Women in Sudan’s Peace Process: The Need for a New Push
Sudanese women have played a central role in mobilisation, humanitarian response, community mediation and advocacy, yet they remain largely excluded from official negotiations. The paper argues that any peace process that sidelines women risks producing narrow, elite-driven agreements that fail to address protection, accountability and long-term stability.
OBJECTIVES
The paper aims to examine the persistent exclusion of Sudanese women from formal peace mediation processes and to show how this weakens the effectiveness, legitimacy and sustainability of peace efforts. It highlights the gap between formal commitments to the Women, Peace and Security agenda and their limited implementation, while identifying practical ways to move women’s participation from informal consultation to meaningful decision-making roles.
EXPERTS
Manal Taha
Giulia Ferraro
Bernardo Monzani
Background
Sudan’s peace processes have consistently shown a gap between formal commitments to the Women, Peace and Security agenda and their actual implementation. After the 2018–2019 revolution, women played a central role in political mobilisation and expectations for inclusion were high, especially following the 2019 Constitutional Declaration and the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement. However, women remained largely excluded from high-level Track I negotiations, and gender-related commitments were often symbolic rather than operational. The 2023 war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces further deepened this rollback: mediation efforts such as the Jeddah talks, IGAD roadmap, Cairo summit, Manama process and later high-level initiatives remained largely elite-driven, dominated by armed actors and male decision-makers. Although Sudanese women continued to contribute through community mediation, humanitarian response, advocacy against conflict-related sexual violence and informal consultation platforms, their proposals were rarely integrated into formal outcomes. This exclusion has weakened the legitimacy, responsiveness and long-term sustainability of peace efforts, especially in relation to civilian protection, accountability, sexual violence, humanitarian access and inclusive political transition
Findings
Future mediation efforts should move beyond symbolic consultation and formally embed Women, Peace and Security principles into the structure of Sudan’s peace process. International and regional actors, particularly the AU, IGAD, ALPS and the Quad, should explicitly require gender-sensitive provisions in ceasefire and political agreements, including protection from conflict-related sexual violence, survivor support mechanisms, accountability for perpetrators, safe humanitarian access, and women’s participation in ceasefire monitoring. At the same time, mediation formats should be redesigned to create multiple coordinated Track I spaces, including regional or thematic tracks where women with local legitimacy, political experience and community constituencies can participate directly as negotiators rather than only as consultees. The case of the Eastern Sudan Track shows that women’s meaningful inclusion is possible when rooted in local legitimacy and backed by clear political structures. Without these reforms, Sudan risks repeating a pattern of narrow, militarised settlements that may temporarily manage conflict but fail to build a durable, representative and socially grounded peace.
