As the African nation of Sudan enters the third year of its civil war, new strategic alliances may serve to pull the independent nation state of South Sudan into the fighting and ignite a wider conflict across the region. In February, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), which controls parts of Sudan’s southern states on the border with South Sudan, allied with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a splinter group which has established a charter government to rival Sudan’s existing government. The civil war began in April 2023 after the rebellion of the RSF, which had previously been commanded by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). The civil war has led to rampant human rights abuses by both the RSF and SAF, and according to the UN, Sudan is currently facing the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with over 30 million people requiring aid. Famine was declared in areas of the country in 2024 and nearly 13 million people have thus far been displaced, either internally or as asylum-seekers and refugees.

The current conflict reflects a longer history of the use of military force in order to secure political power in the region, through sustained cycles of violence. During the North-South Sudan Civil War (1983-2005), the government began to recruit and arm largely nomadic and pastoralist “Arabs” to fight sedentary, “non-Arab” farmers in the South, inflicting horrific abuses including systematic rape and burning entire villages. The atrocities intensified existing conflicts over farmland, an issue created by state-backed policies that introduced industrial farming thereby displacing local communities. During the 2003 Darfur War, Arab militias were recruited to end a rebellion of non-Arab groups in Sudan over land disputes, water access, and state neglect. The RSF was formed from these existing militias in 2013 by former leader Omar al-Bashir as a means to fight counterinsurgency. 

South Sudan also finds itself in a precarious political situation, plagued by a pattern of violence and militarism which analysts fear could tip the young nation back into civil war, thereby expanding the regional crisis. Following its independence in 2011, South Sudan was plunged into civil war in 2013 after a dispute between its President Salva Kiir and vice president Riek Machar. Whilst a peace agreement was established in 2018, Kiir placed Machar under house arrest in March 2025, accusing the vice president of funding militias. “When leaders disagree, it quickly turns into armed confrontation—exactly what the agreement was supposed to prevent,” George Owino, the chair of a monitoring body set up under the 2018 peace deal, told the BBC. Meanwhile, Sudan’s army chief believes that Kiir, who has ties to SPLM-N, is currently backing it, and Sudan’s army is now funding militias on the border.

This continued fragmentation and militarized political conflict will only serve to worsen the violence being experienced in the region. Alan Boswell, an expert on South Sudan and Sudan for the International Crisis Group, warned of the impacts that potential civil war in South Sudan will have on the current conflict in Sudan, telling Al Jazeera, “Even if the army thinks Juba helps the RSF, the collapse of South Sudan would give the RSF a much greater operational theatre than it already has.”

The civil war is also backed by foreign actors, with the SAF being funded by Egypt, Turkey, Eritrea, and Iran, and the RSF receiving support from the United Arab Emirates and Chad. Meanwhile, Sudan’s vulnerable civilian population has borne the brunt of the resulting violence and cruelties; both the RSF and SAF have been accused of a multitude of human rights violations, including widespread sexual violence, mass killing, torture, displacement, and cutting off education, medical care, and food aid. Since the beginning of the Sudanese war in April 2023, the RSF and its allies have engaged in a heinous campaign of ethnic cleansing, targeting ethnic minority Masalit and other non-Arab populations in Sudan’s West Darfur state.

The lack of global attention that the ongoing civil war, genocide, and humanitarian crisis in Sudan is a key aspect of its continuation. The genocide and worsening situation in this nation state has flown almost completely under the radar of international consciousness. Other ongoing conflicts, such as Russia-Ukraine and Israel’s siege on Gaza, have garnered far more media attention, which is consistent with a pattern of highlighting stories of violence and conflict in predominantly white and Western countries. The lack of global attention in the media has also been accompanied by bias from the responses of powerful international actors. The European Union has shown unwavering solidarity with Ukraine and its people, providing large aid packages and welcoming Ukrainian refugees. Meanwhile, European policies and practices towards Sudanese refugees, and African migrants more generally, are unwelcoming and sometimes hostile, with a clear goal of keeping asylum-seekers from coming into Europe. A June 2024 report from Border Forensics analyzing a 2022 massacre of mainly Sudanese migrants at the border crossing between Morocco and Spain concluded that there is “systematic exclusion of Black people from safe migration areas via the Beni-Ensar border crossing.”

In January 2025, nearly two years after the war began, Former U.S. President Joe Biden declared that the RSF committed genocide in Darfur and sanctioned seven RSF-linked companies, which finally indicated some long overdue movement towards international accountability. However, the international community has continued to remain passive, maintaining its exclusion of the conflict in Sudan from both attention and action. The UN Security Council has not implemented an embargo on the flow of arms fueling the conflict, and recent abrupt international aid cuts from the United States’ current Trump administration has served to further strangle already woefully under-financed international humanitarian aid to a starving population. Relief aid for Sudan is severely underfunded; as of March 2025, only 6.6 percent of the $4.2 billion estimate required for an overall humanitarian response had been received, and the International Organization for Migration’s response plan for Sudan is only six percent funded as well. The continued disregard and neglect of Sudan amidst these ongoing atrocities will only serve to perpetuate and intensify existing cycles of violence that impact civilians. Sadly, the muted responses to human suffering and flagrant inaction in Sudan is a failure of the international community to properly enforce humanitarian law. Undeniably, more must be done to protect all of the world’s citizens from famine, displacement, and violence.