General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has discovered dialogue again. After years of promises, a military coup, emergency rule, war rhetoric and political exclusion, Sudan’s army chief now says he wants a comprehensive dialogue inside the country to complete a civilian democratic transition. Al Jazeera reported proposals to drop death-penalty charges against opposition leaders and form a preparatory committee; Radio Dabanga reported talk of a presidential amnesty for leaders of the Civil Democratic Alliance, known as Somoud, and other political activists.
The language is familiar. That is precisely the problem.
Since 2019, Burhan has repeatedly presented himself as Sudan’s temporary guardian on the road to civilian rule. After the previous military President Omar al-Bashir was overthrown in 2019, Burhan promised a civilian government and a transition of no more than two years, as Reuters reported at the time. In October 2021, however, Burhan led a new military takeover that dissolved the civilian-led government, imposed emergency rule and saw Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok detained; Human Rights Watch documented the rights implications of that takeover. In 2022, Burhan again said the army would step back from politics, a pledge reported by Al Jazeera. By 2023 and 2024, once war had erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces led by General Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces led by Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo (‘Hemedti’), Burhan was ruling out negotiations and promising decisive victory, according to Reuters and Sudan Tribune.
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Now, after failing to win the war, failing to restore the state, and failing to build a stable political order even in territories under army control, Burhan returns to the word ‘dialogue’ as if words have no memory.
Sudan’s crisis is not a shortage of conferences. It is a surplus of armed men trying to use civilians as witnesses to arrangements already written by force. Burhan’s latest invitation should therefore be read less as a democratic opening than as a political maneuver. It seeks to transform battlefield survival into political legitimacy by drawing civilian democratic forces into a process designed under military authority, inside army-controlled territory, while coercive institutions remain in the hands of the same power that derailed the transition.
This is not dialogue. It is managed consent.
The contradiction is stark. Burhan speaks of democratic transition while insisting that dialogue be held inside Sudan under a wartime authority that decides who is ‘national’ and who is excluded. He speaks of civilian rule while preserving the military’s right to define politics. He speaks of sovereignty while presiding over a war drawn into foreign interests and regional rivalries.
The question is not whether Sudanese should talk. Of course they should. The question is who sets the table, who holds the gun outside the door, and whether civilians are invited to shape a transition or merely to decorate one.
This is why Burhan’s offer is structurally weak. As I argued in African Arguments, Sudan’s war is no longer a simple two-sided contest between a national army and a paramilitary rebellion. Burhan and Hemedti, lead coalitions, not unified institutions. The SAF camp includes regular units, Darfuri armed movements, local defence groups and Islamist-linked networks that see the army’s survival as a route back to power. Any real settlement would require one national army, civilian oversight, exclusion of former-regime networks and accountability. Each step threatens a constituency on which Burhan depends.
The weakness is visible in areas under army control. Military recovery has not become political restoration. Reuters reported in July 2026 that more than two million people had returned to Khartoum while electricity operated at about one-third of prewar capacity. Nor has army control delivered security. Reuters reported drone strikes on Khartoum airport and other targets in May 2026, renewed RSF pressure on al-Obeid and drone strikes in the wider capital in August 2026; and attacks on Port Sudan in 2025 that targeted fuel depots and which put aid deliveries at risk. A government that cannot secure its wartime capital, restore basic services, or prevent the war from reaching strategic infrastructure cannot credibly present itself as the foundation of regional stability.
The regional argument is even more important. Sudan is not a remote battlefield. It sits between the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, along the Red Sea corridor. A Sudan ruled by Burhan is not a security asset. It is a security liability.
His continued rule risks turning the Red Sea coast into another arena of proxy competition, militarised governance and extremist recovery. It rewards a military-Islamist order whose history produced both state violence and paramilitary monsters. The RSF did not fall from the sky; it grew out of Bashir-era proxy violence in Darfur. In World Politics Review, I argued that Sudan’s army is not the best hope for unity it portrays itself as, because the camp around it is a coalition of armed, ideological and political interests.
The international community should not confuse familiarity with reliability. A man in uniform is not a state. A capital under military control is not stability. A dialogue held under coercive authority is not a transition.
Recent U.S. sanctions support, but do not replace, this Sudanese argument. In January 2025, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Burhan for destabiliaing Sudan and undermining the goal of democratic transition. In September 2025, Treasury sanctioned Sudanese Islamist actors including the Al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade, citing their involvement in the war and connections to Iran. These designations matter because they reinforce what Sudan’s own experience already shows: the problem is not only the RSF, but a political-military architecture that converts war into a route back to state power.
Against this background, Burhan’s dialogue risks functioning less as reconciliation than as political laundering. It asks civilians to convert military survival into civilian recognition, and to build a roof over a house whose foundations remain military command, wartime prosecution, ideological mobilisation and selective inclusion.
Sudanese civilians do need a political process. But it must begin from different premises: Burhan cannot chair the transition he destroyed; civilians cannot be decoration for a military-led dialogue; armed actors can negotiate ceasefires and disarmament, but not Sudan’s constitutional future; and former-regime Islamist networks cannot use dialogue as a return route.
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Any credible transition must start with Burhan’s departure from sovereign political authority. This is not a personal demand. It is a structural necessity.
A leader who promised civilian rule in 2019, overthrew the transition in 2021, promised withdrawal from politics in 2022, rejected negotiations during the war, failed to restore stable governance in army-held areas, and now returns with a dialogue controlled by his own authority cannot be the bridge to Sudan’s democratic future. He is the bottleneck through which every promise has been narrowed, delayed or broken.
For regional and international actors, the conclusion should be clear. Stability in Sudan will not come from rehabilitating Burhan as the least bad option. It will come from a civilian-led transition, a professional national army under civilian control, accountability and the isolation of networks that turned the state into an instrument of domination.
There is no safe authoritarian shortcut. There is no military monopoly disguised as stability. There is no democratic transition chaired by the man who broke it. If Sudan is to become part of regional security rather than a source of regional disorder, the first step is not to bless Burhan’s dialogue.
The first step is to make clear that Sudan’s stability begins where Burhan’s rule ends.
Ezzat Khairi is a Sudanese political analyst and writer focused on war, state collapse and democratic transition. His work has appeared internationally. He is the author of Makashfi’s Candle.
