approaching the end of conflict so much as a reconfiguration of conflict itself — from a war between two principal actors to a more fragmented landscape in which localized struggles increasingly replace centralized confrontation.

Such transitions carry consequences beyond Sudan’s borders. Prolonged fragmentation in one state often reshapes regional security dynamics through displacement, cross-border armed networks, and shifting alliances.

Ultimately, perhaps the most urgent question is no longer: Who wins the war?

A more consequential question may be this:

Will Sudan lose only the war, or could it lose something far more difficult to restore — the capacity of the state itself?

The greater danger may be that the major war ends while the conditions that produced it remain intact; that armed competition persists beneath new arrangements; and that the state remains unable to reclaim a monopoly over force or build authority beyond localized loyalties and weapons.

At that point, the dilemma is no longer how the war ends.

It becomes whether Sudan emerges as a state capable of producing shared authority and rebuilding political order — or as a space where multiple centers of power coexist under the name of a single state.

That may be the most important uncertainty facing Sudan today.

Not simply whether the RSF weakens.

But whether Sudan can avoid entering a future in which fragmentation itself becomes the new political order.