The illusion of a clean endgame has gripped Khartoum. As the Sudanese Armed Forces claw back territory along central supply routes and push the Rapid Support Forces onto the defensive, military planners talk openly of total victory rather than negotiated containment. This optimism is dangerously misplaced. The complete military collapse or expulsion of the Rapid Support Forces from major urban centers will not restore the Sudanese state. Instead, it will shatter the country into a chaotic mosaic of heavily armed fiefdoms, transitioning a bipolar civil war into a multi-sided contest of local warlords.
Understanding this trajectory requires looking past the conventional map of the conflict. The war is widely viewed as a straightforward duel between two generals: Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the regular army and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. This framing misses the structural reality of how violence is organized in contemporary Sudan. The paramilitary force is not a monolithic regular army with a unified ideological core. It operates much more like a loose franchise, an agglomeration of tribal militias, opportunistic economic syndicates, and regional mercenaries bound together by access to gold revenues and patronage.
When a franchise model of warfare faces systemic military defeat at the center, the command structure does not surrender in unison. It splinters. Senior commanders in distant peripheries like Darfur and Kordofan already evaluate their survival through a local lens. Defections are rising, driven by shifting tribal calculations and external financial inducements. If the central leadership collapses or loses its grip on primary economic arteries, these field commanders will not lay down their weapons. They will morph into entrenched local potentates, retaining their arsenals to tax local trade routes, exploit agricultural land, and protect ethnic constituencies from rival armed groups.
The structural weakness of the national army guarantees that a military victory will remain incomplete. Decades before the current conflict erupted in April 2023, the central government in Khartoum struggled to project sustained, legitimate authority across the vast peripheries of the country. Under the long regime of Omar al-Bashir, the state outsourced counterinsurgency to proxy militias, the ideological and structural forebears of the current paramilitaries. A cash-poor, heavily strained regular military relying on irregular volunteer brigades, Islamist factions, and shifting peace-agreement signatories cannot suddenly achieve absolute pacification across a region the size of Western Europe.
External actors complicate any transition toward centralized stability. Regional patrons who previously funneled material support and financial backing into the war effort will not simply vanish from the scene when the front lines shift. Their interests in Sudan's Red Sea coastline, agricultural tracts, and mineral wealth remain active. If the primary proxy structure breaks apart, these external sponsors will likely pivot to cultivating smaller, localized assets. This dynamic threatens to turn Sudan into a sprawling arena of competing micro-interventions, mirroring the protracted fragmentation seen in other collapsed states across the region.
Meanwhile, the capital itself harbors deep political contradictions that military success cannot resolve. The regular army relies heavily on hardline Islamist brigades to hold urban ground. These ideological factions harbour distinct ambitions for postwar governance that clash sharply with the desires of pro-democracy civilian networks, civil society organizers, and regional populations who bore the brunt of decades of authoritarian rule. Once the existential threat of the paramilitary advance recedes from Khartoum, latent ideological and political fractures within the victorious camp will immediately rise to the surface.
The fundamental metric of success in Sudan has been inverted. Observers fixate on who will control the presidential palace or clear the final sniper from the capital's streets. The real test is whether any governing authority can survive the morning after a military triumph without turning the nation into an permanent archipelago of violent exemptions. Without a comprehensive political framework that bypasses zero-sum military logic and integrates marginalized civilian voices, the silencing of the primary guns will merely grant permission for a hundred smaller ones to open fire.
