It is no surprise that contesting definitions of the war dominate Sudanese public discourse.
Phrases like “an existential war,” “a war for dignity,” “a war for democracy,” “a senseless war,” “a war of the ruling class,” or “a war against new colonization” echo through every debate, used as pivotal parts of framing arguments for or against political positions.
This phenomenon is neither unique to Sudan nor unexpected. It reflects a universal dynamic in which competing narratives proliferate during wartime. Such narratives arise from the need to galvanize public support for military action or exploitation and more generally to justify and rationalize political positions and strategies.
Opposing factions craft divergent definitions of the war to legitimize their positions, battling not only on the ground but also in the arena of public opinion.
And all groups impacted by the conflict, whether within warring parties or outside them, generate their own narratives which reflect their ideological stakes, material interests, and survival strategies.
By tracing these evolving definitions, we gain a useful tool and critical lens for mapping the competing forces of society which impact the immediate reality of Sudan as well as the potentials of realizing a revolutionary project of freedom and development of the people of the country.
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) attempted to push a narrative of a war for democracy against a coup government with ties to Islamic political projects and powers. This narrative was faced by ridiculing from the Sudanese general public since the early days of the war.
The RSFs pattern of looting, displacement and fragmented governance, previously observed in the Darfur war and all the way to displacement of communities from mining areas in recent years, was brought to the urban centres and small villages under control of the RSF.
The public saw and highlighted the contradiction between the looting, murder, and torture they are experiencing under the RSF and the narrative of democracy. The RSF continued to use this phrasing regardless of the fact it had clearly failed in gaining any public support.
Which suggests that the effort to cement this narrative is meant for actors other than the Sudanese public, perhaps the international community. This explanation is supported also by their focus on using international community-targeted phrasing in constantly describing the Army and its allies as terrorist organizations.
The RSF has also attempted to phrase the war as one of the disadvantaged and marginalized against the exploitive centre.
This definition was increasingly echoed in the RSF’s official statements and spokespersons, both formal and informal, as the war dragged on. This reflects an attempt to rally support among historically marginalized social and ethnic groups, after the ‘war of democracy’ narrative failed to resonate with broader society.
Early rebuts of this narrative in the general debate cited the atrocities inflicted by the RSF on poor villagers, old women and low wagers in the areas of their control, as well as the wealth and power available to the leadership of the RSF.
These arguments highlighted the contradiction between a definition of the disadvantaged that correctly incorporates their economic and social status, and another that limits it to ethnic lines.
This was a point in the battles of definitions when an organized critical socialist voice could have presented a scientific revolutionary framing of the issue accurately observed by the public to provide an analysis of interests that calls for an alliance of the socially and economically disadvantaged against those in control of wealth and power regardless of their ethnicities.
The RSF’s rhetoric of democracy failed to mask its violence; the SAF’s appeal to stability masked a return to authoritarian rule.
The lack of this voice has allowed for a valid argument to turn into a tool of ethnic division, denial of historic marginalization, and fueled a retreat to ethnic alliances.
However, the RSF’s narrative remained weak and incapable of attracting support from a sufficient percentage of the population needed to legitimize its claim to power.
The Sudanese Armed Forces on the other side was significantly more successful with its narratives which started at the basic levels of the power of armies; bureaucratic legitimization of violence, and the promise of safety.
Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) first defined the war as one against a rebellion of a militia, highlighting the institutionalized nature of the armed forces, its military colleges and army rituals as evidence of their righteousness.
The crimes that the RSF conducted for years under the supervision of the army and the crimes of the SAF itself are conveniently forgotten or deprioritized in this narrative.
Political actors are evaluated here based on their bureaucratic structures and positions within the state apparatus rather than being evaluated based on their impact on the peoples’ lives.
This is a narrative as old as the concept of the state itself, and a tool historically used by the elite to justify the violence they inflict on the communities they exploit utilizing the bureaucratically approved violent arms of the state, be it the police, the army or others.
Decades of propaganda that shaped public thinking into normalising state approved violence has supported the success of this argument in spreading among the public.
The promise of safety and a return to stability was also continuously present in statements by SAF leaders that the war shall end soon, “a week or two” they said two years ago.
This argument managed to pacify the public in the early days of the war, justify destruction of civilian homes, and fuel calls for deadlier attacks on the RSF. It also created space for myths around the SAF’s final blow to the RSF in the coming hours, for days and weeks.
As the war dragged to a year and more, the promise morphed to a return to “normalcy” at an undefined point in time.
The revolutionary response to these narratives should have rejected defining legitimacy through abstract claims. And instead grounding it in how each faction impacts human lives, it ought to emphasize that safety is a fundamental right, not a bargaining chip to justify military rule, and that past “stability” was built on systemic violence and exploitation, which we must transcend, not revive.
Grassroots mutual aid networks, most visibly emergency rooms, embodied this ethos. They prioritised people-centred, rights-based service delivery, realizing the slogan “free healthcare and education.”
These initiatives sustained war-besieged and displaced communities abandoned by both warring factions. Yet they operated without a revolutionary political vision, one that could frame mutual aid as a foundation for a permanent, anti-war governance model led by and for the people.
Instead, efforts remained confined to emergency relief, constrained by rhetoric about a “return to normalcy” that ignores Sudan’s history of structural oppression. This vacuum has allowed the SAF’s narratives to consolidate power and public backing.
The SAF’s growing public support enabled it to advance more politically lucrative narratives.
Central to this escalation was redefining the war as one of dignity and sovereignty. And here the army became synonymous with the state and the state with personal dignity.
This framing weaponised public outrage over RSF atrocities to legitimise SAF actions, detached even from pledges of security, thereby anchoring legitimacy in abstract notions of national pride and the subliminal stigmatisation of tribes constituting the RSF’s core, whose “Sudanese identity” was implicitly questioned.
Such narratives absolved the SAF of obligations to protect or provide for civilians, even justifying the downplaying of its crimes. The narrative also focused on the illegitimacy and criminality of the RSF relations with international actors, specifically the UAE.
This argument ignored the illegitimacy of any international relations with the SAF coup government as well as reported strong economic relations and continuous exports of gold by the SAF with the same exploitative state of the UAE. It is a narrative mainly shaped by half truths.
For the warring elites, victory means territory and power. For ordinary people, it means safety and basic services—two entirely different wars.
Despite stark contrasts between the RSF’s and SAF’s wartime narratives, and their divergent levels of success, both framed victory through control of sovereign territory, strategic bases, and troop numbers. Neither faction’s definition of victory included the efficiency of service provision to the public in their territories, a glaring contradiction that reveals how their priorities clash with those of civilians, particularly Sudan’s most oppressed and exploited communities.
Among unarmed civilians supporting either warring factions, definitions of the war and the indicators of victory diverged across socioeconomic lines and shifted over time. Affluent groups, those with material wealth or inherited privilege, prioritised control of sovereign sites and historical landmarks, reflecting a desire to restore the social hierarchies underpinning their status.
Conversely, marginalised communities emphasized securing safety and services.
While neither group fixated exclusively on a single metric of victory, their contrasting priorities laid bare a stark divide.
Public narratives also evolved: some who initially dismissed the SAF’s demands for unconditional loyalty later embraced them amid war fatigue and desperation for resolution, while others who scorned the RSF’s hollow claims “of a war for democracy” began tacitly endorsing it at the face of the escalating sentiments of central supremacy and denial of their marginalisation, thereby making an alliance of the oppressed across ethnic lines less probable in their imagination than ethnic alliances.
This survivalist approach to defining the war, and one’s stance toward it, is found among the unorganized civilians as well as organized resistance groups.
Take the Resistance Committees, for instance. Once the most influential force in the revolutionary movement, they initially condemned both warring factions.
The Umbada Emergency Room’s founding declaration, for instance, cited the state’s abandonment of public services to fuel “the war for power and wealth raging since April 15.” as the reason the room was created.
Many committees also prioritised “ending the war to save civilian lives” early on, vowing to uphold revolutionary demands despite the violent conflict. Yet over time, they strained to reconcile revolutionary principles with tactical (if temporary) backing for the SAF, viewed as a shortcut to restoring the status quo of “manageable” state oppression over the RSF’s unchecked violence.
This incoherence alienated supporters and eroded their role in public discourse. The unorganized public either turned away from a no longer representative political analysis or chose to go for full militarisation and stabilisation of the elitist state rather than a temporary and incoherent one.
Many of the bodies of revolutionaries were turned into an armed fuel of war and in the meanwhile many of the intellectuals of the resistance frost, provided theoretical ammunition to support the legitimacy of their claimed temporary partner, the SAF.
They advanced a prioritisation of the protection of the state apparatus with no consideration of the balance of power within this apparatus or its impact on the lives of the exploited, or even its clear structural failures and injustices.
Once again, the absence of a cohesive revolutionary political organisation, specifically, a disciplined socialist party, has proven catastrophic, regressing Sudan’s revolutionary potential by years.
Such a party, grounded in socialist principles and democratic deliberation, could systematically analyse strategies, counter ruling-class propaganda, provide the exploited with analysis and an alternative political project that prioritise their interests and needs, and mobilise collective lessons from past struggles.
It would also discipline the bourgeois tendencies of intellectuals, whose privilege, shaped by access to resources, education, and institutional training, often distorts their alignment with grassroots interests.
This exploration of competing wartime narratives reveals how definitions of the conflict are shaped by the material interests and consciousness of the groups advancing them. They map onto a fractured landscape: elitist factions anchor legitimacy in violent hierarchies that subordinate civilian lives, while marginalized communities cling to survivalist visions of safety.
Meanwhile, the absence of a cohesive revolutionary party has allowed ruling-class narratives to metastasize, repackaged only superficially across socio-economic factions aligned with either warring side.
Here, again, the lesson is unambiguous. Only a disciplined socialist party, one capable of constructing revolutionary cultural and ideological institutions to counter ruling-class hegemony, bourgeois compromises, and systemic betrayals, can rupture this cycle.
Its necessity has been repeatedly underscored in recent history, and even as revolutionary narratives wane, glimpses of an alternative project persist in grassroots demands for equitable peace, fleeting but genuine.
The task remains urgent, unglamorous, and inescapable.
