Three years into the country’s catastrophic civil war, Sudan’s patchwork of battlefields has hardened into something that resembles a de facto partition. General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces has consolidated its control over much of northern, eastern, and central Sudan, and the Rapid Support Forces, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti), dominates Darfur in the west and much of the Kordofan region in the country’s center. The factions have each established rival governments—the SAF’s between Port Sudan and Khartoum and the RSF’s in Nyala, in south Darfur—and diverging economies. Although both publicly insist that they are fighting to preserve a unified Sudan, the longer the current division persists, the harder putting the country back together will become.This apparent territorial divide, and the failure of myriad attempts to forge a negotiated peace settlement that would keep Sudan intact, has raised the prospect of another formal partition of Sudan, 15 years after South Sudan seceded. Major think tanks such as the European Council on Foreign Relations have warned that Sudan is on the brink of a split. The RSF and its civilian allies have set up administrative structures to govern western Sudan independently. Their political manifesto pays lip service to the country’s potential “voluntary unity,” but it also declares that “all Sudanese peoples … have the right to exercise self-determination.” The gradual drift toward fragmentation is accelerating, with the RSF working to set up a parallel central bank and the two sides planning to administer competing national school exams.A perception abroad that the RSF and SAF represent different identity groups ostensibly makes partition seem like a straightforward resolution to the country’s protracted violence. In this superficial understanding, the SAF represents the country’s traditional ruling class—the riverine Arab elites and Islamists who have long dominated Sudanese politics—and the RSF and its allies as representing mostly Arab pastoralist and other communities in Darfur and Kordofan who have long been marginalized by Khartoum.But partition would be a grave mistake. Dividing Sudan will not yield economically viable states, nor will it bring an end to the violence that has plagued the country since before its independence in 1956. South Sudan is a cautionary tale: its independence in 2011 was meant to resolve a similar kind of conflict, but it abjectly failed to do so—even though South Sudan received far more help from international actors than two new Sudanese states would be likely to enjoy. Today, Sudan’s fault lines run far deeper than the military stalemate that appears to divide the country between east and west would suggest. Any effort to formalize this apparent split would not resolve the conflict’s root drivers—and it may well make it even worse.THE PAST WILL BE PROLOGUESudan has always been one of Africa’s most diverse countries, patched together by colonial expedience. It was born home to hundreds of ethnic groups; Arab Muslim populations concentrated along the Nile and non-Arab Christian and animist communities predominate in the south. A half century of British rule, which began in 1899, entrenched these divisions, putting the riverine Arab groups in positions of power and erecting infrastructure almost exclusively in the north. Sudan’s south was governed under a separate “southern policy” that deliberately left it underdeveloped.As power was handed to northern elites prior to independence in 1956, civil war erupted; the 1972 peace agreement that ended this first Sudanese civil war collapsed within a decade after Khartoum instituted sharia law across the country. The second Sudanese civil war was even more devastating, killing over two million people between 1983 and 2005 as southern rebels fought for more influence. A 2005 peace agreement both ended the fighting and teed up an eventual 2011 referendum on southern self-determination, which 99 percent of southern Sudanese supported.The African Union and other African leaders have long held fast to the principle that the continent’s colonial borders should remain fixed to prevent endless territorial disputes. But Sudan’s partition was widely accepted as an exception, arising out of a belief that Sudan’s Arab-Muslim north and its African-Christian south could never coexist in an equitable and united polity. The United States and Europe poured resources into the newly established South Sudan, hoping that its sizable oil reserves would secure development and stability.All this optimism, however, evaporated within two years. In truth, what had appeared to be a struggle delineated relatively clearly along territorial and ethnoreligious lines had never been so simple. Identity conflicts had arisen from the Sudanese state’s failure to manage diversity constructively at all levels, including between large constituencies but also within smaller communities. A wide variety of grievances—such as disputes over cattle grazing rights, control over oil-producing areas, and competition over government positions and patronage—that had been subsumed into the south-north conflict were exposed, not resolved, by southern independence. The political elites that had jointly fought a liberation struggle began to fight each other, employing the same tactics of marginalization, ethnic mobilization, and resource extraction that Khartoum had used against the south. In late 2013, a political dispute between South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and his vice president, Riek Machar, erupted into a civil war that, over the next five years, killed an estimated 400,000 people and displaced more than four million.South Sudan’s politics and economy rewarded violence.Because South Sudan achieved sovereignty before a successful effort to address the root drivers of conflict or transform an economy that had sustained decades of insurgency, independence simply relocated the conflict lines. The war was fought primarily between Kiir’s Dinka ethnic group and Machar’s Nuer; both sides were accused of major atrocities against civilians. Yet the violence has not remained contained to these communities. Smaller ethnic groups have formed their own armed factions, some aligned with Kiir and others with Machar. Still others pursue more autonomous agendas, using violence to tackle localized grievances that South Sudan’s independence never addressed.International brokers negotiated peace deals in 2015 and again in 2018, each time installing power-sharing governments to guide the country toward elections and more durable peace. But full implementation of the agreements was consistently delayed and promises were left unexecuted. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, the rebel group that carried the banner of southern liberation and later became South Sudan’s ruling party, turned out to be far more adept at waging war than nation-building. The oil wealth that accounts for approximately 98 percent of government revenues was systematically funneled into patronage networks and private accounts rather than infrastructure, education, or health care. A September 2025 UN report highlighted how the some $25 billion in oil revenue that South Sudan had taken in since independence had not yielded any improvement to the government’s ability to provide its people essential services. The country became a poster child for kleptocracy; its politics and economy continued to reward violence, and Kiir purchased loyalists’ and potential rivals’ allegiance by distributing oil wealth to them. Yet South Sudan exported all its oil through a pipeline in Sudan. When Sudan’s civil war disrupted the pipeline, the South Sudanese government could not provide the spoils that kept Kiir in firm control.Exclusion from patronage networks became an incentive to rebel. In March 2025, in the wake of a fiscal emergency caused by a pipeline disruption, a Nuer militia backing Machar overran a South Sudanese army base near the Ethiopian border; in response, Kiir put Machar under house arrest, detained dozens of senior opposition figures, and, in September, charged Machar with treason, murder, and crimes against humanity. Machar’s faction then declared the 2018 peace deal void. Renewed fighting has spread across Upper Nile, Jonglei, and Central Equatoria states. Nearly 300,000 civilians fled the country in 2025: half of these refugees crossed into Sudan, considering their war-torn neighbor a safer haven.NO EASY ANSWERSouth Sudan’s trajectory demonstrates that partition resolves nothing so long as the state is treated as a prize to be captured and hoarded, rather than an institution to serve its citizens. Dividing Sudan once again would reproduce this instability—especially because two new Sudanese states could never hope to attract the international support, humanitarian assistance, and diplomatic attention that South Sudan received. Moreover, the location of Sudan’s abundant natural resources and the country’s trading patterns make a formal partition economically incoherent. The SAF controls critical infrastructure in the east and center and all of Sudan’s ports on the Red Sea, as well as the oil refineries and pipelines that carry oil to the coast. It also maintains control over vast arable territories along the Nile River valley.The RSF, meanwhile, holds many of Sudan’s oil-producing areas near the South Sudanese border, most of the country’s livestock (the tenth-largest population in the world), and most of its gum arabic, of which Sudan is the world’s top producer. Gold deposits are scattered across both zones but would not be sufficient to sustain two independent economies. A new state in western Sudan controlled by the RSF—a paramilitary force without governing experience—would find itself landlocked, excluded from formal export routes, and dependent on smuggling networks through Chad or Libya. It would control oil fields but would be left with no way to export crude without striking a cooperative arrangement with the SAF to use its refineries and export terminals—an improbable kind of deal, given the two factions’ long hostilities. Even if a formal arrangement could be reached, Khartoum would have every incentive to extract punishing transit fees or embargo oil, as it has done repeatedly to South Sudan since 2011.A western Sudanese state would thus remain reliant on the illicit economy that is already sustaining its war effort and unable to generate the legitimate revenue needed to establish a functioning government. A northeastern Sudanese state under SAF control, meanwhile, would continue to enjoy access to critical seaports as well as some agricultural capacity. But it would lose access to significant revenue from natural resources and face continued insurgent threats from its peripheries. Neither entity would have the resources to undertake the kind of massive reconstruction that their devastated territories would require, and both would remain locked in competition over untapped resources (including oil, gold deposits in the contested areas, and fertile agricultural land) and border regions where their interests collide.Sudan’s civil war has already devolved into dozens of overlapping conflicts.The ethnic and demographic situation would be equally fraught. The neat east-west division that conflict maps suggest does not exist on the ground. The RSF draws its fighters primarily from Arab pastoralist communities in Darfur and Kordofan, such as the Rizeigat, Misseriya, Beni Halba, and Salamat. But these communities are themselves internally divided. Although many younger people in the west have aligned with the RSF, many influential tribal elders remain aligned with the SAF. In South Kordofan, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North—a rebel movement that controls significant swaths of territory in the Nuba Mountains—has aligned with the RSF’s new government. But its Nuba constituency has historically fought against both Arab militias and Sudan’s Khartoum-based military establishment.These tangled loyalties would leave RSF- and SAF-led states without coherent national identities or social foundations. It would also leave significant numbers of people trapped under hostile authorities or stranded on the wrong side of new borders. Non-Arab farming communities in Darfur (the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa) have borne the brunt of the RSF’s atrocities, including violence that, in 2025, the United States designated a genocide. A formal partition affording the RSF rule over western Sudan would undoubtedly condemn these communities to permanent subjugation by the same forces that have systematically killed, displaced, and dispossessed them for over two decades. Similarly, millions of ethnic Darfuris and Nuba that have long lived in SAF-controlled territories would find themselves politically and socially isolated and facing further marginalization.Fundamentally, the violence in Sudan has never really been about territorial control. Sudan’s deep-rooted conflicts are a result of systemic mismanagement of the country’s governance by successive regimes in Khartoum, which extracted resources from and marginalized the country’s ethnic groups in the peripheries. This particular episode of civil war has already devolved into dozens of overlapping conflicts over land, water, grazing rights, and mining claims. The SAF and the RSF have both armed local militias and tribal groups that were already nursing grievances that long predated the current fighting. The RSF, in particular, has employed a franchise model, offering weapons to allied Arab communities in exchange for participating in its war effort. But these groups’ loyalty to RSF command structures is transactional at best; they have generally enlisted the master narrative of the war as a cover to advance their own political and economic agendas. The SAF’s camp, meanwhile, is itself fracturing: its coalition of Islamist factions, pro-SAF Darfuri rebels, and tribal militias has been held together by shared opposition to the RSF rather than any common vision for a national future.BAND-AID SOLUTIONPolicymakers who imagine partition as a pressure-release valve misunderstand the nature and complexity of Sudan’s wars. Any cease-fire that freezes and calcifies the current conflict lines would do very little to address underlying political, economic, and social grievances. It would simply provide a new framework in which armed actors could continue to try to advance parochial objectives, such as seizing farmland, controlling gold deposits, or settling tribal beefs. Drawing a line through Kordofan would create two weak states, each riddled with internal divisions and hostile populations and lacking the economic foundations for recovery. And each would continue to have powerful incentives to destabilize the other, teeing up fragmented, localized, never-ending conflicts and killing the chance, however remote it may now be, for a negotiated national settlement.Another partition of Sudan would also destabilize its neighbors. Chad faces the most immediate danger. Its ethnic fault lines resemble those tearing its eastern neighbor apart, and many of Darfur’s ethnic groups (including the Zaghawa, Chadian President Mahamat Déby’s power base), straddle the Sudan-Chad border. If the RSF formally controlled western Sudan, that would provide Chad’s marginalized Arab communities with a powerful patron and arms supplier and inspire similar bids for autonomy or secession within Chad. The RSF, as a paramilitary, must operate outside formal channels, but an internationally recognized western Sudanese state could openly receive foreign investment and arms shipments and claim legitimacy for cross-border interventions.Ethiopia confronts different but equally dangerous pressures. Sudan’s war has already aggravated domestic tensions in the country, whose government maintains close ties to the RSF because of their shared sponsorship by the United Arab Emirates. Ethiopia is fragile: the 2022 agreement that ended the catastrophic war in northern Tigray remains only partially implemented, and tensions between Addis Ababa and rebel forces in the Amhara and Oromia regions continue to simmer. The RSF-aligned Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North controls territory bordering Ethiopia and, in March, opened a new front, launching attacks from training camps inside Ethiopia. The RSF’s control of Blue Nile would create an exclave detached from the rest of its territories, further complicating its viability in case of partition. And if Sudan is formally split, Ethiopia would face the real prospect of multiple armed entities competing for influence along its porous border.Partitioning Sudan would increase the likelihood of direct conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia.Eritrea, meanwhile, has backed the SAF, concerned about the RSF’s threat to regional order and its role as a tool of Emirati influence in the Horn of Africa. If a partition were formalized, that would increase the likelihood of a renewed direct conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia and destabilize the precarious political balance that Asmara has established since it gained independence from Ethiopia, in 1993. An RSF-led state allied with Ethiopia near its territories would give Asmara a hostile neighbor on its southern flank, creating a new threat for its own stability.And South Sudan would be especially threatened. The country’s economy is almost entirely dependent on oil that flows through pipelines running through both RSF- and SAF-controlled territory. The Sudanese civil war’s disruption to oil exports has already eliminated over half of Juba’s revenue. A partition of Sudan would create two countries with which South Sudan must negotiate and share its oil revenues. Two recognized states would each demand separate transit fees, or use access to the pipeline as political leverage, whereas a unified Sudan provides a single negotiating partner. If another war arose between the newly established Sudanese states, both would have incentives to cultivate proxies in South Sudan. And South Sudan, already weak and divided, would be unable to resist economic coercion, the flow of arms, and territorial encroachments and would end up destabilized even further.Formalizing an RSF-run state would also cement the illicit gold-smuggling networks already run through the Central African Republic, Chad, and Libya, and further aid the armed actors who profit from these routes. And if the SAF came to run its own state, its alliance with Sudan’s Islamist movement would embolden violent extremism.THE WAY OUTSudan’s civil war cannot be ended by focusing narrowly on the two main factions currently at war and seeking a way for them to either share power or split up the country. Partition would simply defer the hard work of building inclusive governance while creating two weak states, each facing the same internal divisions that make the country ungovernable today. Only by comprehensively addressing the root causes of conflict can a meaningful peace be achieved. Previous peace negotiations have failed in part because they excluded Sudanese civilians and emphasized security arrangements rather than political transformation.A more effective strategy would address civilians’ immediate humanitarian needs and establish a political process that engages all the parties, with culturally oriented national reconciliation processes and accountability for the egregious crimes committed by all sides. If Sudan is to end its recurrent wars of identity, regional and international actors with influence and leverage—particularly key regional players such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—must enforce arms embargoes, sanction spoilers on both sides, fund civilian-led peace initiatives in areas where fighting has paused, and make it clear that neither faction will receive international recognition without a credible commitment to protect civilians. They need to condition future engagement on civilian inclusion.Dynamics on the ground are pushing inexorably toward formal fragmentation. But Sudan’s neighbors, as well as middle and global powers, must heed the lesson of South Sudan, where separation did not resolve conflict but merely devolved it. Another partition would come at a far greater cost.Loading...Please enable JavaScript for this site to function properly.