The Civil State in Sudan: The Crisis of Political Mentality and the Dilemma of Building a Free Space

Zuhair Osman - The state crisis in Sudan was not merely a succession of military and civilian regimes, nor was it the result of a constitutional deficit that could be overcome by drafting a new document. Since independence, the postponed question has remained: How do we build a state that recognizes the plurality of society, distributes power and wealth fairly, and subjects all centers of power to the law, rather than its institutions becoming tools in the hands of those who hold influence and arms? The December 2018 revolution arrived to open a new horizon for the Sudanese people, raising slogans of freedom, peace, justice, and the civil state, but it failed to transform those demands into a stable institutional system. Then, the war broke out in April 2023, revealing the fragility of the political structure and the depth of the imbalances that had remained hidden behind transitional agreements and understandings. However, the question is not just about the causes of the transition’s failure, but about something deeper: Why has the Sudanese state remained incapable of producing stable rules that organize difference, prevent the monopoly of power, and subject force to the law? Does the crisis lie in the absence of an intellectual conception of the civil state, or in a political mentality, social culture, and material interests that have hindered the transformation of this conception into reality? Understanding the crisis requires moving beyond the interpretation that merely condemns individuals or relies on changing rulers. The state does not change just by swapping those who sit in power, but when the rules that determine who reaches it, how it is exercised, and what prevents them from turning it into private property are changed. From Revolutionary Slogan to Institutional Concept: The civil state appeared in the revolution's discourse as the antithesis to military rule and the authoritarianism that employed religion in politics, and as a demand to end guardianship over society and return power to the citizens. Yet, the consensus on the slogan was not necessarily a consensus on the content of the desired state, or on how its institutions should be built. The civil state is not just a government not led by the military, nor does it mean excluding religion from society or confiscating freedom of belief. It is a constitutional system that makes citizenship the basis for rights and duties, guarantees freedom of conscience and belief, prevents discrimination, holds power accountable, and prevents any group from monopolizing the right to define the nation or speak in its name. The challenge facing Sudanese forces was moving from rejecting authoritarianism to agreeing on rules that prevent its return, and from agreeing to overthrow an existing regime to building a system that no party can monopolize. However, the revolutionary forces did not enter the transitional phase with a unified conception for all foundational issues. Their visions differed regarding the relationship between religion and the state, the nature of decentralized governance, security sector reform, and the ordering of priorities for peace, justice, and democratic transition. Their assessments also varied on how to deal with the military component and the limits of partnership with it. These differences in themselves were not proof of the failure of the civil project; disagreement is a natural part of politics. The dilemma lay in the inability to transform them into a comprehensive constitutional founding process that settles fundamental issues through public participation and establishes binding rules not subject to immediate power balances. Thus, the concept of the civil state remained broader than the institutions supposed to realize it, while some forces continued to treat it as a slogan for mobilization or a title for consensus, not a project to reorganize power and society. How was the political mentality formed? Political mentality is not born complete, nor can it be explained as a fixed trait in the Sudanese personality. It is formed historically through socialization, education, religious discourse, media, the daily practices of power, and the collective memory left by coups, wars, and exclusion. When a citizen learns, directly or indirectly, that power is only gained through belonging to an influential group, that rights may depend on loyalty, and that dissent can be interpreted as treason, politics loses its meaning as a field for managing interests and differences and turns into a struggle for protection and influence. When the state is presented in curricula and official discourses as a culturally and religiously homogeneous entity, rather than as a framework for a pluralistic society, recognizing diversity becomes akin to a concession, and demands for justice and representation become an imagined threat to the country's unity. Experiences of authoritarian rule also contributed to weakening trust in institutions. Repeated coups, the politicization of public administration, the restriction of the press and organization, and the use of security apparatuses to manage political rivalries entrenched a perception among sectors of society that power balances might be more influential than the law. Collective memory of violence also plays an additional role; the effects of wars do not end when the cannons fall silent, but remain in the form of inherited fear, lack of trust, and a readiness to interpret difference through regional, ethnic, or political affiliation—and when this memory is invoked in public discourse to justify revenge or exclusion, politics becomes an extension of the conflict instead of a means to settle it. However, this mentality is not an inevitable fate. The December revolution, union and community initiatives, and experiences of solidarity during the war revealed other possibilities in Sudanese consciousness and practice: cooperation, horizontal organization, mutual aid, and recourse to public demands that transcend narrow affiliations. The issue, then, is not that society naturally lacks the culture of the state, but that the practices and institutions that can entrench citizenship and accountability have remained weaker than the forces that reproduce loyalty, guardianship, and violence. Marginalization - When Politics Becomes a Security File: The impact of this mentality is clear in the way successive Sudanese governments have dealt with issues of marginalized regions and armed conflicts. In many cases, demands for development, representation, cultural rights, and resource distribution were dealt with through a security-based approach, while the roots of the crisis related to land, services, power, and justice remained without sufficient treatment. The use of force was not the only problem, but its pairing at times with the denial of grievances or their reduction to foreign conspiracies or local conflicts separate from the nature of the central state and its resource distribution. The wars in Darfur, South Kordofan, Blue Nile, and others have shown that conflicts cannot be explained by a single factor, but the intersection of developmental marginalization, weak political participation, competition over land and resources, and human rights violations made security settlements alone incapable of producing sustainable peace. The experience of the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement offers an example of the breadth of issues needing treatment. The agreement addressed power and wealth sharing, decentralized governance, identity and citizenship issues, security sector reform, transitional justice, and development of war-affected areas. However, including these files in an agreement does not itself guarantee their implementation, nor does it replace the participation of the concerned communities in setting their priorities and monitoring their application. A state that views its peripheries as security zones or negotiation files, not as communities of citizens with equal rights, reproduces the causes of conflict even when it succeeds in signing agreements to stop it. Therefore, building a civil state requires moving from managing marginalization to dismantling its conditions: a fairer distribution of resources, genuine political representation, elected local authorities, a judiciary that can protect rights, and development policies that respond to the needs of communities rather than imposing the center’s priorities upon them. Who disrupted the transition? Mechanisms of power and the limits of consensus: Analysis of the political mentality is incomplete unless we determine how interests turned into practices that disrupted the civil state project. The crisis was not the product of an abstract idea or the responsibility of one party, but was formed by the interaction of multiple centers of power, whose roles, capabilities, and interests differed. During the transition period, the military component retained sources of power independent of civilian institutions, including influence within state and security agencies, the ability to influence sovereign decisions, as well as economic interests linked to military and security institutions. This imbalance made the transitional partnership prone to conflict over the boundaries of actual power, not just disagreement over public policies. In contrast, civilian forces faced organizational divisions and competition for representation, and differed regarding the ordering of priorities and the nature of the relationship with the military. Furthermore, the absence of a transitional legislative council and the incompleteness of some oversight and constitutional institutions weakened the ability to subject power to public accountability. In this context, political consensus was not always a tool for state-building; it sometimes turned into a means to postpone foundational disagreements, or to settle competition for positions without addressing the sources of power that determine who holds actual decision-making. This appears clearly in the October 25, 2021 coup, when military leaders ousted the transitional partnership and imposed a new political reality, despite stated commitments regarding the transition. The coup revealed that political consensuses cannot protect the transition unless they are based on independent institutions, effective oversight, and rules that clearly define the responsibilities of state agencies and the limits of their powers. This does not mean that civil discourse was merely a deliberate cover in all cases, or that civilian forces bear the same responsibility as the party that executed the coup. Rather, it means that using the vocabulary of transition and democracy is not enough to prove commitment to them; the standard is actual behavior, and the extent to which each party accepts the restrictions imposed by constitutional rules on its power. Then came the war in April 2023 to reveal in a more destructive way the danger of having competing armed centers outside an institutional framework capable of managing disagreement regarding leadership, integration, and security reform. The war was not the result of a single factor, but the collapse of the transition and the failure to address the plurality of power centers contributed to creating the conditions in which the conflict erupted. From here, a civil state cannot be built just by asking armed parties to agree on the form of government. What is required is reorganizing the security sector, ending dual leadership, subjecting arms to a civilian constitutional authority, and building oversight and judicial institutions that ensure military force does not turn into an independent source of political legitimacy or economic privilege. The Free Space - From Community Initiatives to State Institutions: One cannot talk about a civil state without a free public space in which citizens can express themselves, organize, critique, and hold accountable. A free space is not just freedom of speech or the right to assemble, but the environment in which society learns to manage its differences, in which popular oversight of power is formed, and in which civil initiatives acquire their independence and capacity to continue. On December 9, 2025, the CIVICUS Monitor announced a downgrade of the civic space in Sudan from "obstructed" to "closed," the lowest rating on its index for civil liberties. This came in the context of the war and the accompanying threats, assaults, and detentions that affected journalists, activists, and humanitarian workers, as well as the restrictions imposed on expression, assembly, and organization. However, the retreat of civil space does not mean the disappearance of society or the lack of its ability to act. Emergency rooms, local initiatives, and solidarity and relief networks have shown that Sudanese people are capable, even under the collapse of institutions, of establishing forms of organization that respond to people's needs and work to protect their lives and dignity. These experiences reveal important foundational potentials; they allow for direct participation, distribution of responsibilities, and joint work between people whose political and social affiliations may differ. They also prove that public action does not always need to wait for a central authority to begin, even though it does need a legal environment, resources, and protection to ensure its continuity. However, civil initiatives should not turn into a permanent alternative to the state, nor should they be burdened with responsibilities beyond their capabilities. Community relief alone cannot build a national health system, volunteer work does not compensate for the absence of public services, and solidarity networks cannot replace an independent judiciary or elected local administration. What is required is building a bridge between these initiatives and public institutions, by legally recognizing their independence, ensuring their freedom of organization, involving them in setting local priorities and monitoring services and public spending, and providing transparent mechanisms for cooperation between them and elected authorities. This should be done without subjecting them to partisan or security control, or turning aid and resources into tools for political loyalty. This path also requires protecting the press, unions, universities, and professional organizations, expanding opportunities for public participation, and developing civil education that entrenches rights, responsibilities, and respect for difference. A free space is not a subsequent result of the completion of the civil state, but one of the conditions that allow for its construction, monitoring, and protection from deviation. Without a society capable of critique and organization, institutions established in the name of citizens may turn into apparatuses that operate far away from them. From Crisis of Mentality to Guarantees of the Civil State: Overcoming the crisis of the civil state in Sudan is not achieved by the abstract call to change consciousness, nor by merely writing a new constitution. It is a project that combines cultural transformation, institutional reform, and the reorganization of power relations. At the constitutional level, Sudan needs a comprehensive and transparent founding process in which regions, local communities, women, youth, civil forces, and groups affected by the war participate, and in which issues of identity, citizenship, the form of governance, and the distribution of powers and resources are settled through public debate whose results are not imposed by the balances of arms. This path should end in a constitution that protects fundamental rights, defines the powers of institutions, and places clear restrictions on states of emergency and abuses of power. At the institutional level, this requires an independent judiciary and a constitutional court with real guarantees of independence, an elected legislative council that exercises oversight over the government, independent bodies to combat corruption and audit public funds, and unified professional armed forces that are subject to civilian constitutional authority, along with security reform that ensures accountability and ends impunity. At the social and cultural level, the project needs education and public discourse reform, strengthening the independence of media, developing civil education, protecting freedom of belief, expression, and organization, and entrenching a culture of accepting the rotation of power and recognizing the right to differ. Equal citizenship should also be linked to fair development policies, so that constitutional rights do not remain separate from opportunities for life, work, and services. These guarantees are not complete without addressing the effects of the war through stopping violence, protecting civilians, transitional justice, reparations, reforming institutions involved in violations, and ensuring the participation of the affected in shaping the country's future. Reconciliation that bypasses the rights of victims, or treats justice as an obstacle to stability, may delay conflict but does not remove its causes. The civil state is not just a name for a political system, but a constitutional, moral, and institutional arrangement that defines who holds power, how it is exercised, and the limits that may not be crossed. It is not an elite project speaking in the name of society, but a social contract through which citizens can protect their rights and hold those who rule them accountable. The Sudanese have proven their ability to resist authoritarianism, but the historical challenge lies in transforming this ability into institutions that do not depend on the heroism of individuals, do not collapse when political forces disagree, and are not subject to the will of those who possess arms. The question that the Sudanese must face today is not only: What state do we want? But also: How do we make it resistant to hijacking by any party, group, or armed institution? The answer begins with a constitution that stands above rulers, an independent judiciary that protects it, elected institutions that monitor power, a professional army that is subject to it, and a free civil space through which citizens can defend their rights. But it is not complete until these guarantees turn from texts into daily practice, and from obligations on paper into rules that no party can bypass without accountability. Only then can the civil state in Sudan transition from a slogan gathering the will of the revolution into a project that organizes the life of society, and from a political promise open to interpretation into a public right protected by institutions and safeguarded by citizens. zuhair.osman@aol.com