The Activation Protocol A Companion Document to the Charter of Salvation and State-Building From

11:14 AM October, 01 2026

Sudanese Online
د. علي عبدالله الخليفة طه-UK
My Library
Short URL

The Activation Protocol

A Companion Document to the Charter of Salvation and State-Building

From Idea to Reality: An Analysis of Eight Implementation Gaps and a Unified Roadmap

A revision aligned with the Eighth Revision of the Charter, September 2026, with linguistic revision and source documentation

Dr. Ali Abdullahi Elkhalifa Taha

Contents

• Preface: Why an Activation Protocol Separate from the Founding Text؟
• Chapter One: The Representation Gap — Who Holds the Legitimacy to Call for Foundation؟
• Chapter Two: The Sequencing Gap — Transitional Justice or Financial Sovereignty First؟
• Chapter Three: The Implementation Instrument Gap — From Concept to the Organisational Structure of the Nafeer
• Chapter Four: The Institutional Structure Gap — From a Mobilisation Vehicle to a Self-Governing Entity
• Chapter Five: The Adversary Gap — How Does the Charter Protect Itself from Co-optation and Hollowing-Out؟
• Chapter Six: The Shadow Economy Gap — From Armed Extortion-Taxation to an Economic Structure Independent of the War
• Chapter Seven: The Hate Speech Monitoring Gap — From Symbolic Tension to Actual Mobilisation
• Chapter Eight: The Institutional Wall Gap — From a Constitutional Principle to an Operational Mechanism for Functional Neutrality
• Chapter Nine: The Roadmap — From Idea to Reality within the Five-Year Ceiling
• Appendix A: Concordance Table between the Protocol and the Charter's Main Text
• Appendix B: References and Sources
Preface: Why a Separate Activation Protocol؟

The Charter of Salvation and State-Building presents its conceptual and institutional framework as an integrated structure. Yet the move from idea to action raises implementation questions no less pressing than the foundational ones: who holds the legitimacy to issue the first call؟ In what sequence do its interdependent pillars advance on the ground؟ Who bears the burden of its day-to-day activation؟ How does the Nafeer govern itself from within once it has expanded؟ How does the project withstand the structures of interest that may see no benefit to themselves in its success؟ How does it confront a parallel economy that has become independent of the continuation of the war itself؟ How is hate speech monitored before it turns into actual mobilisation for violence؟ And who converts the principle of the Institutional Wall, which the Charter's main text established, into committees and standards that actually work on the ground؟

This Protocol addresses these eight questions as specific implementation gaps, without touching the original main text of the Charter or amending its conceptual structure. The separation between the foundational discourse (the Charter) and the implementation discourse (this Protocol) is deliberate: it preserves the rigour of the foundational text and provides sufficient space to detail practical mechanisms open to review and development without their being forced into the core of the vision. Wherever a provision in this Protocol appears to contradict a text in the Charter's main text, the main text is the reference, and the matter is treated as a point for revision rather than an independent interpretation.

This revision aligns the Protocol with the Eighth Revision of the Charter (September 2026), in particular with what it newly introduced: an absolute ceiling on the transitional period not exceeding five years, with declared achievement benchmarks (Section IV, Part 5); the specification of the source of legitimacy of the transitional authority and the caretaker body (Section IV, Part 4); the adoption of weighted consensus as the decision-making rule within the Constitutional Conference (Section II, Part 3); the extension of integration and demobilisation tracks to all armed formations, with separation between their institutional fate and the criminal responsibility of their individual members (Section III, Part 2); the establishment of an independent authority for the governance of gold and extractive resources (Section VI, Part 3); and the regulation of the relationship with grassroots initiatives such as the Emergency Response Rooms (Section VIII, Part 2).

This Protocol does not present itself as an alternative to existing Sudanese initiatives and alliances, nor as their adversary, but as a contribution added to them on the basis of "complementing, not confronting": the mechanisms it proposes are available to anyone who finds in them something that fills a gap in their own project, without being required to give up their name or history.

The eight chapters that follow address the gaps in a deliberate order, since resolving each one prepares the ground for the next, as the concluding chapter (the Roadmap) makes clear.

Chapter One: The Representation Gap

Who Holds the Legitimacy to Call for Foundation؟

I. The Nature of the Gap

The Charter of Salvation and State-Building rests on a central premise: that legitimacy is not granted from a centre to the peripheries, but is built upwards from the peripheries towards the centre, through what we have called "ascending functional legitimacy". This premise is sound as a founding principle, but the moment one attempts to apply it, it collides with an unavoidable procedural question: who, at moment zero, holds the authority to issue the first call for a founding convention that adopts this principle in the first place؟

The paradox is that any call to activate an ascending legitimacy needs, in order to be launched, an actor possessing a minimum capacity for organisation, communication and initial funding — and this capacity, in present Sudanese reality, is not evenly distributed among the peripheries. Those who actually possess it are most often: the educated urban elites, well-resourced diaspora organisations, or the existing political frameworks which, in the Charter's view, despite their contribution, have not yet succeeded in representing the peripheries adequately. Can a call for a Charter that rejects centralisation be launched, in practical terms, from anywhere other than a position resembling the very centre it rejects؟

This is not a passing stumble in implementation but a structural tension: every founding project reproduces, at the moment of its launch, a miniature version of the problem it seeks to solve.

II. Critique of Existing Models

Recent Sudanese experience offers two models that did not succeed in resolving the dilemma of "who calls", despite the understandable motives each carried:

The First Model: Legitimacy by Elite Mandate
This is what was attempted, with sincere intentions and in exceptional historical circumstances, by alliances such as the Forces of Freedom and Change following the December Revolution, in which a group of existing parties and civil organisations took on the representation of "the people" by virtue of their historical or organisational position. This alliance has an undeniable credit in leading the moment of change, but the absence of a mechanism to verify that this representation actually reflected the balance of interests on the ground, particularly in the peripheries and the countryside, left its legitimacy open to challenge at the first real test of consensus.

The Second Model: Legitimacy by De Facto Force
This is the path taken by armed parties when they convert their battlefield superiority into a representative claim — "we control the land, therefore we have the greater right to negotiate on behalf of its people". This model, however realistic it may appear, reduces legitimacy to a reflection of the balance of military power, which is precisely what the Fourth Pillar seeks to address through the mechanism of "weighted consensus", which grants parties with less military strength a representative weight that does not depend on their capacity to impose a fait accompli.

Both models share a single assumption: that legitimacy is "declared" by a party that already possesses it, rather than "built" through a cumulative, verifiable process.

III. Framing through Iftiqār

Here the concept of iftiqār (acknowledged insufficiency — mutual interdependence) — in the abstract philosophical sense on which we built the Charter, that is, the mutual interdependence established by Section I of the main text — offers a way out of this impasse, not as a technical solution but as a redefinition of the position of the caller itself. The essence of the concept here is this: any actor that relies on a pre-existing self-sufficient warrant (its organisational standing, its record of struggle, its battlefield superiority) to prove its legitimacy automatically loses the capacity to review itself, because any admission of error threatens the foundation on which it built its claim. By contrast, the actor that starts from an explicit acknowledgement that it does not possess the full warrant of legitimacy, and that this warrant has not yet been achieved, is alone capable of designing a mechanism that monitors itself and continually corrects its course.

This meaning is close to what Heidegger put forward in Being and Time (1927) when he described the human being (Dasein, that is, "being-there") as not complete in itself but always open to its possibilities, and when he made "being-with" (Mitsein) a constitutive dimension of this being rather than a later addition to it (see especially §26 of the book); and to what the African philosophy of Ubuntu expresses in the well-known phrase "I am because we are", with which it became associated after the Kenyan philosopher John Mbiti formulated it in African Religions and Philosophy (1969) — both of which reject the idea of the self-sufficient actor that derives its legitimacy from within itself alone.

In other words: the party qualified to issue the first founding call is not the one holding the greatest stock of prior legitimacy, but the one that declares its lack of this stock and builds the calling mechanism itself on this acknowledgement — so that the first call is "a call to test the call", not "a declaration of final representation".

This is the essential difference between the Charter and the models that preceded it: the Charter does not resolve the dilemma of "who calls" by finding a more representative party, but by redefining the first call as an act that is by its nature provisional and open to review, not as a final founding act.

IV. Comparative Reference

The experience of Yemen's Comprehensive National Dialogue Conference (18 March 2013 – 25 January 2014, with a membership of 565 delegates) offers a relevant twofold lesson. On the one hand, the Conference tried to address the representation dilemma through prior quantitative quotas, allocating roughly half the seats to representatives of the South, roughly thirty per cent to women and roughly twenty per cent to youth, instead of allowing representation to emerge from a cumulative process — which a number of observers criticised as representation dominated by urban elites selecting figures to "represent" the peripheries without any genuine mandate from them, which is the trap we are trying to avoid above. On the other hand, and this is the positive lesson, the Conference adopted a rule of consensus with a high threshold rather than a simple-majority vote on contested issues — its internal rules defined consensus as the agreement of 90% of those present; failing that, the matter was referred to a consensus committee, and then to a vote that could not be decided by less than 75% — an idea that intersects with "weighted consensus" in the Fourth Pillar, although its Yemeni application took place within an already skewed representative structure and so did not prevent the subsequent collapse.

Sources: The number of members and the quotas (50% for the South, 30% for women and 20% for youth) and the two consensus thresholds (90% then 75%) are documented in Erica Gaston's Special Report published by the United States Institute of Peace (Special Report No. 342, February 2014), in Ali Saif Hassan's study in Accord (Issue 25, 2014), and in the situation assessment published by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (February 2014). The critique of the selection of representatives, however, is an evaluative judgement drawn from this analytical literature, not from the Conference's official documents. (Appendix B: Yemen)

The lesson: the decision-making mechanism (weighted consensus) is not sufficient on its own unless it is built on a representation process verified cumulatively from below, not imposed a priori through quotas from above. This tips the balance in favour of the following procedural solution.

V. Towards a Practical Mechanism — The Call as a Process, Not a Declaration

The way out proposed here rests on separating two moments that were mistakenly merged in earlier conceptions: the moment of "the call" and the moment of "representation".

1. The first call is issued from a position of declared iftiqār, that is, from a gathering that explicitly acknowledges that it holds no comprehensive mandate, and assigns itself a limited functional role: facilitating the convening of founding local meetings, not speaking on anyone's behalf.
2. Legitimacy accumulates through a chain of successive, verifiable mandates, beginning with local councils (which are themselves the structure the Charter proposes for the reconciliation councils in transitional justice, and are thus put to this dual purpose early) that send representatives to a regional level, while the regional level sends representatives to the national level — such that every mandate can be withdrawn and reviewed at any stage.
3. The Grand National Mobilisation (al-Nafeer) operates, in this first phase specifically, as an instrument of mobilisation and communication, not as a representative body; that is, its first task is not to "represent" but to "carry the call and gather the responses" — the Nafeer begins with a limited mandate that expands only to the extent that actual mandates accumulate.
4. The link to the transitional authority: until this chain is complete, the Protocol adopts what the Charter's main text stipulates (Section IV, Part 4): the conduct of affairs is entrusted to a small transitional body of non-partisan competent figures, named by a cross-regional consensus among the civil and societal forces that are signatories to the Charter, and accountable to the first ascending representative body to be formed. The convening gathering may not, in that capacity, turn itself into this body or monopolise the naming of its members; its function is facilitation, not succession.
5. The measure of success is not complete representation from day one, but the existence of a transparent, declared mechanism through which any absent party can join later without this being regarded as a challenge to the legitimacy of what came before.
VI. The Specific Geographical Mechanism — From the Local Unit (ruqʿa: a small, bounded patch of territory) to the National Level

This section proposes an operational design with defined boundaries that actually implements the steps above, instead of a general reference to "local councils" whose details are left vague; this is the detail to which the Charter's main text explicitly refers (Section II, Parts 5 and 6):

6. The basic unit: a small, geographically bounded local unit — a neighbourhood, a fariq (nomadic encampment), a cluster of neighbouring villages, or a displacement camp — whose residents are brought together by a shared livelihood concern: water, health, the school, everyday security. The sole condition for membership and candidacy is actual residence, not lineage.
7. Choosing the representative: the residents of the local unit choose their representative by name, not by party list, in a direct ballot open to every adult resident, thereby actually achieving the "verifiable mandate" established by the second item of the preceding part.
8. Escalation: the representatives of neighbouring local units meet in a local council, from which representation ascends to the regional level and then the national level through election from within each level, such that every mandate remains subject to withdrawal and review at any stage. This ascending chain culminates in the Constitutional Conference, which is formed through this ascending spatial representation, and in which the fateful questions (the form of the state, the system of government, the relationship between religion and the state, the distribution of resources, and national security) are decided by the weighted threshold, as the Charter's main text stipulates (Section II, Part 3).
9. The three safeguards: the boundaries of the local units are drawn by an independent technical committee and reviewed periodically to accommodate those returning from displacement; the representative's tenure is limited to only two electoral terms (each term between four and five years), after which candidacy is not permitted except after a full term's absence, in line with the same rotation logic adopted for all the Nafeer's coordinating positions; and anyone proven to be linked to the war economy is excluded from candidacy, by a reasoned decision open to appeal before an independent judicial body, in accordance with the standard and safeguards detailed in Chapter Six below.
10. The measure of success is not the completion of boundary-drawing from day one, but the existence of an independent technical committee and declared rules open to periodic review, which prevent the local unit from being frozen around a population distribution that no longer exists after years of displacement.
11. Group-balance thresholds at escalation: when electing those who ascend from each local council to the regional level, and then from the regional to the national level (item 3 above), it is required that the share of either sex be no less than 35% of the ascending seats in each round of escalation, and that the representation of those under thirty-five be no less than a similar minimum proportion to be set later by an accompanying implementing regulation. This is a corrective threshold applied after the free vote in the local unit (item 2 above), not a precondition on it, so as to avoid repeating the Yemeni experience mentioned in the Comparative Reference (Part IV) above.
12. Organising the diaspora by the same logic: Sudanese abroad are organised into "local units" according to their actual places of residence in each host country or city, electing their representatives and sending them upwards under the same rules above, thereby bringing the diaspora into the representation structure as a geographical extension rather than as a separate advisory delegation.
13. Professional and labour unions are incorporated as an advisory voice within the sectoral teams of the Grand National Mobilisation (Section VIII of the Charter's main text), not as an independent electoral track parallel to the geographical mechanism above. Items 6–8 are the operational detail of the corrective balancing rules established by the Charter's main text (Section II, Part 6).
VII. Why Place, Not Lineage؟ — A Theoretical and Cultural Deepening of the Geographical Mechanism

The choice of "actual residence" as the sole basis for membership and candidacy, rather than any kinship or identity-based criterion, is not a passing procedural preference, but a choice grounded in comparative experience and in an academic literature independent of the Charter, which deserves to be set out briefly here:

• Why geography and not identity: representative arrangements built on allocating seats to particular groups turn belonging into a political resource that gives elites a permanent incentive to sharpen group boundaries rather than bridge them, because their electoral capital depends on those boundaries remaining sharp. Donald Horowitz set out this logic in detail in his book Ethnic Groups in Conflict (1985), and later proposed in A Democratic South Africa؟ (1991) an incentive engineering that rewards the building of cross-group coalitions rather than the mobilisation of each group against the others — which is what the geographical mechanism above seeks when it makes "residence", not "lineage", the condition of membership.
• The critique of the colonial "citizen and subject" duality: in Citizen and Subject (1996), Mahmood Mamdani offers an argument that is essentially African in origin, which he went on to apply to Sudan specifically in Saviors and Survivors (2009) and Neither Settler nor Native (2020): that indirect colonial administration produced a bifurcation between the citizen at the centre, governed by civil law, and the subject in the countryside, governed by a customary authority defined by tribal affiliation, and that any genuine re-foundation of local authority requires establishing it anew on the basis of residence and place, not on the basis of the clan. Making geography the basis of representation here is not an escape from the question of identity, but a direct dismantling of the structure that froze it in the first place.
• Clear boundaries are a condition, not a detail: the first of the three safeguards above (drawing the boundaries of the local units through an independent technical committee) is not a marginal administrative procedure, but is precisely what Elinor Ostrom places at the head of her eight principles for governing common-pool resources in Governing the Commons (1990): no commons can be managed — and no representative legitimacy can be managed — without precise knowledge of who shares in it and where its boundaries end.
• Justice is a cultural process before it is a constitutional text: this engineering remains powerless unless it is accompanied by a shift in political culture acquired gradually in the narrowest sphere (the family, the school, the neighbourhood) before being carried into the national space. This is what Robert Putnam concluded in Making Democracy Work (1993): the performance of democratic institutions is determined by a society's stock of social capital and civic engagement more than by the quality of their design alone. Francis Deng adds a related diagnosis in War of Visions (1995): the crisis of the Sudanese state is at its core a conflict over definitions of identity that precedes the dispute over power, which means that the fragmentation exposed by the current war was not created by the war alone; rather, the war accelerated its pace. Hence the local reconciliation councils (the three-tier structure of transitional justice in the Charter's main text) acquire a double value: they are at once a first tier of transitional justice and a first school of political deliberation.
• The limits of this mechanism: the geographical mechanism, as this section acknowledges, is a transitional arrangement for building trust, not a perpetual formula; its aim is for belonging to place to become gradually stronger than belonging to the group, and if society matures beyond the need for it, it will fall away of its own accord. Its transformation into a permanent arrangement in its own right, however, would reproduce, under new names, the very thing it came to remedy — and this is exactly what the principle of "refusing completion" in the Charter's main text warns against.
Chapter Conclusion: The Gap as a Criterion, Not an Obstacle

The representation gap will never be closed definitively — and perhaps it should not be, because the claim to have closed it completely is precisely the illusion that brought down earlier experiences. The party that claims complete representation from the first moment burdens itself beyond what it can bear; the party that builds on its declared iftiqār is alone capable of having its legitimacy grow over time rather than erode.

Chapter Two: The Sequencing Gap

Transitional Justice or Financial Sovereignty First؟

I. The Nature of the Gap

The Charter sets out two interdependent pillars in its original conception: a three-tier transitional justice structure (local reconciliation councils, the Truth and Reparations Commission, and the Major Crimes Chamber), and a financial sovereignty based on dismantling the parallel economic networks. But any executive body working with limited resources and narrow political time — time that has now become governed by an absolute ceiling not exceeding five years under the Eighth Revision of the Charter — will be forced to face a question that brooks no postponement: which of the two do we actually begin with؟

If we begin with transitional justice before bringing the parallel economy under control, its obstruction may be financed by the very networks that are supposed to be held to account. And if we begin with financial sovereignty before building the mechanisms of justice, the process of recovering resources may lose its moral and popular cover, and easily turn into a settling of scores between competing elites rather than the recovery of a public right.

The gap, then, is not the absence of one of the two pillars, but the absence of a theory of sequencing that determines which of them prepares the ground for the other, and on what conditions.

II. Critique of Existing Models

The First Model: Justice First, as a Moral Precondition
This is the position adopted by much of the human rights discourse, which holds that any economic or political settlement before accountability is a whitewashing of crime. This position has clear moral merit, but its practical difficulty is that it does not pay sufficient attention to the fact that transitional justice mechanisms themselves need funding and an administrative structure that are hard to secure in an economy most of which remains subject to the networks of the warring parties.

The Second Model: Economic Stability First, as a Practical Precondition
This is the position towards which technocratic frameworks and international financial institutions often lean, which holds that macroeconomic stabilisation is a precondition for any enforceable justice. This position too has its logic, but it may provide a window of time for the reconstruction process to be captured and turned into a new form of appropriation, this time under technocratic rather than military cover.

Both models fall into the same problem from opposite directions: each treats the two pillars as successive stages instead of treating them as intertwined processes advancing at different speeds on different tracks. The Charter's main text has settled part of this question by requiring that transitional justice mechanisms, in particular the documentation of violations and the protection of witnesses, begin in parallel with the ceasefire, immediately and not after it (Section IV, Part 3); this chapter sets out in detail what corresponds to that on the financial track.

III. An Alternative Framing — The Logic of Asynchronous Interdependence

Instead of speaking of the "priority" of one of the two pillars, it is useful here to invoke the notion of iftiqār (acknowledged insufficiency — mutual interdependence) in its abstract philosophical sense: the acknowledgement that no actor on its own, however great its strength or resources, is self-sufficient. This meaning is close to what Emmanuel Levinas put forward in Totality and Infinity (1961) on the priority of the relation to the other over the autonomy of the self, and to what Simon Critchley put forward in Infinitely Demanding (2007): that ethical commitment arises from responding to a demand that exceeds the self's capacity to fulfil it, not from the completeness of that capacity.

Applied to the question of sequencing: neither is transitional justice self-sufficient (for it needs funding that it does not have without financial sovereignty), nor is financial sovereignty self-sufficient (for it needs popular legitimacy that it does not have without a visible justice track). This opens the door to a solution that asks: what is the minimum of each pillar that is sufficient to operate the other؟

IV. Comparative Reference

The Tunisian experience after 2011 illustrates the dangers of separating the two tracks. The Truth and Dignity Commission was established under Organic Law No. 2013-53 of 24 December 2013 on Establishing and Organising Transitional Justice, with broad powers that included an Arbitration and Reconciliation Committee examining cases of financial corruption. However, the financial accountability track was partly taken away from it when Organic Law No. 2017-62 of 24 October 2017 on Reconciliation in the Administrative Sphere was passed, which exempted public officials from criminal prosecution for administrative acts that resulted in an unlawful benefit to a third party, provided they had not obtained a personal benefit from them, and did so outside the Commission's framework. The result: extensive documentation of violations, but with limited instruments of financial recovery, and part of the "economic reconciliation" turned into a political settlement negotiated far from the justice track.

Sources: Organic Law No. 2013-53 (the Official Gazette (JORT), No. 105, 31 December 2013); Organic Law No. 2017-62 (the Official Gazette (JORT), No. 85, 24 October 2017), which explicitly excludes bribery and the misappropriation of public funds; the final report of the Truth and Dignity Commission (announced on 26 March 2019 and published in the Official Gazette in June 2020); the Human Rights Watch report (5 April 2019); and the reports of the International Center for Transitional Justice. (Appendix B: Tunisia)

The lesson: documenting justice without a simultaneous instrument of financial recovery produces a moral archive of limited practical effect; and financial recovery without a parallel justice track produces an elite settlement that is renamed "reform".

V. Towards a Practical Mechanism — The Simultaneous Minimum

The proposal here replaces the logic of "succession" with the logic of "parallel thresholds": defining a functional minimum for each pillar sufficient to operate the other, and activating both minimums together from the first day of the ceasefire.

14. At the level of transitional justice: the local councils begin immediately with documenting violations, registering claims and protecting witnesses, without waiting for the formation of the Truth and Reparations Commission or the Major Crimes Chamber. From the outset, the documentation is to meet evidence-preservation standards that allow its use before all levels of justice, including what is required for coordination with the International Criminal Court in the situation in Darfur referred to it by the Security Council (Resolution 1593 of 31 March 2005), in accordance with the principle of complementarity stipulated in the Charter's main text (Section V, Part 3).
15. At the level of financial sovereignty: tracing and initial freezing — not full recovery — of the most evident assets and networks begins, in parallel with local documentation. The Independent Authority for the Governance of Gold and Extractive Resources stipulated in the Charter's main text (Section VI, Part 3) begins registering concession contracts and production and export volumes and publishing them periodically, guided by the standards of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) or their equivalent, so that disputes over figures are settled by published data rather than by competing narratives.
16. The point where the two tracks meet comes when the Truth and Reparations Commission is formed: it will have inherited the archive of local documentation, the database of frozen assets and the records of the resource governance authority, so that it does not start from scratch on either file, and it will find in the recovered resources an initial source for funding the tangible material reparation that the Charter requires.
17. Limits of scope: these thresholds are confined to violations linked to the current war and to the documented cycles of armed conflict immediately preceding it; long-standing historical grievances are referred to the separate political track of comprehensive historical review stipulated in the Charter's main text (Section V, Part 5), whose completion is not a precondition for beginning activation.
18. The measure of success is not the early completion of either pillar, but the continuation of their parallel progress without one outpacing the other by a margin that strips the second of its capacity to catch up — which is measured within the achievement benchmark concerning the commencement of work at the three tiers of transitional justice and the subjection of sovereign resources to the unified account (Section IV, Part 5).
Chapter Conclusion: Sequencing as Design, Not Order

The question "which comes first" implicitly assumes that the two pillars can be completely separated in time, and this is the assumption best abandoned. The alternative: a minimum operating threshold is designed for each of them that makes them advance together from the start, without either becoming hostage to waiting for the other's completion.

Chapter Three: The Executive Instrument Gap

From Concept to the Organisational Structure of the Nafeer

I. The Nature of the Gap

The Charter presents the "Grand National Mobilisation" as the popular vehicle for implementing all of the above. But the "Nafeer" is a concept before it is a structure: an invocation of a deep-rooted Sudanese tradition of collective mutual aid in times of need, projected onto a complex political-organisational task extending over years, not days.

The gap is specific: the tradition from which the Nafeer draws inspiration is by nature non-institutional — no permanent leadership, no registered membership and no ongoing funding mechanism. But the Nafeer's task in the context of the Charter is radically different in its temporal nature, and needs precisely those elements of permanent organisation that the original tradition does not need.

Can the mutual-aid spirit of the Nafeer be transferred into a permanent organisational structure without that spirit losing itself at the moment of "institutionalisation"؟

II. Critique of Existing Models

The First Model: Early Institutionalisation
This is the path often taken by protest movements when they quickly turn into party structures (committees becoming central coordinating bodies, and coordinating bodies becoming parties). This rapid transformation may replicate the centralised hierarchical structure that the original movement arose to transcend. Sudan's resistance committees after 2019 lived this tension directly, and in their discussions of charters and coordinating bodies — especially "the Revolutionary Charter for People's Power" and "the Charter for Establishing People's Authority", both issued in February 2022 — offered serious efforts to deal with it that deserve to be built upon.

The Second Model: Remaining in Permanent Non-Institutionalisation
This is the opposite position, which holds that any formal organisation corrupts the horizontal and spontaneous character of popular action. This protects against elite capture in the short term, but leaves the organisation unable to perform cumulative tasks that require institutional memory and functional specialisation.

Both models assume that "institutionalisation" and "horizontality" are irreconcilable opposites, whereas what is actually needed is a design that combines them through a functional ordering, not an authoritarian hierarchy.

III. An Alternative Framing — Functional Differentiation without Centralised Decision-Making

The way out lies in separating two concepts: functional differentiation (the specialisation of units in particular tasks) and decision-making centralisation (the concentration of decision-making authority at a single apex). The Nafeer can develop full functional differentiation without this requiring the concentration of decision-making in a single central leadership, if the coordination mechanism is designed as a horizontal network of mutual mandates.

This intersects with what Elinor Ostrom put forward in Governing the Commons (1990): communities that succeed in managing complex collective resources do not necessarily need a single central authority, but rather clear rules for coordination, mutual monitoring among units, and multi-level organisation (nested enterprises) in which each unit retains decision-making over its own affairs.

IV. Comparative Reference

The experience of the Zapatista "Councils of Good Government" (Juntas de Buen Gobierno) in the Mexican state of Chiapas — announced in July 2003 and established in August of the same year together with the "Caracoles" (Caracoles) — offers a practical model: the local councils retain decision-making authority over their own affairs, while rotating their representation on the regional coordinating bodies periodically, with a clear separation between those who coordinate external communication and those who take internal decisions. This structure endured for some twenty years without turning into a centralised party.

More telling still, the movement itself announced in November 2023, within a series of communiqués that began in October, the dissolution of these councils and of the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (MAREZ), and the restructuring of its architecture towards smaller "Local Autonomous Governments" (GAL) closer to the base, following a self-review in which it judged that the levels of coordination had begun to drift away from the communities that had created them. This is in itself a lesson in "refusing completion": a successful structure that did not treat its success as final.

Sources: the movement's communiqué announcing the establishment of the councils (July 2003); the two communiqués of Subcomandante Moisés of 5 and 12 November 2023, published on the movement's official website; and coverage by the independent Mexican magazine Proceso (5 November 2023). The interpretation of the motives for the restructuring is drawn from the movement's own communiqués. (Appendix B: The Zapatistas)

The transferable lesson: mandatory rotation in coordinating positions, an explicit separation between "who speaks on behalf of" and "who decides", and a readiness to review the structure itself periodically are the most effective tools for preventing a functional structure from turning into an authoritarian hierarchy.

V. Towards a Practical Mechanism — The Functional Structure of the Nafeer

This section details the three-tier structure established by the Charter's main text (Section VIII, Part 2):

19. Local Nafeer cells: in neighbourhoods, villages and camps, each cell forms small working teams with defined tasks (documentation, communication, mobilisation, services), and is linked directly to the local reconciliation councils and to the spatial representation mechanisms detailed in Chapter One.
20. Sectoral teams: specialised teams (health, education, infrastructure, documentation of violations) working horizontally across the regions, and including professional and workers' unions in an advisory capacity, so as to ensure the accumulation of technical expertise without its central monopolisation.
21. A rotating, not permanent, coordination council: a lightweight body in which representatives of the two preceding levels meet periodically, with mandatory rotation of the chair at each meeting; its function is linkage, documentation and feedback, not the issuing of top-down orders.
22. An explicit separation between the communication function and the decision function: whoever speaks on behalf of the Nafeer is not necessarily the one who holds authority to take internal decisions.
23. Relationship with the Emergency Response Rooms and grassroots initiatives: cooperation with the Emergency Response Rooms and the other initiatives that have rebuilt solidarity in neighbourhoods since the outbreak of the war rests on voluntary coordination and the exchange of experience, not on organisational subordination; the Nafeer does not seek to absorb or politicise them, and it respects their declared humanitarian neutrality as an asset to be safeguarded, as the Charter's main text provides.
24. The measure of success is not the speed of building a unified structure, but the capacity of the distributed structure to perform cumulative tasks without its coordination points turning into positions of permanent power.
Chapter Conclusion: Structure as a Safeguard, Not an Obstacle

The legitimate fear that the Nafeer might turn into a new version of the centralised elites is not a reason to avoid structure, but a reason to design it with greater care. Non-institutionalisation does not protect against capture; an organisational vacuum is always filled, and usually by those most able to move quickly rather than the most representative.

Chapter Four: The Institutional Structure Gap

From a Mobilising Vehicle to a Self-Governing Entity

I. The Nature of the Gap

The previous chapter addressed the transformation of the Nafeer from a mobilising idea into a functional structure: local cells, sectoral teams, a rotating coordination council, and a separation between who speaks and who decides. Yet this functional differentiation, however precise its design, remains an organisation without internal self-governance unless explicit rules are built upon it that determine how those who occupy coordinating positions are held to account, how the local units are financed, and how the cadres who will occupy these positions are prepared in the first place.

The gap here is subtle but decisive: a functional structure without an internal constitution, without a permanent training mechanism, and without clear financial independence from the state may reproduce the very centralisation it was designed to avoid — not through an open coup against the principle of rotation, but through gradual erosion without visible accountability, and an organisational vacuum that is usually filled by the capacity to move fastest rather than by those most committed to the spirit of the Charter.

II. Critique of Existing Models

The First Model: Reliance on Oral Custom
This is the assumption that mutual trust among the first founders is sufficient to regulate the conduct of those who occupy coordinating positions, without explicit codification of members' rights and duties or of terms of office. This model works well in the first founding moment, when everyone knows one another, but it weakens as the geographical base expands and generations enter who did not witness the founding, since unwritten custom may turn into an unaccountable privilege for whoever arrived first.

The Second Model: Copying Ready-Made Party By-Laws
This is the importation of ready-made internal by-laws from existing Sudanese or regional parties, because they are available and easy to apply. The problem is that many of these by-laws were designed to serve centralised hierarchical structures, and they carry with them — even if only latently — the assumptions of individual leadership and the accumulation of powers that the Charter moves beyond at its foundation, so that the problem is reproduced under a different procedural cover.

Both models fall short from opposite directions: the first leaves internal governance uncodified and so weakens with expansion, while the second codifies it on a ready-made centralised template and so replicates what it is trying to avoid.

III. An Alternative Framing — Competence and Rotation as the Basis of Organisational Position

The way out here borrows a simple principle: an organisational position is earned through competence and periodic, assessable performance, not through seniority or proximity to the founding circle. This calls for a move from what the previous chapter addressed (functional differentiation without centralised decision-making) to a new level: codifying this differentiation in explicit, reviewable rules that set time limits for holding positions, a periodic assessment mechanism, and independent financial transparency for each Nafeer unit.

Here the metaphor of iftiqār (acknowledged insufficiency — mutual interdependence) applies in its functional sense: any Nafeer unit that assumes it can dispense with periodic review and mutual oversight loses the capacity to correct its course, just as any actor who builds its legitimacy on a prior self-conferred warrant loses it — which is what Chapter One addressed regarding the founding call. The difference is that this principle here applies not only to the moment of the first call, but to every organisational position throughout the life of the mechanism.

IV. Comparative Reference

The early experience of the Brazilian Workers' Party (PT) in the 1980s offered a relevant model: systematic investment in the political formation of local cadres before their rise to higher coordinating positions, through training institutions linked to the party, such as the Instituto Cajamar (Instituto Cajamar), founded by the party together with the Central Workers' Union (CUT) and social movements in 1986, and then the Perseu Abramo Foundation (Fundação Perseu Abramo) in 1996, alongside periodic congresses to review orientations and leaderships. This contributed to building an organisational base that was able to absorb rapid expansion in its early stages. Yet the party itself later witnessed, upon coming to power, a tendency towards the concentration of decision-making in a narrow leadership circle — a reminder that training alone is no substitute for continuous rotation and review.

Sources: the studies of the party by Margaret Keck (Yale University, 1992) and Wendy Hunter (Cambridge University, 2010); the entry on the "Instituto Cajamar" in the "Places of Workers' Memory" series (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro); and the official website of the Perseu Abramo Foundation (founded on 5 May 1996). (Appendix B: Brazil)

Alongside the Zapatista and Brazilian experiences, this failure of institutionalisation has a Sudanese precedent worth recalling: the People's Local Government Act of 1971, by which the May regime abolished the system of Native Administration (the nazirs, omdas, sheikhs and shartays) and replaced it with people's local councils on a geographical basis, in line with the thesis of the then Minister of Local Government, Ja'far Muhammad Ali Bakheit, that hereditary leaderships should give way to elected councils combining professional cadres with grassroots representation. It was preceded by the Unregistered Land Act of 1970, which transferred ownership of unregistered land to the state and stripped tribal leaders of the authority to allocate hawakir and tribal homelands (dar). The experiment did not falter because of any flaw in the geographical principle itself, but because it was imposed from above and abruptly, was given no real resources or effective powers, and was tied to a single political organisation, the Sudanese Socialist Union — precisely the path this chapter warns against: gradual erosion without visible accountability. The abolition left a security and judicial vacuum in the countryside: Native Administration had maintained rural security, collected taxes and settled customary disputes, and the police, the courts and the replacement councils were not equipped to cover those vast areas. Conflicts over resources and pastures intensified, especially in Darfur and Kordofan, until the state itself returned to relying on Native Administration figures informally from the late 1970s, before their legal status was restored in the 1990s. The lesson is twofold: a geographical basis is not sufficient on its own unless it is coupled with financial independence, effective powers and real distance from the centre, which is what the provisions of this chapter seek to guarantee; and dismantling existing structures all at once, before their replacement has matured, creates a vacuum that violence may fill — which explains why Chapter One treats the geographical mechanism as a gradual transitional arrangement rather than an immediate rupture.

Sources: the People's Local Government Act, 1971, and the Unregistered Land Act, 1970 (Official Gazette of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan); John Howell (ed.), Local Government and Politics in the Sudan (Khartoum University Press, 1974), a contemporaneous record of the Act's implementation; Dennis Rondinelli's study (1981); Al-Agab Ahmed Al-Teraifi (ed.), Decentralization in Sudan (University of Khartoum, 1987); A. M. Elhussein's study of the revival of Native Administration (1989); and Alex de Waal, Famine That Kills (1989), on the effect of abolition on coping mechanisms and dispute resolution in western Sudan. (Appendix B: Sudanese Sources)

V. Towards a Practical Mechanism — The Internal Institutional Structure of the Nafeer

25. A written internal constitution for each Nafeer unit: setting terms of office for coordinating positions at no more than two electoral cycles, each cycle lasting between four and five years (that is, an overall maximum of between eight and ten years for any single coordinating position), an explicit rotation mechanism, and an internal oversight committee independent of each regional coordinating body.
26. A unified digital coordination network: a secure platform enabling members of Nafeer committees across the regions and the diaspora to take part in discussion and periodic voting, with due regard for the protection of members' data in wartime conditions, so as to turn geographical dispersion into a source of cumulative strength rather than a coordination burden.
27. The Nafeer Academy: a permanent training arm that prepares local committee leaders in negotiation, local transitional justice (feeding directly into the reconciliation councils within the three-tier structure), and administration and financial transparency; it is the practical application of the "rapid qualification" stage among the five stages provided for in the Charter's main text (Section VIII, Part 3).
28. Financial independence of the Nafeer mechanism from state funding: small local community donations as the primary base, members' subscriptions, and diaspora support through publicly documented channels, with periodic financial oversight of each committee whose findings are submitted to the regional level (Section VIII, Part 4). The Nafeer and its bodies are subject to the ceiling on external funding provided for in the Charter's main text, so that external funding, whether governmental or non-governmental, does not exceed thirty per cent of its operating budget (Section VI, Part 4).
29. The measure of success is not the completeness of the institutional structure from day one, but the existence of written and published rules against which compliance can be measured, so as to prevent any coordinating position from turning into a de facto position of permanent power.
Chapter Conclusion: Internal Construction as an Extension of the Founding Principle

If the Nafeer mechanism is to remain a faithful instrument for implementing the spirit of the Charter rather than a mere passing mobilising slogan, it needs to be governed from within by the very standards that the Charter demands of the state itself: functional legitimacy, rotation, transparency and accountability — beginning from the smallest local committee, not assumed to be ready-made at the summit.

Chapter Five: The Adversary Gap

How Does the Charter Protect Itself from Co-optation and Hollowing Out؟

I. The Nature of the Gap

All the preceding gaps implicitly assume that the Charter moves in a neutral political vacuum. But in reality any founding project moves amid existing and active networks of interest: the parallel economy, elite alliances, and armed parties that may see their interest in the continuation of the status quo or in monopolising the process of change.

By "the adversary" this chapter does not mean particular persons or groups to be treated as enemies, but structures of interest and patterns of behaviour; and the door remains open to every actor who decides to leave these structures and join the Charter's path, in accordance with what the principle of mutual interdependence allows.

The gap here is that the Charter has diagnosed these networks clearly, but has not yet developed a conception of how to protect itself: how does it safeguard its project from being co-opted or hollowed out once it begins to gain popular momentum؟

II. Critique of Existing Models

The First Model: Direct Confrontation
The assumption that the project can advance through open and direct challenge to the existing networks of interest, relying on popular momentum alone. This assumes that moral mobilisation can compensate for a real disparity in resources and organisational capacity — an assumption that Sudanese experience has on numerous occasions failed to support.

The Second Model: Gradual Coexistence
This holds that gradual engagement with the existing networks is more realistic than confrontation. The problem is that this may open the door to the "capture" of the project from within: the existing networks learn the language of reform and adopt it formally while retaining the substance of their influence.

Both models treat the adversary as a constant, whereas it is an actor that continually adapts to the project's strategy.

III. An Alternative Framing — Protection through Distribution, Not through Rigidity

The way out lies in a design that makes the project hard to co-opt by virtue of its distributed structure, not by virtue of the steadfastness of particular individuals. This intersects with the concept of "adaptive resilience" (adaptive resilience) in the literature on complex systems: the system hardest to penetrate is the most distributed, such that there is no single point in it sufficient to control the whole.

IV. Comparative Reference

The experience of the Chilean transition after 1990 offers a negative lesson: the transition took place through understandings among a limited number of party leaderships, in what became known as the "democracy of agreements" (democracia de los acuerdos), and these understandings preserved for many years institutional constraints inherited from the 1980 Constitution, such as the designated senators and the binomial electoral system; the system of designated senators was abolished only by the constitutional reform of 2005 (Law 20.050), while the binomial electoral system remained in place until it was replaced by a proportional system in 2015 (Law 20.840), applied for the first time in the 2017 elections. Many scholars take the view that the concentration of negotiation in a narrow circle, together with the decline of grassroots civic mobilisation, made it easier for the old networks of influence to secure their continued presence through settlements among a limited few.

Poland's Solidarity movement, by contrast, offers the opposite lesson: when martial law was declared in December 1981 and most of its top leadership was arrested, the movement did not end, because its structure rested on relatively autonomous factory and regional committees, many of which continued to work clandestinely, and those of its leaders who remained at liberty formed the "Provisional Coordinating Commission" (TKK) in April 1982, which continued until the Round Table negotiations (6 February – 5 April 1989).

Sources: the studies of the Chilean transition by Peter Siavelis (2000) and Manuel Antonio Garretón (2003), and the records of the Library of the National Congress of Chile concerning Laws 20.050 and 20.840; and Timothy Garton Ash's book on the Solidarity movement (1983). The judgement that the concentration of negotiation facilitated the persistence of networks of influence is an analytical reading adopted by the first two authors, not an agreed fact. (Appendix B: Chile, Poland)

The lesson: the greater the number of genuinely independent nodes, the higher the cost of complete co-optation rises, until it becomes unviable for whoever attempts it.

V. Towards a Practical Mechanism — Thresholds of Structural Autonomy

30. Separating sources of funding from sources of representation: diversifying sources of support reduces the capacity of any party to exert control through a single financial gateway, with adherence to the thirty per cent ceiling on external funding, and to the prohibition on receiving any binding direction or funding from an external authority, as the Charter's main text provides (Section VI, Part 4).
31. Mandatory rotation at a rate sufficient to prevent the accumulation of personal loyalties in any coordinating position, in accordance with the terms set out in Chapter Four.
32. A verification standard independent of declarations: actual, verifiable indicators instead of reliance on declarations of commitment alone.
33. A unified mediation platform: the Nafeer and all bodies linked to the Charter support the unification of the multiple mediation platforms into a single coordinated mechanism (Section IV, Part 2), because a multiplicity of platforms allows the parties to move between them in search of the terms most favourable to them, which is in itself one of the doors to co-optation and hollowing out.
34. The measure of success is not the absence of any attempt at co-optation, but that the cost of complete co-optation remains higher than its expected return.
Chapter Conclusion: The Gap That Is Not Closed, but Continually Managed

The adversary gap is the gap that is hard to close definitively through a single design adopted once, because the structures of interest themselves adapt to every new defensive design. The project that believes it has fortified itself definitively is the project most likely to be co-opted.

Chapter Six: The Shadow Economy Gap

From Armed Levies to an Economic Structure Independent of the War

I. The Nature of the Gap

Chapter Five addressed the adversary as political and elite networks with an interest in the continuation of the status quo. Yet recent field monitoring of Sudanese trade routes and crossings reveals another layer that merits separate treatment: the network of "gateway lords" — second- and third-tier field commanders who run organised levies on lorries, livestock and gold, and which has turned from a temporary means of financing the combat effort into an economic structure stable in its own right, whose direct interest is tied not to the continuation or cessation of the war, but to the continued absence of the state itself.

Sources: This chapter draws on the Sudan Tribune investigation into the "cartel" of armed levies on roads and crossings (29 July 2026), based on 17 interviews with drivers, traders and customs brokers, analysis of satellite imagery up to July 2026, and cross-referencing of shipping data through the Red Sea ports and informal account books of traders in Omdurman and the east. It identified more than 108 checkpoints and estimated collections at 22 main points at around 600 million Sudanese pounds a day. The accompanying article, "The Gateway Economy: When Armed Levies Turn from a Symptom of War into a Substitute for the State", develops this diagnosis. The figures are the investigation's own estimates, not official data. (Appendix B: Sudanese Sources)

The gap here is specific: the signature of the political and military parties on any settlement does not guarantee the dismantling of these networks, because they are no longer necessarily run from a unified command centre with binding authority over them. Whoever signs on behalf of an armed party does not necessarily hold actual authority over whoever collects levies at the gate.

II. Critique of Existing Models

The First Model: An Exclusively Security-Based Approach
This is the path usually adopted by ceasefire arrangements: disarmament, integration and demobilisation — treated as sufficient to end armed levies. The problem is that this model treats weapons as an end for the gateway lords, whereas for them they are no more than an instrument of collection; handing over the rifle in exchange for a political amnesty may in practice mean laundering accumulated wealth without accountability.

The Second Model: Macroeconomic Reform
This is the position usually adopted by technocratic frameworks, which holds that reforming the banking system and regulating monetary policy is the entry point for drying up the sources of financing of the parallel economy. The problem is that the gateway economy has established a system of barter and cash handling that is to a large extent independent of the formal banking system — cash outside the economic cycle, and in-kind barter in gold and fuel — so it does not need the bank to continue, and is little affected by its reform.

Both models treat the gateway economy as a secondary symptom of the war or of monetary imbalance, whereas it is — as Chapter Five concludes regarding structures of interest in general — an actor that has continually adapted until it has become independent of both.

III. An Alternative Framing — Separating the Weapons Track from the Money Track

The way out lies in treating weapons and money as two separate files that do not necessarily advance at the same pace. Dismantling the military capacity of the gateway lords is a security file subject to the tracks of integration, demobilisation and restructuring provided for in the Charter's main text, which apply to all formations without exception, including the brigades and formations that emerged or expanded in the context of the war alongside either of the two sides (Section III, Part 2). The accumulated assets and financial networks — real estate, parallel transport companies and currency exchange bureaux — are, by contrast, a separate file subject to transitional justice accountability regardless of the outcome of the security file. This is a direct application of the main text's rule: the institutional fate of a formation is decided by professional standards, and the individual responsibility of its members is decided before transitional justice; integration confers no immunity, and demobilisation burdens no one with a guilt not individually proven against them.

Here one may draw on an observation from the work of Elinor Ostrom, already relied upon in Chapter Three: that local arrangements for managing resources acquire over time their own rules and robustness, and are difficult to change later by a political decision from above alone. And if Ostrom studied this phenomenon in its positive aspect, the gateway economy presents its negative aspect: local arrangements that filled the vacuum of the state and acquired their robustness.

IV. Comparative Reference

The experience of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) after the final agreement signed on 24 November 2016 offers a negative lesson: the handover of weapons proceeded with relative success under UN supervision (the handover of individual weapons was completed in June 2017, and the removal of its arms caches in August–September 2017), but the cocaine and illegal mining financing networks that the movement had run in some areas were not dismantled by the same agreement; rather, part of them passed to dissident factions (disidencias) and other armed groups that inherited the economic structure without the political structure that had covered it.

Sources: Security Council resolution 2366 (10 July 2017) establishing the United Nations Verification Mission in Colombia, and the Secretary-General's periodic reports on it; and the two International Crisis Group publications on armed groups after the agreement (Report No. 63, October 2017; and a commentary of January 2022). (Appendix B: Colombia)

The lesson: a political agreement that removes weapons without a parallel mechanism for dismantling the parallel economy does not necessarily end the levies; rather, it may detach them from their political cover, so that they become harder, not easier, to trace and hold to account.

V. Towards a Practical Mechanism — The Independent Authority for Dismantling the Shadow Economy

35. Independent monitoring and documentation: building a database of levy routes and checkpoints in cooperation with investigative journalism and field-monitoring organisations, as a primary source that is not relied upon exclusively without independent, auditable verification.
36. Procedural separation between the two tracks: handling the handover of weapons as a security file separate from the handling of accumulated financial assets, so that neither is conditional on the completion of the other.
37. Conditional and phased economic reintegration: distinguishing compelled local actors — drivers and small traders — from the "gateway lords" who have accumulated actual wealth, through mechanisms close to the logic of the Nafeer that turn the former from coerced victims into partners in local oversight, coupled with the genuine economic reintegration programmes that the Charter's main text requires for the demobilisation track.
38. Preventing the laundering of wealth through alternative channels: subjecting currency exchange bureaux and parallel transport companies linked to the levy networks to financial scrutiny carried out by the civilian institutions provided for in Section VI of the Charter's main text: the civilian Central Bank with regard to payment and transfer channels, and the Independent Authority for the Governance of Gold and Extractive Resources with regard to gold, with the findings published periodically through the Financial Transparency Authority.
39. The link with the formal parallel economy: this track complements the main text's provision for transferring ownership of the companies and commercial activities belonging to the formal military and security institutions to the Ministry of Finance or a civilian public body, with the exception of military manufacturing subject to parliamentary oversight (Section VI, Part 3); dismantling informal levies alone while the formal military economy remains off-budget addresses half the problem.
40. The measure of success is not the disappearance of every checkpoint as soon as any agreement is signed, but that the cost of continuing the levies remains higher than their return, by virtue of tracing and accountability that are independent of the political negotiation track.
It should be noted that this financial scrutiny does not operate in isolation from the representation track: the condition excluding those linked to the war economy from standing for local representation (Chapter One, Part VI, item 4) derives its operational standard from the very database that this authority builds. However, the appearance of a name in the database is regarded as a presumption requiring verification, not a final judgement; no one is excluded except by a reasoned decision of which they are notified, which they have the right to challenge before an independent judicial body, and the exclusion is reviewed after a specified period. These are the very procedural safeguards that the Charter's main text requires for the exclusion of the dissolved National Congress Party (Section V, Part 6), in pursuit of a dual aim: that the position of local representation should not become political cover for shadow-economy wealth, and that the monitoring tool itself should not become a means of exclusion without evidence.

Chapter Conclusion: An Economy Dismantled with Its Own Tools

The shadow economy gap reminds us that a peace signed from above does not necessarily dismantle what has accumulated from below. Levies on the roads are not a side effect of the war that will disappear when it ends, but an economic structure that has learned to continue independently of it — and it can be confronted only with a tool at its own level: an independent financial tool, not merely a security clause within a broader agreement.

Chapter Seven: The Hate Speech Monitoring Gap

From Symbolic Tension to Actual Mobilisation: How Can Hate Speech Be Detected Before It Turns into Organised Violence؟

I. The Nature of the Gap

The six preceding chapters addressed the engineering of representation, sequencing, the instrument, the structure, the adversary and the shadow economy — that is, the institutional structure of the transitional state and the tools for protecting it. Yet organised violence in Sudan, as in most wars of identity-based mobilisation, does not usually begin from a sudden vacuum on the ground; rather, the way is prepared for it discursively: collective classification by identity, the dehumanisation of the regional or ethnic "other", and holding entire communities responsible for the acts of individuals. This discourse precedes actual mobilisation by a period that may be sufficient to detect it and intervene before it turns into a decision on the ground to commit violence.

The gap here is that a citizenship state based on spatial representation rather than lineage (the Fourth Pillar of the Charter) structurally weakens the incentive for identity-based mobilisation in the long term, but does not in itself possess an operational mechanism for monitoring incitement discourse in the short term, during the transitional period itself, when sub-identities remain the strongest frame of reference for many local actors. Neither Chapter One (the representation gap) nor Chapter Five (the adversary gap) provides a real-time monitoring tool for this kind of discourse; both address the structure of representation and political interest, not the content of the discourse actually circulating in the media, local platforms and social media.

II. Critique of Existing Models

The First Model: Direct Security Oversight by the State
This is the path towards which transitional executive bodies usually lean: criminalising "hate speech" and entrusting its definition and prosecution to a security or media body answerable to the authority in power. The problem is that the body defining hatred here may be a party to the struggle over the state, not a neutral arbiter of it; and multiple transitional experiences have witnessed the use of this definition to restrict legitimate political criticism, rather than to protect the groups actually targeted by incitement.

The Second Model: Exclusive Reliance on Social Media Companies' Moderation
This is the direction towards which supporting international actors usually lean, on the assumption that the content moderation policies of the major platforms are sufficient to contain incitement discourse locally. The problem is that these policies are designed primarily for other contexts and languages, are poorly attuned to local Sudanese dialects and coded tribal or regional terminology, are slow to respond, and are not subject to accountability before Sudanese institutions.

Both models grant the authority to define "hatred" to a body that has no direct interest in the success of the transition itself — either because it is a party to it, or because it is entirely removed from it.

III. An Alternative Framing — Independent Community Monitoring with an Explicit Distinguishing Criterion

The way out lies in separating two things that are often conflated: legitimate political criticism of authority, individuals or policies, however sharp, which is protected; and identity-based incitement that targets a particular group with an explicit or implicit call to violence or by dehumanising it. The criterion is not the sharpness of tone but collective targeting by identity.

This chapter proposes that the monitoring function be entrusted neither to a central security apparatus nor to a foreign platform, but to an independent body constituted according to the same logic of spatial representation adopted in Chapter One: balanced representation across the regions in their spatial sense as defined by Section II of the Charter's main text, not by identity quotas, so that the body's neutrality can be verified by all rather than merely declared by one party. This conception draws on the literature on "ethnic outbidding" (ethnic outbidding), formulated by Rabushka and Shepsle in Politics in Plural Societies (1972) and developed by Horowitz in Ethnic Groups in Conflict (1985): rhetorical escalation usually concentrates around moments of mobilisation and elections rather than evenly over time, which calls for intensifying monitoring specifically in those time windows.

IV. Comparative Reference

In the negative direction, the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was preceded by months of open incitement through the radio station RTLM (RTLM), which began broadcasting on 8 July 1993. This discourse was not hidden; the commander of the United Nations mission at the time, General Roméo Dallaire, requested that the station be silenced or jammed, without his request being granted, as he recounts in his memoir Shake Hands with the Devil (2003). Those responsible for it were held to account only later, before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), in what became known as the "Media Case" (Prosecutor v. Nahimana et al., Trial Chamber judgement in December 2003, and Appeals judgement in November 2007) — that is, after the catastrophe had occurred, not before it. The lesson here is twofold: subsequent judicial accountability does not compensate for the absence of an immediate response, and monitoring alone is not sufficient unless it is coupled with a body obliged to act.

In a more instructive direction, iHub Research in Nairobi launched the "Umati" (Umati) initiative in October 2012 to monitor online hate speech ahead of the Kenyan general elections of March 2013, drawing on the lessons of the violence that followed the 2007 elections. The initiative relied on local monitors proficient in local languages, and on a graduated three-level classification: offensive speech, moderately dangerous speech, and extremely dangerous speech, drawing on the "dangerous speech" (dangerous speech) framework developed by the researcher Susan Benesch (2012).

Sources: the final report of the Umati initiative (September 2012 – May 2013) issued by iHub Research in Nairobi; Susan Benesch's paper on "Dangerous Speech" (World Policy Institute, 12 January 2012); and the two judgments of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the "Media Case" (3 December 2003; 28 November 2007). (Appendix B: Rwanda, Kenya)

The lesson: independent community monitoring, when built on a publicly declared classification methodology and intensified ahead of moments of high mobilisation, can function as an effective early-warning system — provided that it is independent of both the state and the foreign platform, and linked to a body obliged to respond.

V. Towards a Practical Mechanism — the Independent Hate Speech Observatory

41. Establishing an independent monitoring body with balanced geographical representation across the regions, in the spatial sense defined by the Charter's main text, not by identity-based quotas, along the lines of the local representation mechanism detailed in Chapter One, with a technical team that includes monitors proficient in local dialects and languages.
42. A public, pre-established classification methodology that clearly separates legitimate political criticism from identity-based incitement, with the classification criteria themselves published for public review, so that the monitoring tool does not turn into a disguised instrument of muzzling.
43. Intensifying monitoring specifically during windows of heightened tension: the founding call phase, the phased elections that begin from the local units upwards (Section IV, Part 5), the convening of the Constitutional Conference, and the moments of transition between the stages of the sequencing detailed in Chapter Two.
44. Operational, not coercive, early warning: when monitoring exceeds a defined threshold in a particular geographical local unit (ruqʿa), its local representative council and the body responsible for transitional justice are notified, without granting any central executive body the authority to suppress or block immediately on the basis of the Observatory's report alone.
45. Funding of the Observatory: it is subject to the same cap on external funding (thirty per cent) stipulated in the Charter's main text, in order to safeguard its independence from funders' agendas.
46. The measure of success is not the disappearance of all harsh or offensive speech — an unrealistic goal that collides with legitimate freedom of expression — but the reduction of the time between the emergence of high-risk incitement speech and a declared institutional response that documents it and refers it to an accountability body, rather than leaving it to accumulate in silence, as happened in previous experiences.
Chapter Conclusion: The Word Before the Bullet

The hate speech monitoring gap reminds us that organised violence rarely begins suddenly; it is prepared rhetorically before it materialises on the ground. The six preceding chapters designed the structure of the transitional state, its institutions and its instruments of protection; this chapter addresses the layer that, in most cases, precedes them in time: the moment at which symbolic tension turns into a decision to mobilise. Monitoring it does not substitute for addressing its structural causes, which the previous chapters dealt with through the state of citizenship and spatial representation, but it provides an early-warning window that none of those mechanisms possesses on its own.

Chapter Eight: The Institutional Wall Gap

From constitutional principle to operational mechanism: who guards the neutrality of those who are supposed to guard neutrality؟

I. The Nature of the Gap

The Charter's main text (Section VII: the Institutional Wall) establishes a clear structural principle: a legal and cultural separation between the changing political class and the civil-executive class, which is intended to be stable and neutral, with objective appointment criteria, periods of job protection, and independent review committees. Yet declaring the principle does not by itself create the committees, apply the criteria, or stop those who breach them. The gap here is of the kind that earlier gaps in this Protocol have confronted in different forms: who guards the neutrality of the body that is supposed to guard the neutrality of the civil service؟ For the independent review committee itself is liable, if not carefully designed, to become a new centre of political influence under the cover of technical neutrality.

This differs in subject matter from the gap in the Nafeer's institutional structure (Chapter Four), despite the similarity of its logical structure: that chapter addressed how the Nafeer governs itself from within after its expansion; this chapter addresses how an institution is built outside the Nafeer's structure, whose task is to protect the state's own civil service from the political penetration that recurs with every transition.

II. Critique of Existing Models

The First Model: Wholesale Purges after Every Transition
This is the recurrent pattern in the Sudanese experience: extensive replacement of senior administrative cadres with every political change, on the pretext of "empowerment" (tamkeen) or "dismantling empowerment", depending on the direction of the change. The problem is that this model treats technical competence and political loyalty as one inseparable thing, thereby depriving the state of genuine cumulative expertise with every cycle, and keeping every civil servant hostage to expectations of their role in the next political battle rather than to their actual performance. This does not mean diminishing the legitimacy of holding to account those whose responsibility has been established, but rather distinguishing between individual accountability and collective purging.

The Second Model: Stability through Shielding the Apparatus from Accountability
This is the opposite pattern, and among its regional examples most frequently cited in the literature is the Egyptian case (see, for example, Yezid Sayigh, Owners of the Republic: An Anatomy of Egypt's Military Economy, Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, 2019): shielding the bureaucratic and security apparatus with a degree of autonomy that places it above political change rather than neutral towards it, such that political movement becomes the dependent variable. This model may achieve notable executive stability, but at a price that touches the core of what the Charter seeks: subordinating the elected authority to an apparatus that answers to no one, rather than protecting the apparatus from it.

Both models fall short from opposite directions: the first makes the executive apparatus hostage to every political shift, and the second makes it a substitute for political change itself.

III. An Alternative Framing — Neutrality Conditional on Periodic Review, Not Absolute Immunity

The way out here borrows the very principle of "refusing completion" established by Section I of the Charter: any job immunity declared final and not subject to review turns — by the same logic the Charter warned of regarding the balance of political power — into a new privilege for a closed bureaucratic class, not into genuine neutrality. The alternative: immunity conditional on periodic performance review against publicly declared criteria, neither a political review of loyalty nor perpetual immunity. This applies to "who guards neutrality" the same principle that Chapter Four applied to "who occupies the Nafeer's coordinating positions": the position is earned through verifiable competence, not seniority or loyalty, and remains open to periodic review rather than shielded from it.

IV. From Separating the Two Classes to Preventing Their Monopolisation — the Fourth Pillar as a Guarantee of Distribution

The question of this chapter can be reformulated with greater precision: not only "how do we separate the political from the executive؟" but "how do we build an institution that prevents the monopolisation of both classes together؟" For separation alone, as an abstract line, protects against nothing unless guarantees are built behind it that prevent any party from reassembling the two classes in its own hands through the back door.

It is precisely here that the function of the Fourth Pillar (Section II of the Charter's main text) is situated within the structure of the Institutional Wall: spatial representation, together with what has been added to it — corrective thresholds for gender and youth, the functional integration of trade unions, and the treatment of the diaspora as a geographical extension (Section II, Part 6; and items 6–8 of Chapter One, Part VI) — is not a clause separate from the Wall, but the mechanism that prevents either side of the separation from turning into a barrier between a narrow leadership elite and the rest of the body politic. The Independent Civil Service Commission itself (VI below) is constituted by the same logic of weighted spatial representation, not by narrow central appointment that would reproduce what it was designed in the first place to prevent.

The Charter's main text also applies this logic explicitly to the most sensitive file: a cap of twelve years in total for any military or civil-executive leadership arising from the integration track; a prohibition on combining the leadership of any armed formation with partisan political activity (Section III, Part 4); and the requirement that the office of head of state and command of the armed forces not be held by a single person or a single body, with the supreme command subordinated to a civilian authority accountable before a representative body (Section III, Part 5).

Leadership rotation — through this cap, and through the two-electoral-term principle adopted for the Nafeer's coordinating positions and for the leadership of the Civil Service Commission — and the transparency of funding, which the Charter's main text subjects to public review (Section VIII, Part 4; and Section VI, Part 4), are not procedural details to be added later, but the test that determines whether these representative guarantees are real or merely formal: a body whose leadership is periodically reviewed and whose sources of funding are published is hard to hijack; a body exempt from both may, however representatively balanced it appears at its founding, turn into a new shielded class above accountability — which is exactly what this chapter warned against in III above.

V. Comparative Reference

The nineteenth-century British civil service reforms offer a distant but relevant historical precedent: the Northcote-Trevelyan Report (dated November 1853 and presented to Parliament in February 1854) recommended moving from appointment by patronage to appointment by open competition, and in its wake the Civil Service Commission was established by Order in Council on 21 May 1855; open competition was then extended to most posts by the Order of 4 June 1870. This established the tradition of official neutrality that has persisted through successive governments. The experience closer in geography and context, however, is South Africa's Public Service Commission, provided for by the 1996 Constitution (Chapter 10, Section 196) as an independent body that "must be impartial", overseeing standards of appointment, performance and professional values in the public service.

Sources: the text of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report; the two British Orders in Council (21 May 1855; 4 June 1870) held at the UK National Archives; and the Constitution of South Africa of 1996, Chapter 10, Section 196, subsections (1) and (2). The extent of the South African commission's independence in practice, however, requires a review of its annual reports before it is relied upon. (Appendix B: Britain, South Africa)

The lesson from both experiences: official neutrality is not built through a single declaration of principle, but through a free-standing independent institution that monitors the application of publicly declared criteria over time, and whose task is not left to the goodwill of each successive government.

VI. Towards a Practical Mechanism — the Independent Civil Service Commission

47. Establishing an independent civil service commission, with balanced representation across the regions in the spatial sense defined by the Charter's main text, along the lines of the representation mechanism detailed in Chapter One, not by direct government appointment that would reproduce the political dependency the commission was designed in the first place to prevent.
48. Publicly declared, pre-established appointment criteria for senior executive posts (qualifications, technical expertise, and performance record), published for public review, so as to prevent the criterion of "competence" itself from being turned into cover for disguised political favouritism.
49. Periodic performance review, not loyalty review: every senior executive post is evaluated at least once in each electoral cycle, against measurable criteria of job performance, not against criteria of political proximity to the government in office at the time of the review.
50. A clear distinguishing track with transitional justice: those whose direct political responsibility for the decisions of the former regime has been established are referred to the three-tier transitional justice track (Section V of the Charter), while purely executive professional competence that did not take independent political decisions is preserved, giving effect to the distinction the Charter's main text draws between political responsibility and professional competence. The senior leadership structures of the dissolved National Congress Party are subject to the exception stipulated in the main text, with its procedural guarantees: the right of individual appeal before an independent judicial body, and an automatically expiring time limit to be reviewed after the Truth and Reparations Commission completes its work (Section V, Part 6) — so that the exception does not extend to civil servants generally by virtue of affiliation alone.
51. The measure of success is not the absence of any change in executive cadres at each political transition — for this may produce the shielding model referred to above — but that the rate of change tracks documented performance indicators rather than political calculation alone, such that any independent observer can distinguish between a dismissal on grounds of performance and a dismissal on grounds of loyalty.
Chapter Conclusion: Who Guards the Guardian؟

The Institutional Wall gap reminds us that official neutrality, like the other principles of this Protocol, is not a condition declared once but a relationship managed continuously: the body charged with guarding neutrality itself needs the same periodic review and balanced representation that it imposes on others; otherwise it turns from a guarantee of neutrality into a new shielded class — which is what the principle of "refusing completion" in the Charter's main text seeks to prevent from the outset. The deeper conclusion is that the question is not "whom do we separate from whom؟" but "who prevents both sides together from regrouping in a single hand؟" — and this chapter's answer is that such prevention is not built by a dividing line alone, but by distributed representation that is hard to hijack, and by rotation and transparency that are continuously tested.

Chapter Nine: The Roadmap

From idea to reality within the five-year cap

I. The Common Thread Linking the Eight Gaps

The eight gaps are not a separate list of problems, but a single coherent system in which each gap feeds on the solution to the one before it. The mechanism of "the call as a process, not a declaration" produces local councils with graduated mandates; these councils are the operating instrument of the "synchronised minimum"; and as they expand and specialise they form the Nafeer cells and sectoral teams, which in turn are complete only with their internal constitution, their training academy, and their financially independent digital network. The principle of decentralisation throughout all of this is itself the structural protection against co-optation — and it is the very principle that the Independent Authority for Dismantling the Shadow Economy borrows when it separates the track of weapons from the track of money, that the Independent Hate Speech Observatory borrows when it is built on spatial rather than identity-based representation, and on which the Independent Civil Service Commission rests when it subjects itself to the same periodic review it imposes on others.

In other words: legitimacy, capacity and protection are all built from cumulative, verifiable distribution, not from a concentration declared all at once.

II. The Practical Roadmap

52. The founding step: a grouping that explicitly acknowledges its iftiqār (acknowledged insufficiency — mutual interdependence), its lack of a comprehensive mandate, launches a local call of limited scope, not a comprehensive national call, and contributes, together with the other signatory forces, to naming the slimmed-down caretaker body by cross-regional consensus, without monopolising its naming.
53. The first dual step: in parallel with the ceasefire, the local councils immediately begin documenting violations and protecting witnesses, initial tracing of the most visible economic networks begins, and the authority for the governance of gold and extractive resources begins publishing data, without waiting for any central structure to be completed.
54. The organisational step: the local Nafeer cells and sectoral teams are formed, linked through a rotating coordination council with mandatory rotation, and coordinate voluntarily with the Emergency Response Rooms and grassroots initiatives without absorbing them.
55. The institutional step: each Nafeer unit adopts its internal constitution (rotation, oversight, and financial transparency), and the Nafeer Academy and the Nafeer's unified digital network are launched, with a clear separation between the funding of the mechanism and the funding of the state, and a commitment to the cap on external funding.
56. The simultaneous preventive step: from the very first moment, the rules of structural protection are applied in parallel — diversification of funding, mandatory rotation, verification criteria independent of public statements, support for a unified mediation platform, and independent monitoring of hate speech during windows of tension.
57. The point of maturity: the local and coordinating units expand sufficiently to feed the specialised central structures (the Truth and Reparations Commission, the Major Crimes Chamber, and the Independent Civil Service Commission) with a documented archive, a database, and a network of accumulated mandates, and the mandates ascend to the Constitutional Conference.
III. The Indicative Calendar within the Five-Year Cap

The Charter's main text ties the transitional phase to five declared and measurable benchmarks of achievement: the holding of the ceasefire according to the monitoring mechanism; the completion of registration in the spatial units of representation; the commencement of work of the three tiers of transitional justice; the subjection of sovereign resources to the unified account; and the adoption of the constitutional framework by weighted consensus. It is governed by an absolute cap not exceeding five years from the date on which the transitional authority is formed, which admits no extension on any pretext, with elections beginning from the local units upwards, general elections before the cap expires, and the transfer of whatever remains incomplete to the elected institutions (Section IV, Part 5).

In light of this, the Protocol proposes the following indicative distribution, which is a proposal for discussion subject to the periodic review stipulated in the main text, not a binding timetable:

Phase
Target benchmarks of achievement (the Charter's main text)
Protocol tasks and Nafeer stage
Launch — approximately the first year
Holding of the ceasefire; commencement of work of the local reconciliation councils (the first tier of justice)
The limited call; the caretaker body; documentation and witness protection; initial tracing and freezing; the gold governance authority; the commission for delimiting the local units (ruqʿa) — Nafeer: mobilisation and registration, then rapid training
Building — approximately the second and third years
Completion of registration in the spatial units; work of the three tiers of justice; subjection of sovereign resources to the unified account
Elections for the local units, then the local and regional councils; the first ascending representative body, before which the caretaker body is accountable; the Independent Civil Service Commission; the Independent Observatory; the Authority for Dismantling the Shadow Economy — Nafeer: pilot deployment, then horizontal expansion
Constitutional founding — the fourth and fifth years
Adoption of the constitutional framework by weighted consensus
Convening of the Constitutional Conference through ascending representation; general elections before the end of the fifth year; transfer of whatever remains incomplete to the elected institutions — Nafeer: institutional consolidation


Whatever of these benchmarks is delayed is not taken as grounds for extending the transitional phase, but is transferred, with a declared description, to the elected institutions; and this is precisely the logic of "refusing completion": a transition that does not claim to accomplish everything, and does not grant itself open-ended time in the name of accomplishing it.

IV. The Limits of This Design

This roadmap does not solve everything. It is a design for a path of activation, not a guarantee of its success. Factors remain beyond the scope of any organisational design: the actual military balance of power, the positions of regional and international actors, and the capacity of local communities to sustain voluntary tasks for years, in extremely harsh humanitarian conditions.

Conclusion of the Protocol: From Text to Practice

The difference between the Charter as an intellectual framework and the Charter as an actual path is not a difference in precision or ambition, but a difference in the nature of the test to which each is subjected. This Protocol has not sought to close the eight gaps definitively — for some of them by their nature are not closed but continuously managed — but to transform them from invisible obstacles into clear design points that can be worked on consciously, together with all who share our concern that Sudan should emerge from this ordeal more broadly represented and more fully participatory than it was.

Appendix A: Concordance Table between the Protocol and the Charter's Main Text

Protocol chapter
What it elaborates from the Charter's main text (the Eighth Revision)
Chapter One: The Representation Gap
Section I (Part 1: ascending legitimacy; Part 2: mutual interdependence); Section II (Part 3: weighted consensus and the Constitutional Conference; Parts 5 and 6: place, not lineage, and the rules of corrective balance); Section IV (Part 4: who holds the authority of transition)
Chapter Two: The Sequencing Gap
Section IV (Part 3: the organic link to transitional justice); Section V (Part 3: integration; Part 5: scope); Section VI (Part 3: the gold governance authority)
Chapter Three: The Executive Instrument Gap
Section VIII (Part 2: the three-tier structure and the relationship with the Emergency Response Rooms)
Chapter Four: The Institutional Structure Gap
Section VIII (Part 3: the five stages; Part 4: the funding model); Section VI (Part 4: the cap on external funding)
Chapter Five: The Adversary Gap
Section IV (Part 2: unifying the mediation platforms); Section VI (Part 4: the funding cap and the prohibition on external direction)
Chapter Six: The Shadow Economy Gap
Section III (Part 2: inclusion of all formations and the separation between institutional fate and individual responsibility); Section V (Part 6: procedural guarantees); Section VI (Part 3: mechanisms for dismantling parallel financing)
Chapter Seven: The Hate Speech Monitoring Gap
Section II (place, not lineage); Section IV (Part 5: phased elections); Section VI (Part 4: the funding cap)
Chapter Eight: The Institutional Wall Gap
Section VII in full; Section III (Parts 4 and 5); Section V (Part 6); Section I (Part 4: refusing completion)
Chapter Nine: The Roadmap
Section IV (Parts 4 and 5: the transitional authority and the five-year cap); Section VIII (Part 3: the five stages of implementation)


Appendix B: References and Sources

Methodological note: the bibliographic data and comparative facts cited in this list and in the "Sources" boxes within the text were checked against published sources (official legal texts, United Nations documents, academic publishers, and research centres) in September 2026. No open items awaiting completion remain in this version. Web links are given where they help in accessing the original text, and may change over time.

I. Theoretical References

• Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Halle: Niemeyer, 1927. English: Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row; London: SCM Press, 1962 — especially §§25–27 (Being-with, Mitsein).
• Levinas, Emmanuel. Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l'extériorité. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961. English: Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
• Critchley, Simon. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso, 2007.
• Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. London: Heinemann, 1969, p. 108 (the page varies by edition) — the source of the phrase associated with the philosophy of Ubuntu.
• Horowitz, Donald L. Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
• Horowitz, Donald L. A Democratic South Africa؟ Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
• Rabushka, Alvin and Shepsle, Kenneth A. Politics in Plural Societies: A Theory of Democratic Instability. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill, 1972.
• Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
• Mamdani, Mahmood. Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. New York: Pantheon, 2009.
• Mamdani, Mahmood. Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020.
• Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 — the eight design principles, especially the first (clearly defined boundaries) and the eighth (nested enterprises / multi-level organisation).
• Putnam, Robert D. (with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti). Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
• Deng, Francis M. War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995.
II. Sudanese Sources

• The People's Local Government Act, 1971; and the Unregistered Land Act, 1970 — Official Gazette of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan.
• Rondinelli, Dennis A. "Administrative Decentralisation and Economic Development: The Sudan's Experiment with Devolution." Journal of Modern African Studies 19, no. 4 (1981): 595–624.
• Al-Teraifi, Al-Agab Ahmed (ed.). Decentralization in Sudan. Graduate College Publications No. 20. Khartoum: University of Khartoum, 1987.
• Takana, Yousif. The Politics of Local Boundaries and Conflict in Sudan. CMI Sudan Working Paper 2008:2. Bergen: Chr. Michelsen Institute, 2008.
• Howell, John (ed.). Local Government and Politics in the Sudan. Khartoum: Khartoum University Press, 1974.
• Elhussein, A. M. "The Revival of 'Native Administration' in the Sudan: A Pragmatic View." Public Administration and Development 9, no. 4 (1989).
• de Waal, Alex. Famine That Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984–1985. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989 (revised ed., Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Bakheit, Ja'far Muhammad Ali. British Administration and Sudanese Nationalism, 1919–1939 (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge; published in Arabic translation) — background to his position on Native Administration.
• Sudanese resistance committees: "the Revolutionary Charter for People's Power" and "the Charter for Establishing People's Authority" (February 2022); see: Muzan Alneel, "Charters of Sudan's political landscape", The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP), 13 July 2022.
• Sudan Tribune (Arabic edition). "Sudan Tribune investigation penetrates the 'cartel' of armed levies on roads and crossings." 29 July 2026 — sudantribune.net/article/316793.
• Sudan Tribune. "Armed Checkpoints Extort Millions From Sudanese Truckers." 29 July 2026 — sudantribune.com/article/316771.
• Taha, Ali Abdullahi Elkhalifa. "The Gateway Economy: When Armed Levies Turn from a Symptom of War into a Substitute for the State." Article accompanying the Activation Protocol, 2026.
III. Sources for the Comparative Experiences

Yemen
• Gaston, Erica. Process Lessons Learned in Yemen's National Dialogue. USIP Special Report No. 342. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, February 2014
• Hassan, Ali Saif. "Yemen – National Dialogue Conference: Managing Peaceful Change؟" Accord 25. London: Conciliation Resources, 2014
• Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, "The Outcomes of the Yemeni National Dialogue Conference", Situation Assessment, February 2014
• Outcomes Document of the Comprehensive National Dialogue Conference (January 2014).
Tunisia
• Organic Law No. 2013-53 of 24 December 2013 on Establishing and Organising Transitional Justice (the Official Gazette (JORT), No. 105)
• Organic Law No. 2017-62 of 24 October 2017 on Reconciliation in the Administrative Sphere (the Official Gazette (JORT), No. 85)
• Truth and Dignity Commission, Comprehensive Final Report (announced on 26 March 2019, and published in the Official Gazette (JORT) in June 2020)
• Human Rights Watch, "Tunisia: Truth Commission Outlines Decades of Abuse," 5 April 2019
• ICTJ, Tunisia in Transition: One Year After the Creation of the Truth and Dignity Commission (2015)
• ICTJ, The Truth About Corruption (briefing).
The International Criminal Court and Darfur
• UN Security Council Resolution S/RES/1593 (31 March 2005).
Resource Governance
• The EITI Standard. Oslo: Extractive Industries Transparency International — eiti.org.
The Zapatistas
• EZLN, "Chiapas: la treceava estela — Sexta parte: Un buen gobierno" (July 2003)
• Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés, "Cuarta Parte y Primera Alerta de Aproximación" (5 November 2023)
• Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés, "Novena Parte: La Nueva Estructura de la Autonomía Zapatista" (12 November 2023) — enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx
• Mandujano, Isaín. "EZLN desaparece Juntas de Buen Gobierno y Municipios Autónomos." Proceso, 5 November 2023.
Brazil
• Keck, Margaret E. The Workers' Party and Democratization in Brazil. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992
• Hunter, Wendy. The Transformation of the Workers' Party in Brazil, 1989–2009. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010
• Pomar, Valter and Fontes, Paulo. "Instituto Cajamar." Lugares de Memória dos Trabalhadores #68, LEHMT/UFRJ.
Chile
• Siavelis, Peter M. The President and Congress in Postauthoritarian Chile: Institutional Constraints to Democratic Consolidation. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000
• Garretón, Manuel Antonio. Incomplete Democracy: Political Democratization in Chile and Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003
• Ley 20.050 (2005) and Ley 20.840 (2015), Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile (bcn.cl).
Poland
• Garton Ash, Timothy. The Polish Revolution: Solidarity 1980–82. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983 (3rd ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
Colombia
• UN Security Council Resolution S/RES/2366 (10 July 2017), and the Secretary-General's periodic reports on the UN Verification Mission in Colombia
• International Crisis Group. Colombia's Armed Groups Battle for the Spoils of Peace. Latin America Report No. 63, 19 October 2017
• International Crisis Group. "Tackling Colombia's Next Generation in Arms." Commentary, 27 January 2022.
Rwanda
• ICTR, Prosecutor v. Nahimana, Barayagwiza and Ngeze, Case No. ICTR-99-52 (Trial Judgment, 3 December 2003; Appeals Judgment, 28 November 2007)
• Dallaire, Roméo. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003
• Des Forges, Alison. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999.
Kenya
• Awori, Kagonya. Umati Final Report: September 2012 – May 2013. Nairobi: iHub Research, 2013
• Benesch, Susan. "Dangerous Speech: A Proposal to Prevent Group Violence." World Policy Institute, 12 January 2012.
Egypt
• Sayigh, Yezid. Owners of the Republic: An Anatomy of Egypt's Military Economy. Beirut: Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, 2019.
Britain
• Northcote, Stafford and Trevelyan, Charles. Report on the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service. London: HMSO, 1854 (dated 23 November 1853)
• Orders in Council of 21 May 1855 and 4 June 1870 (The National Archives, UK).
South Africa
• Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, Chapter 10, Section 196.