INTRODUCTION
April 2026 marks three years of war in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) (Amnesty International, 2026). Since fighting erupted in April 2023, Sudan has become one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises with more than 14 million people displaced, serious human rights violations (OHCHR, 2026), famine, and heightened risks of sexual and gender-based violence (OCHA, 2026).
Given the magnitude of the crisis, the international community has responded through numerous mediation initiatives led by the United Nations, the African Union, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), Saudi Arabia, and the United States (Mahdi and Enbaye, 2025). Yet, despite this sustained diplomatic engagement, no initiative has succeeded in producing a durable political settlement.
This apparent contradiction raises the following question: why have repeated peace-making efforts failed to produce a sustainable political settlement in Sudan?
Existing analyses generally attribute this failure to fragmented mediation processes, regional rivalry, external interference, and institutional shortcomings (Assal and Yahya, 2025). While these explanations provide valuable insights into the obstacles facing peace-making in Sudan, this article argues that they are best understood through the complementary lenses of Ripeness and Readiness theories. Drawing on Zartman’s Ripeness Theory (Zartman, 2000) and Pruitt’s Readiness Theory (Pruitt, 2005), it argues that the failure of peace-making efforts cannot be fully explained by the absence of a ripe moment alone. The article first assesses whether the Sudanese conflict had reached the conditions identified by Ripeness Theory. It then examines how Readiness Theory further explains the persistence of the deadlock and the prospects for a durable political settlement.
The Sudanese conflict through Ripeness Theory
Ripeness Theory argues that negotiations are most likely to succeed when two conditions are met: the existence of a mutually hurting stalemate (MHS) and a mutually perceived way out (WO) (Zartman, 2000). Assessing the Sudanese conflict through this framework helps determine whether the conflict was “ripe,” i.e. whether it reached a stage at which negotiations were likely to succeed.
Absence of a Mutually Hurting Stalemate (MHS)
According to Zartman (2000), negotiations become possible once both parties to a conflict perceive that continued fighting is more costly than a negotiated settlement. Importantly, what matters is not the objective existence of a stalemate but the parties’ own perception that military victory is no longer attainable (Zartman, 2000).
Despite the severe economic, political, and humanitarian consequences of the war, this MHS has yet to emerge in Sudan. In March 2025, the SAF recaptured Khartoum, a victory carrying both strategic and symbolic weight (Al Jazeera, 2025a). Rather than opening a path towards negotiation, this momentum reinforced the army’s commitment to a military solution, as illustrated by al-Burhan’s pledge to continue fighting “until the last rebel is eliminated in the last corner of Sudan’s land” (Al Jazeera, 2025b).
The RSF, despite losing the capital, framed its retreat as tactical rather than definitive, vowing to return “stronger, more powerful and victorious” (Wahba, 2025). This claim materialised in October 2025, when the RSF captured al-Fasher, the last major city in Darfur outside its control, consolidating its dominance over the entire western region (Gohar, 2025). This resulting territorial division allowed each party to claim meaningful gains within its own sphere (Ali, Getachew Birru and Eltayeb, 2024). Far from producing a shared perception of deadlock, the war’s evolution enabled both belligerents to point to recent victories, framing the conflict in zero-sum terms.
This perception has been reinforced by continued external support. Egypt has continued to provide military and political support to the SAF (European Union Agency for Asylum, 2025), while the United Arab Emirates has repeatedly been accused of supplying weapons and financial support to the RSF (Rickett, 2026). Such support reduced the military and political costs associated with continuing the war for both sides, and reinforced the perception that further military gains remained attainable (Africa Defense Forum, 2026b).
In Sudan, each belligerent perceived itself as winning on its own front. As long as both continue to perceive military success as achievable, negotiations remain less attractive than continued fighting. The conflict therefore cannot be said to have reached a mutually hurting stalemate.
No mutually perceived way out
Ripeness also requires the existence of a mutually perceived way out (WO), understood as the shared belief that negotiations offer a credible path towards an acceptable settlement (Zartman, 2000). In Sudan, this condition has also failed to materialise.
The conflict generated an unprecedented level of diplomatic engagement (Mahdi, 2024). The most significant of these initiatives was the Jeddah Process, jointly sponsored by the US and Saudi Arabia in May 2023 (United States Department of State, 2023). IGAD, the African Union and the United Nations also launched parallel mediation initiatives, yet these efforts were never integrated into a coherent peace-making framework (Mahdi and Enbaye, 2025).
None of these initiatives, however, convinced the belligerents that negotiations offered a credible route towards a settlement. Rather than demonstrating that a mutually acceptable political settlement was achievable, peace initiatives increasingly served only to facilitate humanitarian access or secure temporary pauses in the fighting. The second condition identified by Ripeness Theory therefore has remained unmet.
Applying Ripeness Theory to the Sudanese conflict helps explain why repeated peace-making efforts failed to produce a durable political settlement. Neither a mutually hurting stalemate nor a mutually perceived way out have emerged, as mediation was undertaken before the conflict was ripe for negotiation. However, while Ripeness Theory explains why negotiations remained premature, it says less about whether the parties themselves would have been willing to seize a future opportunity for peace. This question is addressed through Readiness Theory.
The Sudanese conflict through Readiness Theory
While Ripeness Theory explains why the conditions for successful negotiations had not yet emerged, it primarily focuses on the conflict as a whole (Zartman, 2000). Readiness Theory complements this perspective by examining each belligerent separately and assessing whether they are sufficiently motivated and optimistic to engage in negotiations (Pruitt, 2005). Applying this framework to the Sudanese conflict suggests that, even if the conflict had reached a ripe moment, neither the SAF nor the RSF appeared ready to pursue a negotiated settlement.
Insufficient Motivation to Negotiate
According to Pruitt (2005, p. 7), readiness first depends on a party’s motivation to end the conflict.
For the SAF, the conflict continues to be framed as an existential effort to restore state authority and eliminate the RSF as a military and political force. Negotiating with the RSF would amount to legitimising an organisation the army leadership considers a rebel militia, a position al-Burhan made explicit by pledging to not compromise nor negotiate and to continue fighting “until the last rebel is eliminated in the last corner of Sudan’s land” (Al Jazeera, 2025).
The RSF, by contrast, continued to derive substantial political and economic benefits from the continuation of the conflict. Beyond maintaining territorial control over most of Darfur, the organisation preserved access to strategic economic resources, particularly through the gold economy, allowing it to sustain both its military operations and its broader political ambitions (Africa Defense Forum, 2026a). For the RSF leadership, war remains not merely sustainable but profitable, a configuration in which, as Pruitt notes, motivation to negotiate cannot emerge (Pruitt, 2005).
Regional involvement further reduces the incentives to compromise on both sides. Egypt continues to provide political and military support to the SAF, including training programmes that facilitated the deployment of Turkish-made drones, while the United Arab Emirates was repeatedly accused of providing military and financial assistance to the RSF (Dziadosz, Delrue and Laguna, 2026; Al Jazeera, 2025b). External support helps lower the military and financial costs of continued fighting, keeping both parties’ motivation to negotiate low.
Limited Optimism Towards a Negotiated Settlement
Motivation alone, however, is insufficient to produce readiness. According to Pruitt (2005), parties must also believe that negotiations can produce an acceptable agreement and that their counterpart is genuinely committed to implementing it.
In Sudan, such optimism remains largely absent. The ceasefire agreements concluded under the Jeddah Process, including the Jeddah Declaration of Commitments of May 2023, were violated almost immediately after their signature, rapidly undermining confidence in negotiated commitments (US Department of State, 2023; Mahdi, 2024). Rather than building confidence, successive ceasefires increasingly demonstrated to each party that the other was not negotiating in good faith, eroding what Pruitt calls “working trust” i.e. the minimal belief in the counterpart’s genuine commitment to settlement (Pruitt, 2005).
This absence of optimism was compounded by the lack of a credible third-party guarantor, a role Pruitt emphasises as decisive in fostering working trust between adversaries (Pruitt, 2005). In Sudan, mediation was dispersed across competing tracks, Jeddah, IGAD, the African Union, the United Nations, each backed by sponsors with diverging interests, none capable of providing credible security guarantees for a future agreement (Assal and Yahya, 2025). Under these circumstances, neither belligerent could reasonably expect that a negotiated settlement, once signed, would be implemented and enforced.
CONCLUSION
This article has argued that the repeated failure of peace-making efforts in Sudan cannot be explained solely by the proliferation of mediation initiatives or by regional rivalries. Applying Ripeness Theory suggests that negotiations were initiated before the conflict had reached a mutually hurting stalemate or a mutually perceived way out. Readiness Theory further indicates that, even had such a moment emerged, the belligerents themselves lack the motivation and optimism necessary to sustain meaningful negotiations. Taken together, these perspectives highlight the limits of mediation when neither the conflict nor the parties are prepared for compromise. Future peace initiatives in Sudan may therefore depend less on multiplying mediation efforts than on altering the calculations that make war preferable to peace for as long as both parties believe victory remains attainable, no mediation framework, however well designed, can succeed.
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