Why Mediators Struggle to End a New Kind of Conflict
Alan Boswell October 2, 2025
In September 12, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States announced a joint road map for ending Sudan’s devastating two-and-a-half-year civil war. The announcement, on its own terms, was a breakthrough. Soon after its outbreak in Khartoum in April 2023, the conflict entangled a variety of regional actors. Egypt and a number of other nearby states have supported General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the government now based in Port Sudan; the UAE—and, increasingly, other countries that depend on Abu Dhabi, such as Chad—has backed Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti), the leader of the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who had been Burhan’s deputy in Sudan’s previous military junta.
The sponsors of the plan, known collectively as the Quad, are thus Arab powers that have a great deal of sway in Sudan (including Saudi Arabia, which has mostly sought to remain neutral) and the United States. Brokering such an agreement among these outside countries had long proved elusive, and it took months of high-level U.S.-led negotiations to reach agreement on a joint road map. The plan called for a three-month humanitarian truce between the two warring factions. This would be followed by a permanent cease-fire and a political process led by the Sudanese to choose a new civilian-led government.
After years of vicious fighting, hope surged that there might finally be a way to end a catastrophe that has killed up to 150,000, displaced a quarter of the country’s population of 50 million, and left innumerable Sudanese without essential services. Yet the plan already appears to be stalling. The fighting in Sudan has continued to rage, and the SAF has publicly rejected the proposal. Bringing Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE into closer alignment was a necessary first step, but a chasm still separates the warring sides. It also remains unclear whether the new U.S. administration is prepared for the difficult long-term engagement that would be needed to bring the plan to fruition.
Indeed, amid a wider U.S. retreat from the region and the rise of ambitious middle powers nearby, the larger story is that the United States no longer possesses the clout it once had to underwrite mediation processes in many parts of Africa, necessitating unwieldy formats such as the Quad. Among outside actors, Washington had by far the greatest influence over the Horn of Africa in the 1990s and the first decade of this century. Although it overreached badly in some of its interventions, it gave peacemaking a center of gravity…
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