Growing up in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, Aamin Mohamedkheir ’26 experienced episodes of political violence, instability and internet blackouts. In high school, he withstood tear gas and bullets during the 2019 protests that overthrew the thirty-year military regime of the country’s dictator, Omar al-Bashir.
However, Mohamedkheir said he could have never predicted the magnitude of violence that has swept across his country since mid-April 2023, when he received alerts that fighting had erupted in his hometown. At first, Mohamedkheir dismissed the reports as part of a familiar pattern of hostilities, until he heard the sounds of heavy gunfire and explosions during a phone call with his sister.
“That’s when I knew — this is serious,” Mohamedkheir said. “Nothing to this extent has occurred in my lifetime, or my parents’ lifetime.”
Airstrikes devastating the streets of Khartoum marked the onset of an ongoing power struggle between two warring factions, which had previously cooperated to prevent the transition to civilian-led democracy that was intended to follow the 2019 revolution.
While international attention has focused on wars in Ukraine and Gaza, UN officials have called the conflict in Sudan the single largest humanitarian crisis in the world with mass displacement and the specter of widespread famine. Today’s violence echoes the genocide that has periodically devastated Darfur, a region the size of Spain in the west of Sudan, since the early 2000s.
“The civil war in Sudan is creating a colossal humanitarian crisis that seems bound to grow much worse. The picture right now is staggering,” said Bertrand Patenaude, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. “The cascading violence, destruction and displacement are threatening to produce a catastrophic famine.”
As Mohamedkheir studied for midterms at Stanford last spring, members of his family fled to Egypt. While his family’s dual Egyptian-Sudanese citizenship made it relatively easy to cross the border, his extended family and others have waited months in the desert hoping to gain asylum.
“The scant international public attention to the humanitarian crisis in Sudan is an important element of that country’s tragedy,” said Larry Diamond, professor of political science and the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute. “The world needs to do much more to negotiate an end to the fighting and to surge assistance to the Sudanese people.”
While the Western media has often labeled the conflict as a civil war, Sudanese scholars stress that it is a clash between armed groups. “Everyday civilians are not actually involved, and neither of these military groups have the support of the civilians,” said Umniya Najaer Ph.D. ’25, who studies modern thought and literature with an emphasis on Black studies.
Further exacerbating the ravages of war, decades of economic mismanagement and foreign land acquisitions combined with climate change and drought have also laid the conditions for famine in a country that was once called the “breadbasket” of the Middle East and Africa.
More than 25 million Sudanese — over half the country’s population — are at risk of acute hunger. In August, famine was officially declared in the Darfur region of Sudan, which Patenaude said “could easily tip over into outright starvation.”
The fighting has triggered one of the worst displacement crises in recent history. Ten million civilians are internally displaced, while two million have sought refuge in neighboring countries. Human rights groups allege that massacre and other grave atrocities have been committed against non-Arab groups in Darfur.
Given the failure of the international system to indict the high-level perpetrators of earlier genocide in Darfur for over two decades, Sudanese activists have called for war criminals to be tried inside Sudan, so they can be “held accountable by their own people,” said Nisrin Elamin Ph.D. ’19, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto and founder of the Sudan Solidarity Collective.
In June 2023, the Sudan Doctors’ Union estimated that more than 70% of medical facilities in Sudan’s already fragile healthcare system have been completely destroyed. Recent intense flooding has further exacerbated displacement and the spread of disease.
“People are dying from outbreaks of very curable diseases like malaria and cholera, including my cousin, a young girl who died of malaria late last year,” Najaer said.
As conditions deteriorate, humanitarian efforts have been spearheaded by networks of local volunteers who have organized Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs). The ERRs have provided food, medical assistance and established temporary schools for the nineteen million children whose education has been interrupted by the war.
“Young people across Sudan are modeling a new way of thinking about humanitarianism that is much more grassroots,” Najaer said. “Where there has been a complete failure of the state and of the international organizations that are supposed to step in and provide basic humanitarian aid or protect people from militias and genocidal violence, people have showed up and created the alternative themselves.”
Sudanese scholars emphasized the need to establish an immediate ceasefire, implement protections for civilians who face danger of genocidal violence, and open humanitarian corridors for international aid organizations.
“The Sudanese people have a very long history of resisting colonialism, of resisting dictators and surviving under harsh conditions… In a more long-term sense, the Sudanese people continue to desire and struggle for a full transition to a civilian democratic rule one day,” Najaer said.
Najaer urged the creation of “coordinated initiatives” to restore civilian government, rehabilitate survivors of war, and rebuild the healthcare, education and agriculture sectors.
Najaer encouraged the support of organizations that are delivering life-saving assistance, including the Darfur Women Action Group, the Sudanese American Physicians Association, the Sudan Doctors Union and Keep Eyes On Sudan.
“In Sudan, these forms of solidarity and resource distribution are literally part of the fabric of our society… we can give money that can save lives. This is something that no state, no military, can take away from us as regular people who are on the other side of the world,” Najaer said.
Elamin said the conflict between the two warring factions ultimately prevents the people of Sudan from realizing their aspirations of democracy following the 2019 revolution.
“The revolution continues, even though it has been crushed, and peoples’ energies have been diverted towards emergency relief,” she said.
Reflecting on the beleaguered state of his country, Mohamedkheir expressed two hopes: “I want for the war to stop and for people to start having the ability to go back home. And second of all, my hope is having a government which is non-corrupt and which is a non-military government.”