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Sudanese Women Share How to Prevent Mass Atrocities and Promote Peace

Last week, the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) hosted Sudanese civil society experts Hanin Ahmed and Enass Abdalla for a virtual conversation on the deteriorating situation in Sudan. They shared their expertise and insights about the current situation in Sudan and ways that the international community can support the prevention of mass atrocities. Below are key takeaways from the discussion:

  • Sudan’s crisis is worsening, with acute atrocity risks in several areas. El Obeid, the Nuba Mountains/South Kordofan, Blue Nile, and Darfur regions were highlighted as areas of particular concern for mass atrocities, and speakers noted that drones are increasingly striking markets, water infrastructure, displacement tents, and other civilian spaces. Civilians face immense challenges such as communications blackouts, attacks on humanitarian responders and civilian infrastructure, dehumanizing rhetoric online, sexual violence, displacement, famine, and climate-related agricultural losses.
  • Sudan does not lack early warning; it lacks early action based on repeated warnings and the structural risk factors. The current war is part of a longer history of conflict, impunity, coups, and incomplete peace processes in which military power and violence were used as political leverage. Civil society groups have consistently raised alarm bells about these structural risk factors as well as acute atrocity warning signs. Yet too often, they are not acted upon. Effective atrocity prevention requires moving beyond early warning and emergency response to addressing the conditions that continue to reproduce the cycles of violence.
  • Efforts to prevent atrocities and promote peace must address the war economy, proxy powers, and cross border networks sustaining the war. Recent reports that combine field data and satellite imagery emphasized the role of external networks, cross-border supply routes, arms flows, and economic interests sustaining the conflict. As long as these networks remain intact, humanitarian interventions and successive peace initiatives will not work to prevent violence and human rights violations. This also requires us to examine how armed actors can use violence to acquire political leverage and subsequently become interlocutors in negotiations.
  • Local responders have become the backbone of the civilian protection system and need direct support and protection. Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), women-led organizations, community and religious leaders, volunteers, soup kitchens, safe spaces, and informal communications networks are helping to evacuate civilians and provide food and services for survivors of gender-based violence. This clearly demonstrates the support and solidarity of the Sudanese people Yet these groups struggle to keep doing this essential work, face enormous personal risks, and operate with very limited resources where money is not reaching those who need it most. Protecting these responders, providing direct and flexible funding, reducing unnecessary administrative barriers, and giving them meaningful roles in humanitarian coordination is key to strengthening protection at the community level.
  • Support should combine immediate humanitarian needs with accountability and longer-term resilience. Gender-based violence is used as a weapon of war by the parties to the conflict, and there is a complete lack of accountability for these crimes. Addressing conflict-related sexual violence requires survivor-centered medical and psychosocial services, stronger documentation and accountability efforts, justice for victims, and protection for survivors and those collecting evidence. Donors—especially private philanthropy—can help by providing flexible funding to credible and reliable local organizations. Displaced Sudanese communities in neighboring countries must not be overlooked, as they have immediate needs for education and employment in the host countries.
  • Women must be treated as political actors with influence, not simply as victims or participants. Sudanese women are experiencing extraordinary violence; they are also accumulating political knowledge, organizing humanitarian responses, documenting abuses, and participating in political processes, but there is a distance between their activism and decision-making authorities. The question for Women, Peace and Security should move beyond whether women are present at the table to whether their analysis and recommendations shape decisions. Their different regional, generational, socioeconomic, ethnic, and political perspectives should be understood as normal political pluralism rather than an obstacle to inclusion.
  • Ceasefire negotiations and decisions about Sudan’s political future require different forms of engagement. Negotiations are necessary to stop the fighting, but they should not determine by themselves what Sudan’s future will look  like. Sudanese civil society must have a central role. Who is invited to negotiations, who briefs mediators and policymakers, who leads mediations, and whose knowledge informs decisions are critical questions. Longer-term peace will require an inclusive, national plan that connects immediate protection with political participation, economic recovery, and a context-specific women, peace, and security framework.

Watch the event recording here.

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