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The war in Sudan is not an anomaly; it is a prototype. A conflict that has directly killed at least 150,000 people, displaced over 11 million, and pushed half the population into acute food insecurity sets the pace for a terrifying global trend. Each new headline, woeful statistic or offensive showcases a form of warfare for which the global community possesses no effective response.
This is no longer the clean, contained proxy warfare of the past half-century, but a messy, multi-layered struggle defined by the weaponization of everything from commercially available drones to global financial networks. It is playing out in a theater where state authority has collapsed, supplanted by rival military factions and a dense web of external actors, from regional middle powers to international arms networks whose competing interests fuel the fire without offering an exit.
This is the shape of wars to come.
First, the mechanics of violence have evolved. Armed drones, once limited to the periphery, now form the core of a callous strategy that blurs the lines between combat and collective punishment. Their function extends far beyond reconnaissance to the primary instruments of siege and terror we see today. For instance, a single drone strike on a displacement shelter at Dar Al-Arqam in El-Fasher killed 57 people, while another that struck the Saudi Maternal Teaching Hospital claimed over 70 lives.
The systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure is very much a calculated escalation. Earlier this year, drone attacks on the Merowe Dam and key substations crippled Sudan’s electricity grid, collapsing essential services. In turn, the consequences were as catastrophic as they were multiplicative: hospitals lost refrigeration, medicines spoiled, and access to water became a tool of war.
For the 1.2 million people once living in El-Fasher — a city turned into a ghost town by a 57 km siege wall and constant aerial bombardment — the persistent hum of drones overhead denies any concept of sanctuary. Here, families dig crude bunkers for shelter and survive on animal feed, while medical staff, lacking gauze, dress wounds with mosquito nets and carry out amputations due to festering injuries. All this suffering reveals a deliberate architecture of a man-made famine, where the battlefield is everywhere and everyone is a target.
Beyond the record death toll and woeful records of persistent human suffering, the civil war has not just undergone a technological shift enabled by a diplomatic vacuum and unchecked external interference; the traditional center of gravity for peacemaking has also disintegrated.
The US, whose influence once provided a forced, if flawed, coherence to regional diplomacy, now operates from a position of reduced leverage, channeling efforts through unwieldy constructs such as the Quad. The group is not a neutral arbiter, but a collection of the war’s primary sponsors. As a result, the entire Horn of Africa, including parts of the Sahel, has fractured into polarized blocs, with states such as Eritrea aligning with the Sudanese Armed Forces, while others, including Chad and elements within Ethiopia, lean toward the Rapid Support Forces. This internationalized patronage network ensures that the war continues to escalate, immune to mediation, and cementing Sudan’s status as a prototype for a new era of intractable, externally fueled war. 

The world’s silence is more than a moral failure.

Hafed Al-Ghwell

Unfortunately, the human cost is both a tragedy and a strategic failure of historic proportions. Over 24.6 million people, about half of the country, face acute food insecurity, with 637,000 experiencing catastrophic levels of hunger, the worst such crisis on Earth. This man-made famine is a direct result of burned farmlands, severed supply routes, and both sides doubling down on siege warfare. Meanwhile, the war has spawned a parallel illicit economy, with Sudanese gold smuggled across borders, financing the very forces that are destroying the state. Moreover, both sides have established parallel governments, cementing a de facto partition of the nation, and thus, making the goal of a unified Sudan increasingly distant.
On the other hand, the international response to the war has been a study in diplomatic failure, defined by a proliferation of competing initiatives that actively undermine each other. Mediation efforts have been entirely devoid of a central authority. Initial talks quickly stalled and a follow-up initiative by East African heads of state ultimately collapsed for lack of the backing of key Arab powers. A subsequent US attempt to convene talks in Switzerland failed when the Sudanese Armed Forces refused to attend.
This cannot even be called mere incompetence anymore; it is a deliberate, structural flaw. With each external power jockeying to control the process, no single mediator gains the necessary momentum or legitimacy. The outcome is a diplomatic race to the bottom, where the overwhelming number of actors with irreconcilable interests shrinks the space for a political solution to zero.
Consequently, the ambitious comprehensive peace deals of the past have been abandoned, replaced by fleeting truces that merely freeze the front lines and cement a fractured status quo. This is the ineffective new standard for conflict resolution, ensuring that a war which has already killed 150,000 people and displaced over 11 million is “managed” rather than ended.
Taken altogether, the war in Sudan demonstrates that the future of conflict lies outside the traditional spheres of great power competition. It is in these spaces, where regional middle powers with commercial ambition, strategic paranoia, and advanced weaponry collide, that the most destructive and unmanageable wars will flourish. Given what is at stake, the international silence is more than a moral failure; it is a strategic preview of the nature of conflict in a disordered, fragmented world.
If a catastrophe of this magnitude, fueled by so many and stopped by none, can unfold with such impunity, then Sudan is not the exception. It is the shape of wars to come.

• Hafed Al-Ghwell is senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center in Washington and senior fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies.
X: @HafedAlGhwell