By Willy Fautré, director of Human Rights Without Frontiers
Two different quartets now shape the battle for Sudan’s future. One is a hard‑edged regional bloc—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and Iran—pursuing overlapping but by no means identical interests in the Red Sea corridor, political Islam, and regional security. The other is a more awkward concert of Western and multilateral actors—the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and the African Union—drifting towards a lowest‑common‑denominator outcome that restores a familiar interlocutor, even if that means reconciling themselves to the very forces Sudanese protesters tried to eject from power in 2019.
This is not simply diplomatic choreography. It is the frame within which outside powers are trying to close down Sudan’s war as a problem, rather than open up Sudan’s future as a political question. It is also the triumph of expediency and strategic self-interest over the interests and aspirations of a people battered by war and systematic repression.
The Saudi–Egypt–Turkey–Iran quartet operates from a clear premise: Sudan is a strategic asset. Its ports, its airspace, its Islamist networks, its security services and its militias are all potential instruments in wider regional contests. Each member of this group reads the country through its own security lens. For Egypt, the priority is a strong, army‑dominated Sudan that keeps Islamist rivals in check, protects the Nile waters and ensures that no disorder spills catastrophically across its southern frontier. For Saudi Arabia, Sudan is part of a broader belt of vulnerabilities from the Red Sea to the Horn of Africa—a theatre in which Riyadh wants to prevent chaotic state collapse but also to preserve leverage with whichever actors ultimately control territory and coastal infrastructure. Turkey and Iran, each in their own way, view Sudan as a field for projecting influence and countering their rivals’ alignments, whether through security cooperation, arms supplies, or ideological networks. Crucially, this engagement is not limited to mediation or diplomacy: all four states have materially and politically backed the SAF, treating it as the most reliable vehicle for securing their interests rather than as one party among many in a neutral peace process.
What binds this quartet together is not a shared vision of Sudan’s political future, but a shared insistence that Sudan’s future must be mediated through actors they understand and can deal with. In practice, that means a bias towards dealing with the Sudanese Armed Forces under General Burhan. A hierarchical army, operating through familiar security structures and embedded in long‑standing relationships, is far easier for them to read than a fragmented coalition of civilians and armed movements pushing for a radically different, secular and decentralized order. Burhan, with his Transitional Sovereign Council, offers an institutional form and a set of uniforms that look reassuringly like “the state.”
Set against this is the second quartet: the US, the EU, the UN and the AU. This group presents itself as the guardian of humanitarian norms and political transitions. It has backed negotiations, issued statements, applauded ceasefire initiatives, and repeatedly insisted on civilian protection and inclusive dialogue. Yet it is increasingly constrained by its own fatigue and caution. After a decade in which international crises—from Syria to Yemen, Afghanistan to Ukraine—have stretched diplomatic bandwidth and humanitarian budgets, Sudan registers as yet another calamity in a crowded field of emergencies. The appetite for a robust intervention—political or otherwise—that would fundamentally reconfigure the power balance on the ground is conspicuously absent.
Instead, this quartet tends to slip towards outcomes that stabilize the file rather than transform it. In practice, that means circling back to familiar interlocutors. The SAF under Burhan looks, from Western and multilateral vantage points, like the least disruptive option: an actor that can sign ceasefires, attend summits, promise transitions, and, crucially, anchor a narrative of “state continuity.” This attraction is reinforced by a pervasive fear of what a victory by the RSF—or a genuinely radical civilian coalition—might bring: legal instability over past atrocities, a redistribution of power away from the Nile corridor, and a reconfiguration of Sudan’s external alliances.
The result is convergence between these two quartets at precisely the point where Sudan’s internal rupture is most profound. Sudanese citizens have repeatedly signalled their rejection of the Islamist‑dominated National Congress Party (NCP) order, and of the security‑state structures that underpinned it. Yet the military‑centric solution now tacitly favoured by many external actors is rebuilding the political scaffolding of that order. NCP‑linked cadres, Islamist networks and elements of the old security apparatus have drifted back towards the SAF‑led regime as it struggles to hold power against the RSF and a fragmented civilian camp. The coalition around Burhan thus looks less like a neutral guardian of the transition, and more like a recycled version of the hegemonic, Nile‑centred elite which peripheral communities rose against in the first place.
At the same time, the RSF has seized on the vacuum created by this dissonance between external preferences and internal demands. It has begun to articulate an alternative political project—secular, democratic, regionally devolved—which presents itself as a break with the Islamist, centralized state. The credibility of that offer is limited by the RSF’s violence against civilians—a record more than matched by the SAF, whose atrocities extend to the use of chemical weapons—but the important point, in political terms, is that a contest of visions is underway. This is not simply a war about who controls the presidential palace; it is a war about whether Sudan continues under the familiar model of a Nile‑centric, Islamist‑inflected security state, or moves to a decentralised, more inclusive configuration in which historically marginalised regions gain genuine power.
The twin quartets, however, are signalling that this contest should be truncated in favour of a settlement that looks “legible” from the outside. For Riyadh, Cairo, Ankara and Tehran, this means a Sudan that does not suddenly turn into a laboratory for secular regionalism or a platform for rival Islamist movements out of their control. For Washington, Brussels, New York and Addis Ababa, it means a Sudan whose leadership can be invited to conferences, sign memoranda, and offer plausible assurances on humanitarian access, counter‑terrorism and migration. In both cases, Burhan’s Transitional Sovereign Council becomes the convenient pivot.
The cost of this convenience is that the deeper political rupture created by the uprising and by the war is pushed out of view. Sudan’s peripheral communities—Darfur, South Kordofan, Blue Nile, eastern Sudan—have paid a disproportionate price in displacement, famine and violence. They have also been at the heart of demands for a different state: one in which power is not monopolised by Khartoum’s Islamist‑leaning cabals, but shared institutionally and economically with the regions that have long supplied cannon fodder and resources without representation. If external actors close ranks around a settlement that implicitly rebuilds the old centre, they risk entrenching the very inequalities that made Sudan so fragile in the first place.
If the US‑EU‑UN‑AU quartet continues down this path, it will claim that it is “ending the war” and “saving lives.” Some lives will indeed be saved by any reduction in open fighting. But the underlying political violence—the violence of exclusion, marginalisation and impunity—will remain untouched. The SAF will have little incentive to genuinely demilitarise politics or dismantle the Islamist networks that have reattached themselves to its command structure. The RSF, if forced into a subordinate or purely security role, will have still less incentive to accept accountability. Civilian actors will once again be invited to manage the public face of an order over which they hold little real control.
A different course is possible, but it requires both quartets to abandon the search for the “easy” interlocutor. For the regional quartet, it means recognising that a stable Sudan cannot be built on the back of a narrow Islamist‑military elite whose legitimacy is shot and whose appetite for compromise is thin. For the Western‑multilateral quartet, it means accepting that Sudan’s transition cannot be scripted as a technocratic exercise in constitution‑writing, while the armed centre is quietly restored. Pressure needs to be recalibrated: not towards legitimising one armed actor over another, but towards enforcing a genuinely inclusive process in which civilian movements, regional representatives and victims of violence are not simply decorative.
Sudan’s war is already the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, and the temptation to “make it go away” by recognising whoever controls the capital will only grow. But the country’s future will not be settled by convenience. It will be settled by whether its people, particularly those in the peripheries, are allowed to renegotiate the basic terms of power. The two quartets now hovering over Sudan can either facilitate that renegotiation, or smother it under the reassuring illusion of familiar uniforms and familiar faces.
