Take a look at a map to understand why Sudan is important to so many other nations.
There is a cause for the widespread international concern surrounding the fighting that has broken out there during the past week. Sudan is not just enormous—it is the third-largest country in Africa—but it also spans a troubled and crucially important geopolitical region.
Whatever occurs militarily or politically in the nation’s capital, Khartoum, has an impact on some of the continent’s most vulnerable regions.
Since the nation straddles the Nile River, its fate is of almost existential importance to Egypt, which is downstream and Ethiopia, which is upstream and has ambitious hydroelectric plans that are currently affecting the flow of the river.
Overall, Sudan has borders with seven nations, each of which faces security issues connected to Khartoum’s politics.
Conflict in the western Darfur region of Sudan nearly always spreads to nearby Chad and vice versa. The region’s open borders frequently allow fighters and weapons from the war-torn Central African Republic and the coup-prone Chad to move freely. Northwestern Libya has demonstrated that much the same is true.
Sudan, which recently ended a bloody struggle involving another unreliable neighbour, the impoverished and heavily militarised authoritarianism of Eritrea, borders the Tigray area in northern Ethiopia. There is also conflict along other stretches of Ethiopia’s and Sudan’s common border.
Sudan’s southern neighbour, South Sudan, is a relatively young country that officially declared its independence from Sudan in 2011 following one of the deadliest and longest civil wars in African history. That border is still in a shaky state.
South Sudan descended fast into the kind of protracted civil war that some worry may now befall Sudan as well. When South Sudan gained independence, it took the majority of the region’s valuable oil fields with it, leaving Sudan much poorer and indirectly fueling the current crisis in Khartoum as rival military factions fight for control of dwindling economic resources like gold and agriculture.
Sudan’s generals have sought out international allies as a part of that effort since the military has long been a significant, reportedly corrupt component in the domestic economy. This has meant enticing Gulf nations to invest in the vast, largely untapped potential of the fertile land that borders the Nile River for agricultural purposes.
Deals involving gold with Russia’s infamous Wagner organisation, which is accused of transporting gold out of Sudan, seem to have been far murkier. The head of Wagner, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, has been charged by the US Treasury with “exploiting Sudan’s natural resources for personal gain and spreading malign influence” online through his “troll farm”.
The interests of Russia in the nation and region are far more extensive. The Red Sea may be seen from the bleak coastline of eastern Sudan.
Since years, the Kremlin has sought to create a military facility in Port Sudan, giving its warships access to and control over one of the busiest and most contentious maritime routes in the world. Moscow and Sudan’s military government, which took control in a coup in 2021, are almost done agreeing on an agreement over the base.
It should come as no surprise that a wide spectrum of governments are now attempting to affect what is happening in Sudan.
For the time being, it appears that the priority is to put an end to the conflict between the army and the RSF paramilitary group before it escalates and threatens to transform from a relatively simple power struggle into a more complicated civil war.
Additionally, some foreign governments are eager to assist Sudan in achieving the democracy that many had hoped would come after the brutal dictator Omar al-Bashir was overthrown in the country back in 2019.
The Sudanese people, who have waited decades for one of Africa’s suffering giants to realise its potential, may, however, prefer that other states support another strongman in order to block their wishes.
