A Depoliticised Sudanese Army From Political Arbiter to National Institution Dr. El-Tahir El-Fak

05:29 PM September, 30 2026

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A Depoliticised Sudanese Army

From Political Arbiter to National Institution

Dr. El-Tahir El-Faki

Sudan does not need a weaker army. It needs a stronger national army precisely because it must no longer be a political army.

This distinction is fundamental.

To call for the depoliticisation of the Sudanese Armed Forces is not to weaken Sudan’s defence capabilities, nor to deny the army its legitimate responsibility to protect the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. It is to argue that the army’s strength must derive from professionalism, discipline, national legitimacy and constitutional authority—not from its ability to determine who governs Sudan.

From Guardian of the State to Arbiter of the State

The central problem of Sudanese civil-military relations is not simply that the army has staged coups.

That is the symptom.

The deeper historical problem is that Sudan repeatedly transformed the army from an instrument of the state into an instrument for resolving political disputes. The pattern began soon after independence.

In 1958, civilian politicians invited the military to intervene when parliamentary politics appeared incapable of resolving the country’s crisis.
In 1969, another political alliance used military power to overthrow the existing order.
In 1989, the military became the vehicle through which the Islamist project captured the state.
After the fall of Omar al-Bashir in 2019, the army once again emerged as an indispensable political broker during the transition.
In 2021, the military returned to direct political rule.

*The ideological content changed.
*The political alliances changed.
*The personalities changed.

But the underlying bargain remained remarkably consistent: civilian political forces failed to agree on the rules of political competition, and the military was repeatedly invited—or allowed—to become the institution that settled the dispute.
This is why Sudan’s problem cannot be solved simply by condemning military coups.
The deeper task is to make military intervention institutionally unnecessary, politically illegitimate and constitutionally impossible.

Sudan’s post-independence history can therefore be understood as progression through three increasingly dangerous stages.

First, the army became the arbiter of political conflict.

Second, political movements attempted to capture and politicise the army.

Third, the security sector itself fragmented, producing competing centres of armed power.

The final stage contributed directly to the catastrophe of April 2023.

That historical trajectory must now be reversed.

1958: The Original Bargain
In November 1958, General Ibrahim Abboud assumed power in a military coup with the cooperation of civilian political forces.
This was the foundational contradiction of Sudanese civil-military politics.

The military did not simply seize power from a united civilian political class. Civilian actors themselves helped create the circumstances in which military intervention appeared to be a legitimate solution to political paralysis.

That distinction matters.
The lesson of 1958 was not merely that the army could overthrow a government. It was that civilian politicians could use military intervention as a substitute for political compromise.
Once that precedent was established, the army acquired a new political identity.
It was no longer merely the defender of the state. It had demonstrated that it could decide who controlled the state.

The October Revolution of 1964 eventually removed Abboud, demonstrating that military rule could not permanently substitute for civilian legitimacy. But the fundamental constitutional question remained unresolved.

Sudan had removed a military government without permanently removing the military from politics.

1969: The Army as an Instrument of Political Transformation

The 1969 coup under Jaafar Nimeiri deepened the problem.
The army was no longer merely an arbiter brought in to restore order. It became the vehicle through which a revolutionary political project sought to reconstruct the Sudanese state. This was a qualitative change.

The question was no longer simply:
Should the army govern؟ It became:
Which political project can control the army؟
That distinction is crucial because it marks the beginning of the systematic politicisation of the officer corps.

Political movements learned that control of the state could be achieved by gaining influence within the military.
The military, meanwhile, learned that political legitimacy could be constructed through ideological alliances.
The boundary between the barracks and politics consequently became increasingly porous.

1989: The Political Capture of the State
The 1989 coup represented the culmination of this process. The alliance between Omar al-Bashir and the National Islamic Front transformed the relationship between military authority and political ideology. The army was no longer simply governing in the name of national order. The state itself was reorganised through a combination of military authority, ideological organisation and expanding security institutions.

This produced a fundamental distortion. Instead of the political system controlling the military, political power increasingly penetrated the military and security apparatus.
Appointments, promotions, intelligence structures and economic interests became part of a wider system of political control.

At the same time, the proliferation of security and paramilitary organisations weakened the principle that the state should possess one coherent national coercive authority.

This created a particularly dangerous contradiction: Sudan had an army, but the army no longer constituted the entire security state. That distinction would become decisive decades later.

2019: The Revolution Without a Civil-Military Settlement
The December Revolution created Sudan’s greatest opportunity to break with this history. But the revolution removed Bashir without fully dismantling the political and security structures that had made military power indispensable.

The 2019 transition therefore contained an unresolved contradiction. The revolution demanded civilian rule, while the military retained substantial institutional, political and economic power.

Civilian forces, fragmented among competing parties and movements, were unable to establish a unified strategy for transforming that relationship.

And the military was not the only actor responsible. Civilian politicians once again faced the temptation to seek advantage through relationships with competing security actors.

Thus, the old pattern survived under new conditions. Sudan had changed its government without yet changing the political function of the military.

2021: The Failure of the Transition
The October 2021 coup exposed the limits of the 2019 settlement. The military again demonstrated that it retained the ability to override civilian political arrangements.
But the historical situation had now become more dangerous than in 1958, 1969 or 1989.

The problem was no longer simply military versus civilian. Sudan now had multiple armed centres of political and economic power.
The emergence and institutional consolidation of the Rapid Support Forces meant that civil-military relations had also become a question of military-military relations. This was the accumulated consequence of decades in which governments had created, empowered or tolerated armed institutions outside a single professional national command.

2023: The Historical Bill Comes Due
The war that began on 15 April 2023 was therefore not an inexplicable rupture. It was the catastrophic culmination of a much longer historical process. For decades, Sudan had failed to establish three basic principles:

one state, one legitimate political authority and one national system of organised force.
The unresolved relationship between the SAF and RSF brought that contradiction to its most destructive conclusion. The dispute over integration was therefore not merely about the timetable for merging two forces.

Ultimately, it was about who would possess coercive power, who would command it and who would control the Sudanese state.

The war demonstrated the ultimate danger of politicised security institutions. Once military organisations become political actors, political disputes can become struggles for military survival. And once there is more than one powerful armed organisation, a struggle for political power can become civil war.

From Political Arbiter to National Institution

Sudan’s history therefore demands a more ambitious reform than simply calling for “civilian control of the military.” The country must move from:
military intervention → military arbitration → military politicisation → competing armed centres

towards: constitutional civilian government → one national army → professional military neutrality → democratic accountability.

This is not an argument against the Sudanese Armed Forces. It is an argument against the historical role that successive political orders have assigned to them. The army has been asked to save the state from political failure.

• Political movements have attempted to capture the army.

• Governments have created parallel armed institutions to protect themselves from the army.

• And eventually those institutions have competed with one another for control of the state.

The circle must now be broken.
The task of Sudan’s next political order is therefore not simply to remove the military from government. It is to remove governmental power from military competition.

That is the real meaning of depoliticisation.

A professional national army must be strong enough to defend Sudan, deter external threats and preserve the country’s territorial integrity—but constitutionally incapable of deciding who governs Sudan.

That requires more than military reform. It requires a political settlement in which civilian institutions are strong enough to govern, political parties accept constitutional rules, elections become the legitimate mechanism for transferring power, and no political faction regards the armed forces as an instrument for achieving what it cannot achieve at the ballot box.

The responsibility is therefore shared.
The military must relinquish its political role.
Civilian politicians must relinquish the temptation to use the military against their political rivals.

And the state must dismantle the parallel security structures that have made armed competition possible.

Only then can Sudan break the cycle. Only then can the Sudanese Armed Forces become what they should have been from the beginning:
a national institution that defends the state, but does not rule it.

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