 Good morning everybody. My name is Barry Colfer and I'm the director of research at the Institute of International and European Affairs here in Dublin. I'm very pleased to welcome you to this webinar. I'm delighted that we're joined by a friend and colleague, Professor Sharath Srinivasan, who is the David and Elaine Potter Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge. Professor Srinivasan, Sharath has taken time from what is a very busy time for him to speak to us about the current situation and state of affairs in Sudan. Sharath is going to speak for about 20 minutes as ever and then we'll go to the all important Q&A with you, our audience. So to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, please feel free to put in questions as they occur to you throughout Sharath's discussion and we'll set aside the time at the end of the engagement today to go through them. A reminder that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record and you can interact with the webinar and with Sharath using the Twitter handle at IEEA and indeed Sharath's own Twitter handle which I cannot recall to memory. I'll now formally introduce Professor Srinivasan and hand over to him. Sharath Srinivasan is David and Elaine Potter Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge's Department of Politics and International Studies. Sharath is also a fellow King's College Cambridge and co-director of the University Center of Governance and Human Rights. Sharath lived and worked in Sudan in the early 2000s and has been researching on the region ever since and is indeed a regional and global voice on the topic and I'm sure many of you will have seen his contributions to news media over the past weeks and months. His book, When Peace Kills Politics, International Intervention and Unending Wars in the Sudan, is published in 2021 and is visible behind the speaker's right shoulder. Sharath also co-edited Making and Breaking Peace in Sudan and South Sudan, The Comprehensive Peace Agreement and Beyond with the British Academy and Oxford University Press in 2020. I'm delighted to have been able to help in a small way with that book. I was a PhD in Sharath's department when that book was coming together and I was one of the research assistants helping bring that book and an important conference together. And I remember immersing myself in the politics and history of the region for a lovely summer in 2019. I remember it very well and it's lovely to reconnect with Sharath and with these ideas in this format. Sharath is also a fellow of the Rifts Valley Institute and a trustee of the British Institute in Eastern Africa. Alongside long standing work on Sudan, Sharath's current research focuses on communication technology and politics and peaceful assembly. Sharath, thank you very much again for being with us and I'll hand you the floor for the next 20 to 25 minutes. Thank you Barry. And thanks to everyone at IIEA for organizing this and for inviting me. It's a real pleasure to be here. I hope to also join in person, not too long from now. I'm frequently in Ireland and it's always a joy to be there. And indeed, Barry does remind me of the work we did together and your energy and enthusiasm for that project that led to that edited book. So it's nice in a sense to come full circle in that regard. So what I want to do with the 20 minutes I have is I talk across four headings I suppose. First, what's the situation right now in Sudan. Secondly, why now. Third, what next. And fourth important for at least me in terms of my academic work, why this situation again and again, how can we understand the deeper logic of what's going on. So let me start really with the situation at the moment in Sudan, where in effect, the one month in from when this exploded in mid April. So let's focus on the humanitarian situation and the human situation to be to be clear before talking about conflict and peacemaking. And I'm doing that because I think what we're seeing in the last few days is how dire things are getting on the front of what civilians are facing. That's across the country but also in seeking to actually leave whether that be to Chad to South Sudan to Egypt. All of these are really fraught passages to refuge. There's so much that we don't know about what the situation is because of the insecurity and if we just take even cartoon. It's very difficult to understand what the scale of civilian death and injury has been largely because a lot of civilians can't get to hospitals and we are not getting data very much out of hospitals a lot of them are under staffed or have been targeted indeed by the violence and as a result, the estimates we have a very sort of provisional Sudanese doctors union says that approximately 822 civilians have died across the country since the start but we know that's a massive underestimate. And we don't expect we'll get much better data. And I assume it's a situation where all essential services have been either hit and miss or slowly collapsed without the electricity, water, access to markets, etc. food. And that in the context of some scorching heat at this time of year so they've been a lot of issues of just trying to get basic essentials moving. So that's sort of very localized community level so there has been some efforts to to ensure that basic welfare is reaching those who are most in need, organized at a very local level and I'll come back to that a bit later. But the health services themselves have been severely affected and that in Katsu means from city that usually would be about 5 million people, even with the numbers that have left we're still talking about millions who are in a state of siege and dire humanitarian crisis. In other regional centers, L O B, which is a capital city of North Corde which is in the southern part of Sudan. Now that's been a site of tremendous violence as well. The Sudan armed forces holds the city but the rapid support forces the other arms group is on the approaches it's a strategic location for various reasons. The civilian deaths and suffering are very high as well. The hospital has recorded over 100 deaths, just in the recent period, over 1000 wounded from violence, unable to really service those numbers in any so decent way. In El Jena, which is a place in the west of the country so in West Darfur that's seen the most violence in in recent weeks that we've documented the target civilians in the city. This is partly a result of the, the conflict spilling over into a set of dynamics around militias in that area and so local conflicts mapping on to this wider national conflict. Just over the last weekend, doctors reported their 280 civilians were killed just over the weekend. So we're talking about a much higher level of targeting of civilians in that area with a slight ethnic or with a clear ethnic dimension to some of that violence. So the humanitarian efforts have been through Port Sudan in the east of the country, a large numbers of internally displaced have fled to Port Sudan partly with the view to getting to Saudi Arabia. The many thousands hundreds of thousands have not and put stands become a sort of space for displacement from the center of the country. I think the humanitarian effort has ramped up considerably, but Port Sudan is not Sudanist and the level of access to humanitarian assistance to other parts of the country is very patchy at best. And another concern on the humanitarian front is the Egyptian border, large numbers fled to the Egyptian border hoping to get into Egypt, but have not had been able to get visas processed and so that was a large bottleneck, especially about 10 days ago, still remains a very sort of dire situation and that becomes an area of humanitarian need because it's sort of in the middle of the desert and thus sort of a real area of lack of resource and capacity to support. So that's the sort of humanitarian situation in nutshell is more I would like to say about how how this is playing out in in troubling ways in terms of targeting of civilians I'll say that in a second on the conflict itself, both sides have really dug in. So if we thought that maybe there might be a click out or that one actor would prevail quickly over the other. That's not the case so the Sudan forces led by General Burhan and the rapid support forces led by General Degalo and others notice himetti. These that the two dominant actors is your, your both, you all know. They both now think that they can prevail for different reasons. The RSF is very strong at urban warfare, in effect, it's a, it's a kind of a gorilla warfare militia. It's much more mobilized much more coordinated and sort of, I guess, militarily has been on a sort of active footing for years now. And so it's much more, it was much more able to mobilize in the urban settings and to infiltrate civilian areas, take over neighborhoods, etc. And make itself hard to sort of weed out I suppose. And that's penetrating of civilian areas is not involved now increasing levels of looting, pillaging, burning of various facilities, etc. But also incidences of sexual violence and rape that are on the increase quite clearly and this is only patchy reporting but it's very clear there's a pattern here. So targeting a civilians has increased much more of late and that will continue is, you know, the clear trajectory. So they're holding areas of cartoon and greater cartoon, including Omdomen North cartoon, but also attacking other regional centers. And they feel that they're ascendant in some of these areas there's no doubt about that. Meanwhile, the Sudan armed forces is clear and confident that it can hold on to strategic installations. Some of some of the strategic installations in cartoon, but other regional centers, as I said, like a little bit, and it dominates in a sense the skies so the Sudan armed forces is well known throughout the history of civil war in the country is that the Sudan forces is quite happy to bomb, you know what would be called joint use facilities, but not only that just actually areas that have civilians in them and this is occurring in now again, you have the RSF in the civilian, heavily civilian populated areas or, you know, on the weekend. Sudan armed forces bombed a major hospital in in cartoon that's a major orthopedic hospital in the whole country. They bombed the hospital because they said the RSF were there so that that sort of thing is happening a lot more and will continue to happen especially because the armed forces lacks the sort of ground force infantry effectiveness that the RSF has on the ground so it's looking to take them out especially from the air. And so again in both cases civilians are either being disregarded or being targeted and this is a worrying trend here. So then I just want to say very briefly I'll come back to this, well what's the peacemaking situation. There have been multiple ceasefires, some of the ones early ones were not even worth the paper they were sent to be written on. Others held, you know, sort of a limited way which allowed for evacuations which was politically expedient for one side or the other as they sought initially to hold some moral high ground. And others were never going to hold much longer than that because it was quite clear that they were being broken repeatedly and both sides thought that they could be militarily, you know, triumphant in a sense. The more recent talks in Jeddah are at the formative stage in one sense and then the most recent thing that came out of that was a commitment by both sides to the principles of international humanitarian law which, you know, doesn't take my person with much to think well you know this is what they should be obliged to follow in the first place so why does this mean anything. And what does this mean about safe passage well it's meant very little about safe passage is the truth. And I think what is more important here is to understand what are these actors doing when they're sitting in Jeddah with the US and Saudi Arabia, seeking to get them to do something because of their relations with these powerful actors so what are they trying to do in terms of in reinscribing themselves into a space of peacemaking of negotiating tables in which they can claim some legitimacy and be actors that are still relevant to those sorts of talks. So I'll come back to that but I think that's actually, unfortunately a more cynical reading of what's going on in these talks that's important. So what did this happen now. In order to understand what went what led to this we have to sort of walk ourselves back through a couple of moments in the last four years, since the popular revolution, and the deposing of President Alba share in April 2019. The immediate proximate reason that this happened was that there was a agreement in December 2022 called a political framework agreement, which is an agreement between these two actors. On the one hand, and other actors that are in, in holding the country and power in the country after a coup in 2021 and some civilian forces in what was called the forces for freedom and change, and they had sought with international peacemakers to get the parties to the of October 2021 back to the table of a transition to civilian rule. So this framework agreement in December 2022 was trying to get the transition back on track, after the events of 20 of 2022 of the events of 2021. So that framework agreement was calling for a number of things it was a lot of So overall aim was a transition to interim civilian rule, leading to elections again as had been the plan for the transition all along. And in order to get there, some other things would be necessary. One of them would be that the security sector would have to reform and, and there would be only one legitimate armed army in the country. The rest would involve in part, negotiations with rebel movements that had already signed on to a peace process earlier to be part of this reform, but also that the RSF, the rapid support forces under him it would merge under the Sudan Armed Forces. And that seems, you know, sensible enough that the army can and the state can only have one army or armed forces and the RSF, which is a militia needs to mull underneath there. But the political power and security power that the RSF had was so significant that this was not sort of, you know, acceptable to the RSF unless it assumed dominant position in the command and control of the army. So that was really what was at stake there and it was quite clear from December last year onwards that, you know, the town isn't big enough for both of them but it's not easily going to be big enough for just one of them or a merged version and so I thought that this was going to be a really perilous process. Negotiations and discussions had continued throughout early this year, and it was quite clear that both sides were increasingly digging in and the army was calling for a two year transition for the RSF to be merged in the RSF is talking about 10 years there was discussions about but fundamentally it wasn't about the details it's about the fact that neither side wanted to give up its primary dominant position in the state which it had held for the last four years. But the other thing that I think we was less obvious but it was also anxious for the both parties and the army as well was that again there would be a commitment to a civilian led transitional government that would also be part of this period. So that was going to that was imminent and that should have also happened alongside the security sector reform. And so, in a sense, the reason why this these these two fell out was in part because they were seeking to have be the dominant security actor, but also in part that neither thought that this transition to civilian led rule had room for them to dominate the state. And that was exactly the same circumstances that led to the October 2021 coup. So, the political framework agreement of the end of last year was one long year after a coup in 2021, which had led to military actors, taking over the state these two and also a couple of the rebel movements that had been also signed on to the transition, and kicking out the civilian led government. And the October 2021 coup led to a push immediately by peacemakers to get these parties back to the transition to, you know, back to the table to negotiate. And that was again pushed by especially Western and peacemakers and what's called the Troika, the sort of main, the US, UK, and Norway, and the Troika is adapted to become something called a quad, which is involved just a US, UK, Saudi Arabia. And that that mechanism has sought to get the parties back to the table of the transition whenever there's been a crisis. The civilian protests on the street after the coup we're rejecting this and saying we can't go back to the transition they've just scuppered the earlier agreement to join civilian military rule and a transition to civilian leadership with this transition. And that indeed is important because the coup itself of October 2021 was again a response to the fact that the timetable of a transition was calling for civilian leadership to come to the helm. And I think, when we look at this, we, we see a sort of repeated pattern occurring the October 2021 coup occurred, because in the context of the transition in November 2021 civilians were supposed to take over the leadership of the transitional government ahead of elections. So that plan and that timetable that had a joint civilian and military leadership of the country, which was an agreement that came in August 2019. So by 2021 that was supposed to transition to civilian led rule until then there was a joint sovereign council, but the military and behind it's still been in charge of the state and for all intents and purposes were able to exert ultimate supreme power with him at that point. The reason why that joint transitional sovereign council came about itself was that when President al-Bashir was deposed in 2019 in April, the immediate cause of that was a palace coup in which Hometi and the army not under Burhan at the time deposed President al-Bashir to hold on to the power of the state. And it was only continuing ongoing protests on the street, and indeed a crackdown by the RSF in which they killed a number of over 100 protesters in Khartoum, that led to a range of foreign actors saying no we need to have joint military civilian rule, and they agreed this sovereign council. But the point here is that it's never been in the interest of the military and the Sudan armed forces or the RSF to do anything other than hold on to the state, ever since those events of April 2019. The transitional military council that they created the time had no room for civilian leadership, and at the time Hometi was considered the de facto leader of the country, the army was a weaker actor at the time of the deposal of President al-Bashir, Hometi was seen to be the actor that was really at the fore. So if we see this then we see both actors need not wanting to let go of their control over the state, and actually Hometi and the RSF being a preeminent actor at the time of the 2019 events of 2019. And since then there's just been a repeat pattern of agreeing to a transitional process but maintaining control of the state and security. And whenever the transition was on the verge of a key decisive milestone around civilian rule, acting in a sense to scupper that or in this case falling out with each other over how to maintain, you know, power and control. So that's really where we got here and in terms of what next I think that the key worries that emerge at the moment are that at the moment both actors remain the dominant sort of belligerence on the ground. And this is not the case exactly in West Darfur where already it spilled over into the fact that the RSF is aligned to certain Arab militias in Darfur. And they are acting either directly at the behest of the RSF or with that kind of security support to also settle local scores in effect. This is not something that was, this already predates the events of April. So this has been going on for the last few years ever since 2019 it's been very restive area. And the clashes between the non-Arab Masalit and Arab militias has been on the rise throughout this period, but now it's being articulated with the dynamics of the national conflict. And the Masalit in this case who have had an armed militia in the past are quite clearly seeking to rearm or going to Chad and seeking to bring in support from Chad. And that is where you can see a contagion potentially occurring that is around a set of dynamics that aren't just about these two leaders and they're vying for power and control of the state. And one of the rebel movements in Darfur, the SLA under Miny Minawi which has been part of a various agreements for a number of years since 2019 and earlier has also gone back to Darfur as such. So Miny Minawi is de-camped to Darfur because of concern over how this is playing out in Darfur and a desire to be a security actor in their home region. So these dynamics are starting to occur more frequently and they're worrying because they speak to two things. One is the way that either of these actors starts to mobilize other militias in order to come to their support because neither of them is prevailing at the moment and they're looking for ways to increase their military leverage. And that's seen in fact that Sudan armed forces is certainly seeking alliances in the east with militias in the east around Port Sudan and seeking to say, look, we need to ensure that the RSF doesn't prevail in their country. They're from predominantly western Sudan, and this country can't be ruled by them. And so this is starting to happen. It's much more instrumental and tactical, but it's starting to lead to some dynamics that suggest contagion with other armed groups. So there's also the regional actors who have been involved throughout in some way and have not been actively involved since last month, but increasingly is a concern that that might be the case whether that's Egypt quite clearly strongly supporting this armed forces has been for a long time, recognizes in Burhan and the SAF, an actor like itself on the Egyptian state that it can deal with and it can trust and potentially rely upon in crucial negotiations around Nile waters, etc. But in various ways Egypt is is SAF aligned in this conflict. Whereas, General Haftar and Libya is clear line of support into the RSF has been for a long time. The RSF has also support supplied troops as such to his cause in Libya. There's a connection there in a triangle and a connection to the United Arab Emirates, who have both been a patron of the RSF during the Yemen conflict and tens of thousands of RSF fighters 14 Yemen under UAE patronage. And also the RSF which controls a large amount of nearly all of the gold production in Sudan has been built a strong relationship with the UAE in that regard as well. The actors are not necessarily fomenting the conflict at the moment but we don't know really what the level of active involvement has been in the very recent period. And I think we just add Chad and Eritrea as being also key actors in this and I can talk about that maybe more in the Q&A. I'll just end by just saying very quickly. I mean why again and again, is this going on. I mean, my own thinking on this and this stems from looking at peacemaking in the civil wars of Sudan over a couple of decades is I've seen very much similar concerns of what goes wrong, and it largely involves belligerent actors reinscribing themselves into their political legitimacy via the logics of transition pro planning and peacemaking and road maps and framework agreements. The only response that external actors have to this is to try and stabilize the situation and to stabilize it means privileging the belligerent actors in order to encourage them to obviously desist from violence. But the mode of doing that tends to reinscribe them in the political domain as the dominant actors, and they know exactly how to manage that to their advantage. They're much more effective at managing timetables and road maps and these sorts of planning processes, such that actually nothing has actually changed in, in terms of political power in the country during this period we've seen that in the last four years. And what happens along the way is that the civil actors who were there at the heart of the popular revolution the uprising in Sudan, whether that's the civilian leadership and etc. The resistance committees that were central to how that popular revolution occurred, and indeed throughout the period since have been the source of a civilian voice but also a resistance and a counterpower to these armed actors, including after the October 2021 coup. They were marginalized from the space of these political transitions because they want they don't have a seat at the table, and to their, the promise of politics to come which is a sort of democratic transition is means that they sort of deferred from the political space in the immediate term, but the reality is that the immediate term never changes and Sudan is lost in transition in a sense. So while it's lost in transition, these dominant security and belligerent actors maintain their hold on on the state on power and that's on on on sort of the political possibilities in the country. I'll stop there because I know I've gone over time but in talk more about any of that. I'm very happy to