Sudan has exposed the failings of the AU’s ability to end wars

In April 2023, when fighting broke out in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the response from African institutions was one of cautious distance. In a recent statement in April this year, the Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf released a statement urging all parties to commit to a ceasefire and engage in a Sudanese-led political process.  This statement also emphasised that the well-being of the Sudanese people must remain the foremost priority, and the AU remains committed to working with Sudanese stakeholders, regional partners, and the international community to protect civilians.  

Despite these calls for peace, real engagement faltered, and two years since it began, the war has become the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Entire cities have been turned into battlegrounds, and millions have been displaced. In places like Al Fasher and West Darfur, the atrocities echo the genocidal violence of the early 2000s, against multiple ethnic groups in the region, particularly the Masalit. In the face of such devastation, the absence of an effective continental response raises an urgent question: why do African peace-making and peacekeeping mechanisms so often fail when they are needed most? 

Sudan is not an isolated case. Rather, it is symptomatic of deeper contradictions embedded in Africa’s postcolonial security architecture. At the turn of the millennium, the African Union (AU) sought to move beyond the doctrine of non-interference that had defined the Organisation of African Unity. With the horrors of the Rwandan genocide still fresh, the AU positioned itself as a bold new actor, willing to intervene in cases of war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. The principle of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was endorsed and embedded into the Union’s Constitutive Act. At the time, it appeared that Africa was determined to define its own norms of accountability and protection, distinct from the prescriptions of the West, and committed to the value of human life. As a result, African leaders deliberately endowed the AU with powers to intervene to prevent such atrocities from recurring.  

Sudan’s ongoing war offers a painful illustration of the gap between rhetorical commitment and institutional capacity. 

And yet, more than two decades later, the AU’s record in this regard is mixed at best. A 2019 study by Professor Ebere R. Adigbuo for the Journal of African Union Studies highlighted challenges of capacity as a central hindrance to the effectiveness of the AU’s civilian protection framework. Specifically, financial constraints, Implementation/political will problems, and internal divisions among member states were underscored as the challenges affecting the AU’s R2P capacity. Indeed, financial constraints were a major problem in the AU’s previous operations in Sudan. Professor Ebere’s study notes that the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS), which was launched in 2004, was estimated to initially cost $158 million, out of which $63million was to be provided directly by member states, while the balance of $95 million was to be raised voluntarily. The AU could not meet the initial target, severely limiting its capacity to deploy and logistically support the R2P in the Darfur conflict. By December 2007, AMIS, on the verge of collapse, was merged with the United Nations and became the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID).  

Sudan’s ongoing war offers a painful illustration of the gap between rhetorical commitment and institutional capacity. Although the AU succeeded in mediating Sudan’s transition after the fall of President Omar al-Bashir in 2019, it has been unable to broker a lasting ceasefire or implement a sustainable peace process in the country since the outbreak of the current conflict. Despite having developed an elaborate peace and security architecture, including early warning systems, standby forces, and mediation frameworks, the AU has proven unable to act decisively. Its Peace and Security Council has issued communiqués and urged restraint, but there has been no serious attempt to deter atrocities, and no meaningful support for humanitarian access. The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the regional bloc mandated to lead mediation efforts, has likewise struggled to maintain credibility, constrained by competing national interests and fractured regional relationships. 

It is true that African peacekeeping missions have historically been underfunded, dependent on external donors, and beset by logistical challenges. But institutional weakness alone does not explain the failure of political will. 

One might argue that the AU’s inability to respond robustly stems primarily from resource constraints. Director & Research Fellow, University of Pretoria, Chris Changwe Nshimbi has argued that the AU’s efforts to ‘silence the guns’ has been ineffective, due to many conflicts being internal, arising from the grievances citizens have with their governments. This internal dynamic appears to have been ignored from the outset. In his op-ed for Al Jazeera, columnist Tafi Mhaka noted that by failing to bring al-Bashir to international justice, the AU helped foster a dangerous and regressive military complex in Sudan. For it was in the years during which the AU claimed the International Criminal Court (ICC) was unfairly targeting Africans, and actively advised member states to ignore the ICC warrant against al-Bashir, that the Janjaweed militias were formalised into the RSF.  

It is true that African peacekeeping missions have historically been underfunded, dependent on external donors, and beset by logistical challenges. But institutional weakness alone does not explain the failure of political will. If anything, the Sudan case illustrates how formal mechanisms, no matter how well designed on paper, are ultimately subordinated to the interests and hesitations of member states. As scholars of African international relations, such as Sabelo Gumedze, have noted, the AU’s supranational ambitions have always existed in tension with the realities of state sovereignty.  

What then of the civilians caught in the crossfire? In Al Fasher, over 400,000 people have been displaced since April 2024, as RSF forces laid siege to the town and surrounding IDP camps. Five localities in North Darfur and the Western Nuba mountains are already experiencing famine, with at least 17 more areas across Sudan on the brink. Despite the severity of this crisis, humanitarian corridors remain blocked, and aid agencies struggle to operate. According to UNICEF, at least 146,000 children are expected to suffer from severe acute malnutrition next year. This condition makes them up to 11 times more likely to die than their well-nourished peers. In urban areas like Khartoum, indiscriminate shelling, sexual violence, and forced recruitment of children have become commonplace. This is the world’s largest internal displacement crisis, yet the mechanisms of continental solidarity appear ineffective. 

The erosion of a political consensus 

There is no shortage of blueprints for improving African peace and security institutions, but Sudan reveals a deeper malaise. The AU's failure to respond decisively to the crisis cannot be explained by capacity constraints alone. In Sudan, the problem lies in the fracturing of political consensus across the region, which has paralysed the AU’s ability to act with unity or moral clarity. While the new AU Commission Chair, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, has expressed a desire to end the war, he inherits a diplomatically entangled landscape in which several of Sudan’s neighbours, including Chad, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, and Khalifa Haftar in Libya, have taken sides or tolerated foreign military involvement, notably by the UAE. This has complicated regional diplomacy and weakened the AU’s authority as a neutral arbiter. 

More fundamentally, Sudan has exposed the AU’s inability to uphold the norms it once championed. After the Rwandan genocide, the AU was founded on the principle of “non-indifference” and a collective responsibility to protect civilians. But as Sudanese thinkers like Kholood Khair and Amgad Fareid Eltayeb have argued, those ideals have given way to transactional diplomacy and elite-led processes that marginalise the victims of violence. The vision of a continental body rooted in human dignity is receding, and Sudan has become a stark reminder of what is lost when that commitment stalls. 

For those who once hoped that the AU would provide an African alternative to the failures of global governance, the silence surrounding Sudan is a sobering reminder that norms, like institutions, require more than good intentions to survive. 

In this light, the tragedy of Sudan’s war also serves as a regional reckoning. It forces a confrontation with the limits of Africa’s security project and the uncertain place of humanitarian norms within it. For those who once hoped that the AU would provide an African alternative to the failures of global governance, the silence surrounding Sudan is a sobering reminder that norms, like institutions, require more than good intentions to survive. 

Some may argue that Sudan’s war is too complex, too remote, or too politically fraught to act on. But that is the same logic that allowed Rwanda’s genocide to unfold uninterrupted in 1994, and it is a logic we promised never to return to. If the African Union and its regional partners fail to protect Sudanese civilians now, it will signal to armed actors elsewhere, from the DRC to Mozambique, that civilians are fair game and impunity is assured. Inaction by the AU will, in effect, mark the death of its own Responsibility to Protect framework. In Sudan, we are witnessing a defining crisis. Whether the continent chooses to act or to avert its gaze will shape the credibility of African peace and security for years to come.