Sudan’s Intractable War

Listen to this episode from The Foreign Affairs Interview on Spotify. The war in Sudan gets only a fraction of the attention that conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza and potential conflicts elsewhere get. But after two years of fighting, it has created the biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded. And as the two sides in the conflict, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, vie for control of the country and its resources, there is little hope of a conclusion any time soon. As the war goes on, and a growing number of outside powers look for advantage in the carnage, the consequences are likely to get even worse, argue Mai Hassan and Ahmed Kodouda in a recent Foreign Affairs essay—not just for Sudan, but for the rest of its region as well. Both Hassan, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Kodouda, a humanitarian policy expert who was based in Sudan until March 2023, have spent years watching what is happening in Sudan. They joined senior editor Eve Fairbanks to discuss the roots of what has become an intractable conflict, and whether a path out of it is possible. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.