SUDAN INSIGHT ALERT: Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project - Riders on the Storm: Rebels, Soldiers, and Paramilitaries in Sudan’s Margins
Dr. Dan Watson, a postdoctoral researcher with the University of Sussex and ACLED, warns that the declining relevance of the rebel groups may culminate their usage of the Juba peace process to become “part of a reactionary alliance, taking their place alongside paramilitary and security elites in Khartoum, and entrenching militarised rule in the peripheries.”
Since 2016, Watson argues, violence in Sudan’s peripheries has evolved from recurrent clashes between rebel and state-aligned forces to urbanised and ethnicised clashes, joined by frequent attacks on IDPs and farmers enacted by militias linked to the semi-periphery of Arab-identifying groups who’s declining fortunes in the Sudanese political economy lead them to launch attacks against weaker non-Arab groups.
Thus, rebel groups have been rendered “near irrelevant,” and their attempts to expand their presence via the peace process may “ultimately exacerbate” the violence.