Charter of Salvation and State-Building Discussion Draft: Toward Rebuilding Sudan Eighth Revision

03:14 AM September, 29 2026

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


Charter of Salvation and State-Building

Discussion Draft: Toward Rebuilding Sudan

Eighth Revision, September 2026 — Prepared for Review and Development

Dr. Ali Abdullahi Elkhalifa Taha

Introduction

In a corner of this homeland, there once stood a Lego model, built with rare patience and effort spanning long years; one hand placed a piece, another fixed a corner, until the structure stood complete — a masterpiece carrying in its details the memory of everyone who contributed to it. But anyone who had been near the box of pieces in those days knew something no one paid attention to: that many pieces were never used at all in that first structure — pieces set aside, either because they did not fit the design the first builders had chosen, or because no one had noticed them at all, or because they arrived late, after the model’s shape had already been settled. As the years passed, these neglected pieces accumulated in a forgotten corner — neither destroyed nor used, but simply waiting, without anyone knowing that their day would come.

Then, in a moment of carelessness — or perhaps a moment of deliberate intent the eye could not mistake — a small child came along. He did not mean harm so much as he was captive to a passing impulse, and in a matter of seconds he tore the whole model down. The old pieces scattered and mixed with the accumulated neglected ones, and to anyone watching from afar it seemed that years of building had gone up in smoke. But whoever examined the scene closely saw something entirely different from what first appeared: that the real loss was not in the pieces themselves, but in the opportunity — lost from the very beginning — to use everything that had actually been available.

Here, a circle of serious amateurs gathered — not professional experts alone, but amateurs supported by the experience and design knowledge of those who came before them — around all those pieces: the old ones with which the first model had been built, and the neglected ones that had never been used at all. The great paradox is not that this team rebuilt what had existed before, but that it refused to settle for that: it built a newer model, wider and more complete than the first, because this time it left not a single piece aside. The wager was not on speed, but on completeness — to be able to say that we did it and made use of every possibility available, rather than merely repeating the same shape with the same pieces used before.

This is exactly Sudan’s condition today. The state that was demolished in this war was not a fragile structure improvised without foundation; it was, despite all its flaws, the product of decades of social, institutional, and cultural accumulation — a fabric woven by successive generations of administrators, teachers, farmers, people of the Sufi orders, and people of mutual solidarity in neighborhoods and villages. Those who tore apart this fabric did so recklessly, thinking that destruction meant annihilation. But the truth this Charter insists upon is that the blueprints are still preserved — in collective memory, in the customs of solidarity, and in every prior Sudanese experience of transitional justice and communal reconciliation — and that the pieces, old and neglected alike, were not lost; there remain, at the margins and at the center, in the homeland and in the diaspora, those who carry the competence and the will to rebuild, and those whose voice was left neglected and never summoned before.

The Great National Nafir (al-Nafir al-Watani al-Kabir) is nothing but that team of “serious amateurs”: not a repetition of the elite that built the state the first time, but a new popular vehicle possessing enough seriousness to compensate for a lack of formal institutional experience, supported by — and not dismissive of — the experience of those who came before. From here comes this Charter’s central wager: that rebuilding Sudan will not be a cloning of the state that once was, but an investment of everything that was neglected and never invested — energies, competencies, and resources — across decades, so that the new structure is broader in representation and more complete in participation than its predecessor, not because the task is easier, but because what is required today is to summon every piece that was available and never used before.

Part One: The Preserved Blueprints — The Charter’s Conceptual Framework

When a structure collapses, many rush to gather the scattered stones before asking: on what design are we rebuilding؟ This is exactly the mistake into which most Sudanese political initiatives have fallen since the war broke out: preoccupation with arranging alliances and positions before agreeing on the blueprint upon which the homeland is to be rebuilt. The Charter of Salvation and State-Building does not present itself as a substitute for these alliances, but presents itself as the blueprint that must precede them — a condition for their validity.

In presenting this blueprint, the Charter does not proceed from the dichotomy of reform versus founding as an exclusive choice. The decisive difference in building states emerging from deep conflict is not between a document that calls itself “reformist” and another that calls itself “foundational,” but between a project that translates its principles into named, activatable, and accountable institutional mechanisms, and a project that contents itself with declaring a rupture or a continuity of reform without specifying how the alternative institutions are to be built in practice. Accordingly, this Charter presents itself as a third path: an actual refounding of the Sudanese political contract — not through a discourse of total rupture, nor through patching up the inherited state, but through specific mechanisms that redistribute power, wealth, and recognition from their foundations.

First: Ascending Functional Legitimacy from the Periphery to the Center
The Charter’s first conceptual entry point is an inversion of the very direction of legitimacy. The traditional Sudanese model — since independence to this day — has rested on descending legitimacy: a center that produces decisions, representation, and resources, then distributes them to the periphery according to whatever the balance of power allows at that moment. This model, whatever its civilian or military façade, is what produced the recurring cycle of marginalization, rebellion, and coup over seventy years. The Charter proposes reversing this direction: a functional legitimacy that ascends from the periphery to the center, meaning that the center does not derive its legitimacy from monopolizing decision-making, but from its capacity to represent and channel the functional consensus produced by the periphery around issues of security, justice, and resources. This is not a generic decentralization slogan; it is the entry point upon which the Fourth Pillar (regional representation and weighted consensus) is later built as an institutional mechanism to activate it.

Second: Mutual Interdependence — From Philosophical Principle to the Tradition of the Nafir
The second conceptual entry point runs deeper than being a mere institutional mechanism; it is a structural condition for the validity of any political transformation. The political subject — whether an individual, a group, or a state — is not formed by being self-sufficient, but by acknowledging a demand that exceeds its capacity to fulfill alone: no party in the Sudanese equation is capable of resolving the crisis by itself, and no component possesses enough legitimacy, resources, or expertise to dispense with the others. This mutual interdependence (iftiqar) is neither a weakness to be concealed nor a deficiency to be ashamed of; it is the very condition upon which any genuine collective political action is formed: the army lacks the popular legitimacy that force alone cannot secure; civilians lack the executive and field capacity that representative legitimacy alone cannot supply; and every region lacks what other regions possess in resources, expertise, or institutional depth.

Yet this mutual interdependence becomes liberating only under two conditions: that the stronger party’s acknowledgment of its need for the weaker begins before the weaker is asked to acknowledge its need for the stronger, not the reverse; and that this acknowledgment be translated into real institutional effect — in representation, resources, and power — rather than into a discourse that exhausts itself in speech without action. To the extent that this principle is safeguarded from becoming a tool to justify existing inequality or to silence legitimate demands under the pretext that “everyone needs everyone,” it remains a liberating principle rather than a new instrument of coercion.

This mutual interdependence has a living, deeply rooted embodiment in Sudanese social heritage itself, requiring no import from outside the popular conscience: the tradition of the nafir, known to Sudanese villages and neighborhoods across successive generations, whereby an individual or family calls on neighbors to harvest the crop, build a dwelling, or face an urgent crisis, and those called respond without waiting for immediate reciprocity, on the basis that their turn will come when they in turn need a similar nafir. The nafir here is not an occasional act of charity from a capable party toward a helpless one, but a practical, mutual acknowledgment that no one alone possesses everything needed to accomplish their task, and that answering the call is obligatory, not optional, because the roles rotate over time and are not fixed to any one party.

On this basis, the Charter borrows the name “the Great National Nafir” not as a passing linguistic metaphor, but as a direct evocation of this actually existing social structure: just as the local nafir summons neighbors when a single household cannot harvest its land alone, the national nafir summons all the neglected and excluded energies when any single elite is unable, on its own, to rebuild the state. The essential difference is that the call here must be directed first to those who hold power and resources, not only to those who hold need and readiness — fulfilling the condition established above: that acknowledgment of mutual interdependence must begin with the stronger party before it is asked of the weaker.

It is worth noting here a necessary methodological reservation: it is not permissible to merely invoke the tradition of the nafir rhetorically or symbolically without translating it into binding constitutional mechanisms — such as those detailed in the “Rejecting Completeness” commitment below — lest this very cultural invocation turn into a new cover for justifying inaction or softening demands for distributive justice, exactly as any discourse of interconnectedness and solidarity can be used to silence demands rather than meet them.

Third: The Civil State and the Relationship Between Religion and State — Transcending the Fatal Dichotomy
Among the founding errors that have accompanied the Sudanese state since independence is that the conflict over its identity has been managed through a sharp dichotomy: either a religious state that excludes those who do not share its doctrinal reference, or a secular state that excludes religion from public space as though it were a threat to modernity. This dichotomy is not a neutral description of available options; it is itself what fueled the longest civil wars on the African continent, produced the secession of the South, and kept regions such as the Nuba Mountains and South Kordofan in a state of perpetual alert. The Charter refuses to enter this dichotomy through its polarizing door, and instead proposes the concept of the “civil state” as a procedural, not doctrinal, formula: a state whose institutions are managed with neutrality toward all religious and sectarian references, without this neutrality implying hostility to religion in public space or a denial of its place in the popular conscience. Institutional neutrality is one thing, and the negation of religion from public life is something else entirely; conflating the two is what has prolonged the polarization.

This entry point connects directly to the principle of mutual interdependence established above: just as no political party possesses the complete solution on its own, likewise no party — religious or secular — possesses the final, binding interpretation of the relationship between religion and state on behalf of all Sudanese. Acknowledging this shared interdependence, rather than claiming absolute certainty from any single side, is what opens the door to a consensual formula, rather than imposing a single vision by force of numerical majority or force of arms. In application of this principle, the resolution of sensitive details (personal-status law, legislation with a religious reference, protection of religious and sectarian pluralism in regions such as the Nuba Mountains and South Kordofan) is referred to the very mechanism of weighted consensus within the Fourth Pillar, not to a unilateral central decision — so that a single formula is not imposed upon genuine Sudanese diversity, but this sensitivity is instead managed through genuine representation of the parties directly affected by it. All of these questions are ultimately settled within the constitutional conference, under the weighted-consensus decision rule set out in Part Two.

Fourth: Rejecting Completeness as a Constitutional Guarantee
If the three preceding entry points established the foundation of interdependence among the components of state and society, this fourth entry point places a necessary logical safeguard so that this interdependence remains just rather than turning into a new form of power. Any founding principle, however sound it appeared at the moment of its adoption, loses its just character if it turns into a fixed arrangement immune to question: a principle that governs without remaining accountable to those it governs inevitably turns, by an unavoidable logic, from an instrument of fairness into a new instrument of domination disguised in the very language of justice that founded it.

Three integrated procedural commitments follow from this principle:

◆ No balance in representation or distribution of power is considered final or permanently acquired; it is subject to binding periodic review, so as to prevent any institutional arrangement — however just it may seem at the moment of its adoption — from turning into a fixed privilege for one party over another.
◆ Apparent consensus is not taken as an end in itself, nor as proof that justice has been achieved; consensus may conceal the silencing of those without a voice more than it reflects fairness toward them. Accordingly, permanent constitutional channels are preserved that allow any group or region that finds itself insufficiently represented in an existing arrangement to demand its review, without this being considered a breach of stability or a departure from the spirit of the Charter.
◆ Every official discourse issued by state institutions is bound to explicitly acknowledge the limits of its achievements and the persistently incomplete fulfillment of its commitments, and must refrain from describing any stage of state-building as a final completion or a total accomplishment; for the claim of completeness is itself a sign of institutional deviation requiring review, not celebration.
This entry point connects directly to the concepts of ascending legitimacy and mutual interdependence established above, and immunizes them against a potential reversal against themselves: ascending legitimacy from the periphery loses its meaning if it freezes at a particular distribution of power, and the acknowledgment of mutual interdependence — like the call of the nafir, which is not answered once and then forgotten — loses its effect if it turns into a one-time declaration rather than a permanent stance renewed at every stage of state-building. In other words: mutual interdependence that does not remain continuously open to its own review is not genuine interdependence, but a temporary pretense of humility that soon hardens into a new certainty.

Part Two: The Fourth Pillar — Regional Representation and Weighted Consensus

If Part One established the principle — that legitimacy ascends from the periphery rather than descending from the center — this part answers the harder question: how is this principle translated into an applicable institutional mechanism, rather than merely a dreamy slogan repeated in every Sudanese document without effect؟

First: Why Pillar and Not Clause؟
The Charter deliberately names this element a “pillar”, not merely a paragraph or clause in the distribution of power — because it places it on equal footing with three other pillars: transitional justice, financial sovereignty, and the restructuring of the military landscape. Regional representation, in this conception, is not a detail left to later negotiations among elites, but a fourth structural condition without which no genuine democratic transformation can be complete, on par with the other three.

Second: A Critique of Hamouda’s Confederal Proposal
Several proposals have been raised in Sudanese debate to address the imbalance in representation, most notably the confederal proposal put forward by Hamouda ⟦To be completed: full name of the proposal’s author, its title, venue and date of publication⟧. The importance of critiquing this proposal here does not lie in rejecting it in principle — it shares with the Charter the same diagnosis of the problem: excessive centralization that produced structural marginalization — but in demonstrating that the confederal solution treats the symptom, not the root:

◆ Confederalism fragments sovereignty itself among semi-independent units, whereas what is required is redistributing the mechanism of decision-making within a single, sovereignty-unified state.
◆ In the context of a war built on actual divisions on the ground (as is Sudan’s case today), any confederal structure risks turning the current military lines of contact into semi-permanent borders between units.
◆ Confederalism implicitly assumes political parity among the parties, which often conceals actual imbalances of power (military and financial), thereby reproducing domination but with a decentralized façade.
The Fourth Pillar proposes an alternative: not dividing sovereignty, but re-engineering how it is exercised.

Third: The Mechanism of Weighted Consensus
The essence of the Fourth Pillar is a weighted voting and representation mechanism that combines two simultaneous criteria, not a single one:

◆ Numerical representation (the region’s population density)
◆ Compensatory representation (the degree of historical marginalization and underdevelopment the region has suffered)
This mechanism is applied to fateful decisions (the constitution, resources, national security) through a weighted quorum that prevents any bloc — however large its population or however great its central influence — from imposing a unilateral decision without genuine, cross-regional consensus. This is the direct institutional application of the principle of ascending legitimacy established in Part One: here the center does not decide alone, but ratifies a consensus that has actually formed from the periphery.

A necessary clarification: “region” in this mechanism refers to a geographically and administratively defined unit with fixed boundaries, not an identity-based or ethnic entity. The compensatory criterion above is measured by objective developmental indicators of the place itself — per capita share of services and public investment, and historically documented decades of administrative marginalization — not by the demographic composition of its inhabitants. This distinction is not merely formal: tying compensation to a group rather than to a place turns belonging into a political resource that gives elites a permanent incentive to inflate communal boundaries rather than bridge them — precisely what this Charter seeks to dismantle, not reproduce in a new compensatory language.

Nor does the Charter present weighted consensus as a substitute for the constitutional conference on which most Sudanese forces agree; it presents it as the decision rule within that conference. The conference is constituted through ascending, place-based representation, and its fateful questions — the form of the state and the system of government, the relationship between religion and state, the distribution of resources, and national security — are decided by the weighted quorum that prevents any bloc from imposing its will alone. The question of what must be settled before the conference and what is left to it thus becomes a procedural question answered by the decision rule, rather than an arena for extracting preconditions.

Fourth: The Reserve Clause on the Right to Self-Determination
The Charter recognizes the right to self-determination as a final reserve constitutional guarantee, not as an immediate activation mechanism nor a call for secession. This right is activated exclusively in the case of a documented, repeated failure by the state to fulfill its constitutional commitments to equality among regions as defined by this pillar, and after all review and correction mechanisms available through the weighted-consensus mechanism and the institutions of transitional justice have been exhausted. The purpose of this clause is to deter any return to inherited centralization, not to stimulate or encourage division.

Activation of this right is not tied to disagreement over the relationship between religion and state, which is managed through weighted consensus as set out in Part One; the sole trigger is a documented failure to uphold equality among regions. This reassures those who fear that a single definition of the state will be imposed on them, and equally those who fear that a dispute over a constitutional term could become a gateway to partition.

Perhaps the image that best embodies this pillar is not the Lego model alone, but a parallel image from Sudanese popular heritage: the water jar (zir) placed at the roadside, from which the drinker is not asked about his lineage, but only about being here, now, in this place; and the image of the stone arch, in which no single stone stands on its own, but is held in place by the one pressing against it. Just as the neglected Lego pieces are not complete except by summoning all of them, the arch does not stand except by every stone bearing what is next to it — and this is precisely the meaning of iftiqar (mutual interdependence) upon which this pillar is built: a legitimacy built from place, not lineage, and from mutual dependence, not from monopoly.

Fifth: Why Place, Not Lineage؟ Supporting Academic Reference
Choosing place — actual residence within a bounded region — rather than lineage or identity as the basis for representation is not merely a literary image drawn from popular heritage; it rests on an independent academic literature that supports it from several angles. Tying representation to group identity rather than place gives elites a permanent incentive to inflate communal boundaries rather than bridge them (Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 1985; Horowitz, A Democratic South Africa؟, 1991); re-founding local authority on the basis of residence rather than clan is precisely the conclusion Mahmood Mamdani reaches in his critique of the colonial legacy of indirect rule (Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 1996); and clarity of a geographic unit’s boundaries is a first condition for any successful participatory governance, as Elinor Ostrom shows in her analysis of commons governance (Ostrom, Governing the Commons, 1990). The success of this institutional design on the ground, in turn, depends on a parallel shift in political culture acquired gradually from the narrowest sphere outward to the widest (Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 1993), especially since Sudan’s state crisis carries at its core a clash of identity definitions prior to any dispute over power (Deng, War of Visions, 1995). The full operational detail of this geographic mechanism — the basic unit, selecting the representative, escalation, and the three guarantees — is set out in Chapter One of the Activation Protocol accompanying this Charter.

Sixth: Corrective Balance Rules — Gender, Youth, Unions, and the Diaspora Within the Spatial Structure, Not Outside It
Extending the Fourth Pillar’s horizon to include genuine presence for women, youth, professional unions, and the Sudanese diaspora raises a decisive question: how is this presence achieved without sliding into the pre-set identity-quota logic this Charter explicitly rejects in the Third point above؟ The Yemeni National Dialogue Conference (2013-2014) offers a precise cautionary lesson: allocating fixed percentages (for the South, for youth, for women) before the cumulative representation process began produced token representation, in which urban elites selected figures to “represent” the targeted groups without genuine delegation from them.

The Charter avoids this trap by keeping the base electoral act itself — each plot choosing its representative by name — entirely free of any prior condition on the candidate’s identity. Group presence is instead achieved through three corrective mechanisms that operate at the points of escalation, not at the point of the initial vote:

◆ Corrective thresholds at escalation: when representatives of adjacent plots elect from among themselves who ascends to the regional and then national level, no single gender’s share of ascending seats in any escalation round may fall below a declared minimum, and representation of those under a specified age may not fall below a similarly minimum share. This is a corrective threshold that intervenes only if the free cumulative process produces a severe imbalance, not a preset quota that overrides free choice at the base. The full numerical and operational detail of these thresholds is set out in Chapter One of the Activation Protocol.
◆ Union representation as a functional advisory seat: professional and labor unions are integrated within the Great National Nafir’s sectoral teams (Part Eight below) in an advisory capacity with a voice on committees relevant to their files, not as a separate national electoral bloc competing with spatial representation.
◆ The diaspora as a geographic extension, not a separate category: Sudanese abroad are organized on the same “plot” logic — clusters based on their actual place of residence in each host country or city — electing and escalating their representatives through the same mechanism and rules, so that the diaspora is treated as an additional region measured by place, not an identity category measured by percentage.
The measure of success here is not completing this balance from the first electoral cycle, but the existence of a declared, periodically reviewable threshold mechanism that prevents representation from freezing at an existing imbalance, without itself hardening into a fixed quota that reproduces the Yemeni trap in new Sudanese language.

Part Three: Restructuring the Military Landscape

There is no meaning to any talk of legitimacy ascending from the periphery, or weighted consensus among regions, so long as actual power on the ground remains in the hands of multiple armed bodies that are not subject to this political equation at all. The military landscape is not a technical pillar to be managed after political consensus is reached; it is the material condition without which any consensus remains theoretical, suspended in mid-air.

First: The Governing Principle — Subordinating Armed Force to Civilian Authority
This principle is not a negotiable detail that can be gradually phased in indefinitely; it is the real test by which the seriousness of any transitional project is measured. Repeated Sudanese experience since independence shows that every constitutional project, however advanced it appeared on paper, collapsed when the fundamental question was left unresolved: who holds the decision over war and peace, the military budget, and senior appointments؟ This Charter’s answer is clear: an elected civilian authority or a legitimate transitional one — not a military institution parallel to, or above, the state.

Second: Addressing the Multiplicity of Armed Bodies
Sudan today faces a reality far more complex than the traditional dichotomy of “army versus civilian authority”: there is the army, the Rapid Support Forces, armed movements that signed earlier peace agreements, and others that did not sign or broke away from their understandings. Any vision for restructuring the military landscape that ignores this multiplicity and treats it as merely two opposing blocs will produce a fragile solution that quickly unravels. The Charter proposes addressing this file through three simultaneous, not sequential, tracks:

◆ The integration track: for qualified elements into a unified national army, according to professional, not political, criteria.
◆ The demobilization track: for those who do not meet integration criteria, coupled with genuine, not cosmetic, economic reintegration programs.
◆ The institutional restructuring track: to formulate a new national military doctrine and unified command and funding channels, ending the phenomenon of “parallel armies” under their various names.
These three tracks apply to all formations without exception: the Sudanese Armed Forces themselves, insofar as restructuring concerns them; the Rapid Support Forces; the signatory and non-signatory movements; and the brigades and formations that emerged or expanded in the course of the war alongside either side. The Charter separates two matters that must not be conflated: the institutional fate of a formation, decided by professional integration and demobilization criteria, and the criminal responsibility of its members, decided before the tiers of transitional justice in Part Five. Integration confers no immunity, and demobilization imputes to no one a guilt not individually proven.

Third: Linkage to the Structure of the Fourth Pillar
The greatest danger in any integration or demobilization process is that it be managed centrally, in isolation from the affected regions, thereby turning from a solution into a reproduction of marginalization with new tools (who is integrated, where they are deployed, at what ranks). The Charter therefore links this file directly to the weighted-consensus mechanism established in the Fourth Pillar: decisions on integration, demobilization, and the distribution of senior commands must pass through the same quorum that prevents the center from monopolizing them, so that history does not repeat itself with the state’s legitimate armed force monopolized by a particular regional or central elite.

Fourth: A Term Limit on Leadership and the Separation of Arms from Politics
In application of the principle of the institutional firewall (Part Seven below), no leadership — military or civilian-executive, including any arising from the integration track above — may remain in its position for more than twelve years in total, whether continuous or cumulative. Nor may leadership of any armed formation, regular or irregular, be combined with holding a partisan political position at the same time: whoever chooses to remain within the restructured military hierarchy is barred from direct party activity, and whoever chooses political work moves entirely outside the military chain of command. This is not a routine administrative measure, but the direct application of the principle separating the political class from the executive class to the most sensitive file of all: who holds the weapons.

Fifth: Separating Command of the Army from the Headship of State
The Charter does not prejudge the choice between a parliamentary, presidential, or mixed system; it leaves that choice to the constitutional conference under the weighted-consensus rule. It does, however, set two minimum conditions binding on whatever system is chosen: the headship of state and command of the armed forces shall not be combined in a single person or body, and supreme command of the armed forces shall rest with a civilian authority accountable to a representative body. Sudanese experience shows that the dispute has never been about the name of the system so much as about where the gun sits within it.

Part Four: Imposing Peace and Stopping the War

All the pillars discussed so far — ascending legitimacy, weighted consensus, restructuring the military landscape — remain ink on paper unless the machinery of war actually stops turning. This part does not speak of “peace” as a distant final goal, but as the first practical step necessary to begin any other track.

First: Ceasefire as an Entry Point, Not an End Goal
Among the recurring errors in Sudanese peace initiatives is treating a ceasefire as a final achievement to be celebrated, when in reality it is merely the minimum possible condition — a starting point and nothing more. The Charter sets a clear minimum for what any ceasefire agreement must include to be buildable upon:

◆ A comprehensive ceasefire, unconditioned by any party’s immediate field gains.
◆ Immediate and unrestricted opening of humanitarian corridors, without tying them to the political negotiation track.
◆ A clear timeline for the transition from “ceasefire” to “the start of transitional justice,” rather than leaving the gap between them open indefinitely — a gap that armed parties have historically exploited to reposition militarily instead of genuinely transitioning.
Second: Monitoring and Guarantee Mechanisms Without Infringing on Sovereignty
A ceasefire without a credible monitoring mechanism is merely a tactical truce between two parties each waiting for the moment to pounce. The Charter therefore proposes:

◆ A joint (regional–international–national) monitoring mechanism to oversee compliance with the terms, without turning into a guardianship over Sudanese decision-making.
◆ Regional guarantees (the African Union and IGAD, as the geographically and politically closest bodies) and international guarantees (the Security Council) to prevent a repeat of the collapse of previous agreements without holding the violating party accountable.
◆ A clear distinction between “guarantee,” which binds the parties, and “guardianship,” which confiscates sovereign decision-making — this dividing line is precisely what grants international guarantees their popular legitimacy rather than being accused of interference.
◆ Support for consolidating the multiple mediation platforms into a single coordinated mechanism, since competition among platforms allows armed parties to move between them in search of the most favorable terms, and weakens the guarantors’ ability to hold the violating party to account.
Third: Organic Linkage to Transitional Justice
The gravest error the Charter warns against is treating the end of the war and transitional justice as two sequential tracks (first we stop the war, then later we think about justice), since this formal sequencing opens the door to postponing accountability indefinitely under the pretext of “not disturbing the atmosphere of peace.” The Charter insists that transitional justice mechanisms (particularly documenting violations and protecting witnesses) begin in parallel with the ceasefire immediately, not after a delay — so that evidence and the living memory of victims are not lost in the time gap between the two agreements.

Fourth: Who Holds Transitional Authority؟
This question is not posed here in search of victors and vanquished, but in search of a source of legitimacy that all can accept precisely because no one holds it alone. The Charter proposes that the transitional authority derive its legitimacy from three conditions taken together: that it be constituted through ascending representation from the regions in accordance with the logic of the Fourth Pillar, not by appointment from an armed party nor by apportionment among the elites of the center; that the role of the military parties within it be confined to the ceasefire, security arrangements, and the integration and demobilization tracks, without authority over political or legislative decision-making; and that it remain subject to the principle of rejecting completeness, so that neither its composition is final nor its mandate open-ended. Until ascending representation is complete, day-to-day business is conducted by a small transitional body of non-partisan competent figures, named by cross-regional consensus among the civilian and societal forces that endorse this Charter, and accountable to the first ascending representative body once it is formed.

Fifth: A Transition Measured by Achievement, Within a Five-Year Ceiling
The Charter does not regard a number of months, on its own, as a sufficient guarantee: previous transitional periods were extended or shortened according to the balance of power, not according to what had been achieved. It therefore proposes linking the transitional period to declared, measurable benchmarks, including: a stable ceasefire verified by the monitoring mechanism; completion of registration in the place-based representation units; the start of work in all three tiers of transitional justice; placing sovereign resources under the unified account; and adoption of the constitutional framework through weighted consensus. Each benchmark carries an indicative timeframe subject to periodic review. Elections are held in stages, beginning with local units and ascending, so that electoral legitimacy is restored gradually from below rather than deferred wholesale to the end of the transition.

All of this is bound by an absolute ceiling: the transitional period, in its entirety, shall not exceed five years from the date the transitional authority is constituted, and this ceiling shall not be extended under any pretext. General elections are held before the ceiling expires, and whatever benchmarks remain unmet are transferred to the elected institutions rather than used as grounds to prolong the transition. This is the very logic of rejecting completeness: a transition that does not claim to finish everything, and that does not, in return, grant itself open-ended time in the name of finishing it.

Part Five: The Three-Tier Structure of Transitional Justice

If Part Four required that transitional justice mechanisms begin in parallel with the ceasefire, this part answers the following question: what institutional structure can bear this enormous file of violations without falling into either of the two opposing traps that previous Sudanese experiences have fallen into — either a formal justice that issues statements without effect, or a vengeful justice that feeds a new cycle of violence؟ The Charter proposes a three-tier structure, not a single central institution, because the scale and geographic diversity of the violations make any single-tier solution either far too slow or far too shallow.

First: Local Reconciliation Councils
This is the tier closest to the people and the fastest to activate, dealing with violations of a directly communal nature (land disputes, local assaults, forced displacement at the village or neighborhood level). These councils draw on traditional Sudanese mechanisms of solidarity and communal reconciliation, but operate within a unified national legal framework that prevents them from turning into a “parallel justice” that reproduces the influence of local strongmen at the expense of the weakest victims.

Second: The Truth and Reparations Commission
This national-level tier is responsible for documenting the comprehensive historical narrative of violations and determining mechanisms for material and moral reparation for victims. Here the Charter benefits from a deliberate comparison of two divergent experiences:

◆ South Africa: the “truth for conditional amnesty” model, which succeeded in uncovering the truth but was criticized for the weakness of actual reparations to victims.
◆ Colombia: a more recent model linking truth to restricted restorative justice and clearer material reparations, despite its ongoing implementation difficulties.
The Charter does not adopt either model wholesale, but proposes a Sudanese commission that takes from South Africa its mechanism of public truth-disclosure, and from Colombia its insistence on tangible, not merely symbolic, material reparation.

Third: The Major Crimes Chamber
This is the strict judicial tier, reserved exclusively for grave violations (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity) that must not be subject to communal reconciliation or even to the logic of “truth for amnesty.” Here the Charter draws on the experiences of Sierra Leone and Tunisia:

◆ Sierra Leone: the Special Court that tried senior officials without flooding the judicial system with thousands of minor cases, by focusing prosecution on “those who bear the greatest responsibility.”
◆ Tunisia: the “Truth and Dignity Commission” experience, which, despite its later political derailment, revealed the risks of the absence of genuine political will behind good legal frameworks — a direct warning to Sudan against settling for institutional structure without ensuring its actual independence from any later political settlements.
On jurisdiction, the Charter adopts the principle of complementarity: the Major Crimes Chamber is the primary forum for grave violations wherever it meets the conditions of independence and competence, and it may be constituted as a hybrid chamber including international judges and experts. Establishing this chamber shall not serve as a pretext for evading existing obligations toward the International Criminal Court in matters referred to it by the UN Security Council; rather, it coordinates with the Court as those obligations require, so that disagreement over the judicial forum does not become a back door to impunity.

Fourth: Why Three Tiers, Not One؟
The structural logic here is to avoid flooding the major courts with simple local cases (as happened in Sierra Leone before the course was corrected), while at the same time not leaving grave crimes to the logic of communal reconciliation, which could produce impunity under the pretext of “communal forgiveness.” Each tier feeds the others with information without encroaching on their jurisdiction.

Fifth: The Scope of Transitional Justice and Pre-War Historical Grievances
The three-tier structure above (local reconciliation councils, the Truth and Reparations Commission, and the Major Crimes Chamber) is limited to violations connected to the current war and the documented cycles of armed conflict immediately preceding it. Addressing historical grievances extending back to before independence, and the patterns of internal colonialism in the distribution of power, wealth, and knowledge that followed it, is referred to a separate political track for a comprehensive historical review, to be designed later in consultation with representatives of the affected regions, and its completion is not a condition for the activation of this Charter.

Sixth: Exclusion of the Dissolved National Congress Party
In application of the principle of the institutional firewall (Part Seven below) and its independence from any political recycling, the dissolved National Congress Party, and its senior leadership structures, is excluded from participation in the transitional process. This exclusion is a narrowly defined judicial exception, not a general political stance: it is subject to procedural safeguards (an individual right of appeal before an independent judicial body for anyone who proves they were not implicated) and to an automatic sunset clause to be reviewed once the Truth and Reparations Commission has completed its work, so that the exception does not turn into a permanent exclusion that reproduces the very polarization the Charter originally sought to dismantle.

Part Six: Financial Sovereignty — Dismantling the Parallel Networks

Among the most dangerous illusions Sudanese experience has accumulated is that sovereignty is measured only by flag, army, and borders, while the financial infrastructure — payment systems, transfer channels, extractive resources — has been left exposed to penetration and exploitation by networks parallel to the state, civilian and military alike. This part builds on what was previously addressed in the article on al-Asjad ⟦To be completed: article title, venue and date of publication⟧: that financial infrastructure is a non-delegable sovereign asset, not a technical detail left to technocratic bodies isolated from political oversight.

First: Why an Independent Pillar, Not an Appendix to the Economy؟
It has been customary in previous transitional documents to treat the financial file as a chapter within general “economic reform,” where it becomes submerged in details of monetary and budgetary policy, while the more dangerous question escapes attention: who actually holds the keys controlling the flow of money؟ The Charter raises this question to the rank of an independent pillar in its own right, because the answer to it is a condition for the validity of the other three pillars: without financial sovereignty, any armed body theoretically demobilized can continue to fund itself through parallel networks, and without financial sovereignty, transitional-justice reparations remain ink on paper for lack of transparent resources to fund them.

Second: Financial Infrastructure as a Non-Delegable Sovereign Asset
The central principle here is that payment, transfer, and clearing systems must remain exclusively under the control of legitimate civilian state institutions, not managed or partially funded by parallel military or security actors who use them to finance their influence outside the general budget and parliamentary oversight. Any new digital financial infrastructure (such as the al-Asjad experiment referred to at the opening of this Part) must be subject to this principle from the first design, not corrected after a breach has already occurred.

Third: Mechanisms for Dismantling Parallel Financing
The Charter proposes integrated, practical tracks:

◆ Tracking extractive resources (gold in particular) and linking them to a single, transparent sovereign account, instead of multiple unofficial export channels. To this end, an independent authority for the governance of gold and extractive resources is established, with which concession contracts and production and export volumes are registered and periodically published, adopting the standards of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) or their equivalent, so that disputes over figures are settled by published data rather than competing narratives.
◆ Reviewing and unifying digital payment channels under the oversight of the civilian central bank, closing any channels designed to circumvent this oversight.
◆ Regular, public transparency of balance-of-payments and sovereign-resource data, as a tool of popular oversight, not merely an internal bureaucratic procedure.
◆ Linking this file to the Fourth Pillar: so that decisions on distributing revenues from sovereign resources (particularly from historically producing regions) are subject to the same weighted-consensus mechanism, preventing a repeat of the pattern of extracting wealth from the periphery without genuine developmental return to it.
◆ Transferring ownership of the companies and commercial activities belonging to the regular military and security institutions to the Ministry of Finance or a civilian public authority, excepting military manufacturing subject to parliamentary oversight, with whatever is excepted subject to regular public financial audit; financial sovereignty cannot be divided between what lies parallel to the state and what lies within it.
Fourth: The Foreign-Funding Ceiling as a Sovereign Guarantee
Financial sovereignty is not complete by reining in domestic parallel networks alone; it must also be safeguarded against being replaced by an external penetration cloaked in “support” or “reconstruction.” The Charter therefore sets a maximum ceiling of 30% (thirty percent) on the share of any transitional track’s or Charter-affiliated institution’s operating budget — including the Great National Nafir and its bodies — that may come from foreign funding (governmental or non-governmental), with the remaining share to be financed from documented domestic sovereign resources or transparent local and diaspora donations. This ceiling does not mean rejecting international support; it prevents that support from itself becoming a substitute for Sudanese decision-making under a developmental cover — the same logic by which the Charter distinguishes, in Part Four above, between international “guarantee,” which binds the parties, and “guardianship,” which confiscates sovereign decision-making. This percentage is to be reviewed periodically by the same body responsible for the regular transparency of sovereign resources.

In application of this same logic, this prohibition also extends to any political party, organization, or religious institution receiving binding direction or funding from an external reference — not the official transitional bodies alone — so as to prevent the domestic political and religious space from being penetrated through the same door through which penetration of the public budget is prohibited.

Part Seven: The Institutional Firewall — Separating the Political Class from the Civilian-Executive Class

All the preceding pillars implicitly assume the existence of an executive apparatus capable of translating them from text into practice. Yet repeated Sudanese experience reveals a deeper flaw than a mere absence of mechanisms: when a regime falls in our country — whether through a military coup or a popular uprising — it is not only the head of political authority that changes, but the entire executive layer that disappears with it: ministries are restructured, governors and directors-general are replaced by those presumed more loyal, and government agencies are liquidated and rebuilt from zero — so that every political transition, however noble its motives, becomes an occasion for a new institutional collapse rather than genuine reform.

First: The Nature of the Two Classes
The Charter draws a structural distinction between two classes, distinct in function, law, and culture alike:

◆ The political class: the organizations, parties, and alliances competing for power, which by their nature change, contend, and rotate.
◆ The civilian-executive class: the civil service and the technical and organizational institutions, which must be built on standards of competence and functional neutrality, with legal protection against the politicization of appointment and dismissal.
Second: The Binding Mechanisms
◆ Objective criteria for appointment to senior executive positions, based on competence rather than loyalty.
◆ Tenure protections that prevent arbitrary dismissal with every political transition.
◆ Independent review and evaluation committees, insulated from whichever political movement holds power at any given moment, drawing a precise distinction between political responsibility for decisions, which is subject to accountability, and functional competence in execution, which is protected and invested in.
Third: Its Relationship to the Other Pillars
This firewall intersects with the principle of ascending functional legitimacy (Part One): when institutional legitimacy is built upward from performance and competence, rather than downward from political loyalty, the competent official’s continuity in office becomes something earned by the function itself, not a favor granted by a passing authority. This principle is accordingly applied explicitly to the most sensitive files in any Sudanese transition: a term limit on military and executive leadership the separation of arms from party politics, and the separation of army command from the headship of state (Part Three), the independence of judicial exceptions within transitional justice from any later political settlement (Part Five), and the prohibition of binding external penetration of the domestic political and religious space (Part Six).

Part Eight: The Team of Serious Amateurs — The Great National Nafir as Executive Vehicle

All the preceding pillars, however precise their design, remain a suspended blueprint without a hand to implement it. This part answers the final question: who carries this project on the ground؟ The answer the Charter proposes breaks an entrenched expectation in Sudanese political consciousness: that implementation necessarily requires a “professional” elite — traditional parties, technocrats, or recycled former military leaders. The Great National Nafir proposes an alternative: a broad popular vehicle that does not require formal institutional professionalism, but derives its legitimacy from seriousness and reach.

First: Why Serious Amateurs, Not Experts ؟
This is not a diminishment of the value of expertise, but a precise diagnosis of the reality of the crisis: the “professional” elites who have succeeded one another in ruling Sudan or opposing it since independence are the very ones who produced — or failed to break — the recurring cycle of collapse. Relying exclusively on them for rebuilding means repeating the same mistakes with more polished tools. The nafir, by contrast, draws on the spirit of authentic Sudanese communal solidarity: networks of specialists, volunteers, and concerned individuals, geographically dispersed and non-centralized, carrying seriousness and discipline without necessarily carrying a formal institutional history burdened by old settlements.

Second: The Three-Tier Organizational Structure
The nafir rests on an integrated three-level organizational structure:

◆ The local level: nafir cells in neighborhoods, villages, and camps, linking the project directly to local reconciliation councils and regional consensus mechanisms.
◆ The sectoral level: specialized teams (health, education, infrastructure, documentation of violations) working horizontally across regions, ensuring the accumulation of technical expertise without centralizing its monopoly.
◆ The national coordination level: a lightweight body whose function is linkage, documentation, and feedback between the two preceding levels and the four pillars, not issuing top-down orders.
The National Nafir draws inspiration from the Emergency Response Rooms and the other grassroots initiatives that have rebuilt solidarity in neighborhoods since the outbreak of the war, without seeking to absorb or politicize them; their declared humanitarian neutrality is an asset to be protected, not an obstacle to be overcome. The relationship between them rests on voluntary coordination and the exchange of experience, not organizational subordination.

Third: The Five Phases of Implementation
◆ Mobilization and registration: cataloguing the energies available locally and in the diaspora.
◆ Rapid qualification: intensive, short-term training that compensates for the absence of formal institutional experience through clarity of tasks and simplicity of tools.
◆ Pilot deployment: activating cells in limited areas first to test the mechanisms before generalizing them.
◆ Horizontal expansion: generalizing the model after correcting gaps, in parallel with progress on the tracks of ending the war and transitional justice.
◆ Institutional consolidation: the most successful cells gradually transforming into permanent community structures, not an emergency initiative that ends when the “emergency” ends.
Fourth: The Funding Model
The nafir relies on funding with ascending transparency: small local community donations as a first base (communal by nature), with support from the Sudanese diaspora through publicly documented channels, later linked to financial-sovereignty mechanisms to ensure that the funding of the nafir itself does not turn into an unaccountable parallel network.

Conclusion: Why a Newer Model؟

We return to that Lego model with which we opened this Charter. Having surveyed the eight pillars — from ascending legitimacy and the principle of mutual interdependence rooted in the tradition of the nafir, through regional representation, restructuring the military landscape, and imposing peace, to transitional justice, financial sovereignty, the institutional firewall, and the nafir as executive vehicle — we may rightly ask: is this ambition for a wider, more complete structure merely an optimistic wish, or a logical conclusion resting on a solid foundation؟

The answer lies in the distinction the metaphor established from the outset: there is a fundamental difference between cloning the old shape and investing everything that was available and never invested. When the model was first built, not all the pieces in the box were used; some were deliberately set aside because they did not fit the first builders’ vision, some were neglected by oversight, and some never found anyone to notice them at all. Today, however, the blueprints have not been lost, and the neglected pieces have not vanished:

◆ The conceptual blueprint exists in the heritage of ascending legitimacy, the tradition of the nafir, and mutual interdependence — it needs no invention, only recollection.
◆ The consensus mechanisms are drawn from tested comparative experiences (South Africa, Colombia, Sierra Leone, Tunisia), not experimentation from scratch.
◆ And the neglected pieces specifically — the regions that were marginalized, the competencies that were excluded, the voices of the diaspora that were never consulted before, and the experiences of communal solidarity that were never integrated into the official design of the state — these are all pieces that were in the box the whole time, never lost, but waiting for someone to pick them up.
This is precisely what makes this new model newer, not merely a more complete repetition: we do not aspire to restore a state that excluded its regions and components, deliberately or not, but to build a state that uses every piece that was available to it from the beginning and was never used. The question is no longer “how do we bring back what was؟” — the eight pillars already answer that clearly, in the negative — but “who gathers all the pieces, old and neglected together, to begin the wider construction now؟”

And here, the child who destroyed the model, despite all the harm he caused, revealed something that had not been visible before: that the box held far more pieces than were ever used, and that today’s opportunity is not only to repair what was broken, but to make up for what was neglected — deliberately or by oversight — over decades. What remains for Sudanese today — at home and in the diaspora, at the periphery and at the center — is to be that team of “serious amateurs,” supported by the experience of those who came before: not to restore the state as it was, nor to surrender to the illusion that the new structure is merely a faster repetition of the old, but to build, from every available piece — old and neglected together — a state more complete and more inclusive than Sudan has ever known. The blueprints are ready, all the pieces are preserved, and the only thing still needed is the will to use all of them.

Arabic Forum