AU's Sudan mission faces steep odds amid battlefield stalemate

The African Union arrived in Sudan on Sunday with a familiar mission: stop the shooting, open the aid corridors, restart the politics. It is a task the AU has attempted before, and failed. This time, the delegation from the Peace and Security Council faces a war that has killed tens of thousands and scattered millions across three years, with neither of the two main combatants willing to believe that talking might serve them better than fighting.

The Sudanese Armed Forces control much of Khartoum now, a significant shift in the military picture. The Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary faction that once rivaled the army for power, have been pushed back but not broken. They remain entrenched across Darfur in the west and continue to operate as a formidable fighting force. Between these two zones lies Kordofan, a region that has become a grinding secondary battlefield precisely because of its geography—it sits astride the supply lines and movement corridors that connect the territories held by each side. Fighting around el-Obeid shows the war is far from static, despite the army's gains around the capital.

This stalemate is the AU's central problem. Neither the SAF nor the RSF has achieved what military strategists call a decisive victory. The army cannot eliminate the RSF; the RSF cannot dislodge the army from the capital. In a different context, this mutual exhaustion might create space for negotiation. Instead, it has produced the opposite. Both sides still believe they can improve their position through force. Why accept a political settlement when the next offensive might tip the balance? The AU is trying to advance diplomacy while both combatants remain convinced that the battlefield holds more promise than the negotiating table.

The AU's stated goals are three: a ceasefire, humanitarian access, and a political process that goes beyond simply dividing power and territory between two armed factions. That last point matters. Sudan's crisis did not begin with the war. It began in 2019 when a popular uprising overthrew Omar al-Bashir, the country's longtime dictator. A civilian-military power-sharing arrangement followed, but it collapsed into disputes about the country's future. In October 2021, the military dissolved the arrangement entirely. The war itself erupted in April 2023 after months of rivalry between the SAF and RSF over how Sudan should transition to civilian rule. Stopping the fighting alone would not resolve what came before it.

The AU has tried this before. In May 2023, the Peace and Security Council adopted a roadmap calling for a permanent ceasefire, humanitarian access, civilian protection, and a return to political transition. The SAF and RSF both signed commitments in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, that same month. They pledged to protect civilians, accept a short-term ceasefire, and arrange humanitarian access. None of it held. The fighting continued. In October 2024, the AU sent another delegation to Cairo and Port Sudan, pressing the same demands. The problem, analysts say, is not a shortage of diplomatic initiatives. It is the fundamental unwillingness of either side to make concessions when both still believe force can deliver what negotiation cannot.

The AU's leverage is limited. Dennis Amachree, a former deputy director of Nigeria's Department of State Services, told Al Jazeera plainly that the organization lacks the tools to compel either side to stop. The AU has no enforcement mechanism, no financial leverage, and no standby military force. It has diplomatic weight and political legitimacy, but those are not the same as power. The organization depends on coordination with regional bodies like IGAD, the United Nations, and international actors including the United States and Saudi Arabia. Even that broader coalition has struggled to move the needle.

Kabir Amadu, a security analyst and founder of Beacon Consulting Limited, frames the challenge differently. The war has produced exhaustion, he argues, but not resolution. Both sides receive enough internal and external support to keep fighting, but not enough to win decisively. The AU's task, then, is to convert this stalemate into diplomatic momentum before the territorial divisions harden into something permanent—a de facto partition of Sudan that no amount of later negotiation could undo. Benjamin Dowmoh-Doyen of the African Chamber of Content Producers emphasized that an African-led solution is essential, that the continent must own its own crises. But African ownership alone cannot persuade two heavily armed factions that compromise is preferable to the next battle.

The two-day visit will not resolve these problems. Its value will depend on whether the AU can extract commitments that survive the delegation's departure and create enough diplomatic space for negotiations to move forward. The fundamental question remains unchanged: Can the AU convince the SAF and the RSF that a political process offers something that continued fighting cannot? Until that question is answered, the war will continue, and the millions displaced will remain displaced.