With Friends Like These: Strong Benchmarks for Next Phase of U.S.-Sudan Relations
The U.S. government’s October 2017 lifting of its comprehensive economic and financial sanctions on Sudan has created the impression that the Sudanese regime of President Omar al-Bashir is evolving into a reliable partner and no longer poses a threat to the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States. This impression is deeply misguided ...
Radical Intolerance: Sudan’s Religious Oppression and Embrace of Extremist Groups
The Obama and Trump administrations, in temporarily and then permanently lifting comprehensive sanctions on Sudan, cited improvements in the Sudanese government’s counterterrorism and its broader humanitarian and human rights record. But a closer look reveals these claims to be very problematic ...
Ominous Threats Descending On Darfur
In Darfur, what began in part as a disarmament and collection campaign has rapidly escalated into a volatile, high-stakes armed standoff that could dramatically alter the balance of power of a resource-rich region where large-scale violence has unfolded ...
A Question of Leadership: Addressing a Dangerous Crisis in Sudan’s SPLM-N
Download the full report here | العربية A worsening recent political divide within the leadership of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N, or “movement”), traditionally based in South Kordofan and Blue Nile (the “Two Areas”), is increasingly likely to lead to a change of leadership of the movement. Of grave concern, the political divide has already led to violent clashes with strong ethnic undertones between units of the movement’s armed wing (the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North, the SPLA-N) in parts of Sudan’s Blue Nile state that are controlled by the movement and in camps hosting refugees from Blue Nile just across the border ...
Border Control from Hell: How the EU’s migration partnership legitimizes Sudan’s “militia state”
Large-scale migration to Europe has precipitated a paradigm shift in relations between the European Union (EU) and the government of Sudan, and closer ties between both entities. Read the full report ...
Is the Sudan-Saudi Arabia Alliance Paying Off?
With only one week left in his administration, President Obama issued an Executive Order that conditionally lifted long-standing sanctions on Sudan. The United States first enacted sanctions on the Government of Sudan in 1997 for its support of international terrorism, destabilizing regional actions, and serious human rights violations. It applied additional sanctions in 2006 for widespread human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law in Darfur ...
Khartoum’s Economic Achilles’ Heel: The intersection of war, profit, and greed
Sudan’s increasingly urgent economic crisis, which has recently grown more acute because of financial isolation related in part to tighter sanctions enforcement for Iran, has become the Sudanese regime’s greatest vulnerability. This economic vulnerability has caused sanctions relief to replace debt relief as the regime’s primary preoccupation, giving the U.S. government powerful leverage to support an inclusive peace deal in Sudan that leads to a transition to democracy ...