Solomon Ayele Dersso, PhD, Founding Director, Amani Africa

15 April 2026 marks the 3^rd-year anniversary of the outbreak of the civil war in Sudan, pitting the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), headed by General Abdel Fattah Al Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti).

On that same day, the international conference on Sudan will be held in Berlin, hosted by Germany together with the African Union (AU), the European Union (EU), France, the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK).

With the US-Israel war on Iran dominating international attention, this conference brings a rare focus to the war in Sudan.

Breaking the Saf-RSF death and destruction trap

The war grinds on unabated. There is little sign of its resolution on the horizon (see here).

There is no prospect of either of the warring parties securing total military victory. Neither a ceasefire freezing of the war (and hence the crystallisation of the partition of Sudan) nor a power-sharing arrangement between SAF-RSF guarantees sustainable peace.

The coalescing of peace efforts into two tracks (the truce/ceasefire track championed by the US-led Quad and the political dialogue track spearheaded by the African Union leaning multilateral organisations making up the Quintet) carries little prospect of changing either the battlefield or the mediation dynamics.

It is long past time to abandon the SAF-RSF-centric template that guided international engagement for the past three years.

During the last three years, the warring parties carried out hostilities with no regard to the rules of war. They both unleashed violence in an atmosphere of near-total impunity. The UN International Independent Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan concluded that RSF’s violence in Darfur is of such a nature, ‘the hallmarks of which point to a genocide.’

The war has claimed the lives of more than 150,000 people. Living up to Kholood Khair’s apt observation that ‘Sudan’s catastrophe can now only be described in superlatives’, Sudan now bears the status of being ‘the world’s largest hunger, protection and displacement crisis.’ It is now the world’s worst famine, on top of being the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and largest child displacement crisis.

Much of the peace processes in Sudan since the ouster of former President Omar al-Bashir prised the role of the SAF and RSF. This approach has persisted since the outbreak of this war three years ago. It is seen as a pragmatic necessity. Yet, instead of facilitating peace, this SAF-RSF-centric approach (along with growing Sudanese polarisation and deepening external support for the warring parties) has only incentivised the warring parties to persist in the military showdown.

Making the 3^rd international conference count

Apart from the enormous human suffering and the destruction it precipitated, this war has now resulted in the de facto partition of Sudan into two between the SAF-controlled northern, eastern and parts of southern Sudan, and the RSF-dominated western and parts of southern Sudan. This has put the very survival of Sudan in grave peril.

As Abdul Mohammed pointed out, ‘without new thinking, a ceasefire risks freezing disaster in place.’ As such, breaking the death and destruction trap that the fighting between SAF and RSF imposed on Sudan requires giving a chance to a new approach – a civilian transitional authority.

The international conference on Sudan in Berlin, marking the 3rd year of the outbreak of the war, can be the forum for setting in motion the process towards the establishment of a civilian transitional authority.

Ahead of this anniversary, Chatham House, the United Kingdom’s international relations think tank, bestowed on Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) the most befitting recognition with the institution’s 2025 prize. This is a reminder that after three years of war and with no end in sight, the Sudanese civilian realm is the only avenue not only for breaking the stalemate between the two warring factions but also for forcing them into changing their calculations.

Why a civilian-centric process is a strategic necessity

The issue is no longer about including civilians. It is rather whether peace is possible without making them the centre of gravity.

Anchoring the peace efforts on and prioritising the civilian realm constitutes a critical antidote to the accelerating disintegration of Sudan.

Reinforcing the role played by the ERRs in the provision of aid and basic services and helping in maintaining infrastructure, this approach operates as an autonomous state-preservation instrument around which all Sudanese can rally.

The establishment of such technocratic civilian administration by Sudanese social and civic actors and the diplomatic recognition of such government by the international community carry additional benefits.

First, by creating an entity as the main locus of diplomatic efforts and separate from either of the two fighting parties, it ends the glorification of the people with guns. The idea is not that this will dispense with the necessity of engaging the warring parties, but it disrupts the incentive structure.

Second, it thus has the potential to break the logic of total victory and total defeat by which the action of the warring parties is currently dictated.

Third, this would incentivise the warring parties to opt for committing to a ceasefire as a means of limiting their loss in any future dispensation.

Fourth, by the sheer fact of its presence, it is also possible that the warring parties would be put into a position of pursuing their interests by choosing to accept the role of such technocratic civilian administration.

A two-phase transitional framework

As argued previously, the central idea to secure a breakthrough in breaking the SAF-RSF grip on the fate of Sudan is the establishment of a two-phased transitional process. Admittedly, this is easier said than done. Yet the fragmentation that the war unleashed is not insurmountable. The alternative is the perpetuation of the three years of disaster. Given the trajectory of the war, there is neither a cleaner nor an easier approach than this for arresting Sudan’s deepening downward spiral.

Taking further the arguments that analysts such as Alex de Waal made, this two-staged process to a civilian-centric transitional process injects a measure of pragmatism into the proposal of establishing a civilian administration as a way of breaking the SAF-RSF trap.

The first phase involves the establishment of a civilian technocratic transitional administration. This is a government whose only raison d’etre is the salvation of the Sudanese state by creating the space for a Sudanese-led peace process that brings to the centre of diplomatic efforts the agency of Sudanese civic actors. The mandate of this caretaker administration is envisaged to be further limited in three ways. First, it has a limited substantive mandate focusing on facilitating humanitarian support and creating the space for charting a process for an all-inclusive civilian transitional government. Second, its term of office will also be limited in time. Third, to break the transitional governance trap, no member of this technocratic administration will be eligible to participate in the composition of the civilian transitional government.

As a body with such limited emergency and technocratic power for saving the Sudanese state, there is a need for its urgent establishment, whose narrow focus can mitigate, if not dissolve, fragmentation and contestation, which have been used against effective engagement with Sudanese civic actors. The impact of polarisation can also be reduced by mobilising the engagement of Sudanese social and political forces around the definition of the criteria for determining who and what needs to be done during the tenure of the technocratic administration.

Sudanese civilian forces working with the AU and others in the international community can take the lead in initiating the process for the constitution of such a technocratic civilian administration. It is necessary that the upcoming conference on Sudan in Berlin can be the platform for making a declaration of support for such a process, with Sudanese civilian leadership. Among others, the international community will play a critical role not only in extending diplomatic recognition but also, importantly, in providing substantial institutional support for it to restore the effective functioning of such state institutions as the bureaucracy and the Central Bank.

Apart from creating opportunities for silencing the guns, the technocratic civilian administration’s main role is the creation of the conditions for the holding of a national popular convention based on principles and formats to be agreed to by the Sudanese.  This is a convention that will bring together various political and social forces of Sudan for the elaboration of a transitional roadmap and the establishment of the transitional government for the implementation of the roadmap, involving various reforms that will culminate in the adoption of a constitution and the establishment of a constitutional government, inaugurating a new dispensation in Sudan.

Whether or not this could work and how it could be made to work depends first and foremost on the Sudanese civic actors and the creativity and willingness of those engaging in the search for peace in Sudan. Barlin could be where the journey towards working on making this civilian-centric approach work begins.

Abdul Mohammed

The passing of Ambassador Konjit is a painful loss for Ethiopia, for Africa, and for all those who still believe that diplomacy, at its best, is one of the noblest instruments of public service.

She belonged to a generation of diplomats who did not reduce diplomacy to protocol, access, or maneuver. They understood it as statecraft in its highest form: the disciplined, principled, and intelligent pursuit of national interest, conducted with dignity, restraint, and strategic purpose. Ambassador Konjit represented that tradition with distinction. She was one of Ethiopia’s finest diplomats, and unquestionably one of Africa’s too.

Her death comes at a sobering historical moment. We are living through a time when diplomacy has been globally diminished, hollowed out, and in far too many places displaced by transactional deal-making. Multilateralism is under strain. Norm-based mediation has declined. Transactional approaches, short-term bargains, and interest-driven alignments are increasingly replacing serious, principled diplomatic engagement.

At the epicenter of this troubling shift lies the erosion of diplomatic culture within major global powers in the west, particularly the United States, where diplomacy has increasingly been subordinated to coercive instruments and short-term power calculations. This has contributed significantly to the global weakening of diplomacy as a credible and primary tool of statecraft.

This decline is not an abstract institutional matter. It has consequences written in blood. When diplomacy loses stature, war gains ground. When foreign ministries are weakened, when mediators are sidelined, force ceases to be the last resort and becomes the default instrument.

In this sense, the passing of Ambassador Konjit is not simply the death of an accomplished individual. It feels, too, like the fading of a certain diplomatic ethic—one grounded in seriousness, intellectual discipline, discretion, patriotism, and service.

Ethiopia produced diplomats of exceptional caliber. Ethiopian diplomacy was forged not only in the defense of sovereignty, but also in the service of Africa’s wider quest for dignity, multilateralism, and collective voice. Ambassador Konjit is the embodiment and towering practitioner of that tradition.

She represented a foreign policy inheritance that was credible, professional, ethically grounded, and larger than any one regime. She served across political eras with consistency and integrity, embodying continuity where politics often produced rupture.

In serving under successive regimes—from the imperial period to the present—Ambassador Konjit upheld a rare and vital distinction: the difference between the state and the government of the day. Governments come and go; regimes rise and fall. But the state endures as the embodiment of a people’s history, sovereignty, and continuity. Professional diplomats, as her life so clearly illustrates, serve the state in its perpetuity. In doing so, they anchor national continuity amid political change.

She was deeply Pan-African, and deeply committed to multilateralism. She understood that Ethiopia’s strength—and Africa’s—lies in unity of voice and principled engagement with the world.

Diplomats are among the least acknowledged servants of the state. Their greatest successes are often invisible, because they prevent crises rather than react to them. When diplomacy works, it is quiet. When it fails, the consequences are loud and devastating.

That is why its current global decline is so dangerous. Ceasefires without political vision, negotiations without legitimacy, and short-term bargains have begun to substitute for real diplomacy.

The African Union and African institutions must take note of a deeper and more troubling dimension of this decline. The erosion of principled, committed diplomats—those capable of serving as serious negotiators—is increasingly at the heart of the failure of mediation to avert, manage, and resolve conflicts across the continent. The passing of Ambassador Konjit should serve as a moment of reckoning. It should trigger serious reflection on the state of African mediation, the caliber of its diplomatic cadres, and the trajectory of its diplomatic traditions.

It is also a warning. Africa must resist the growing normalization of transactional deal-making approaches, often externally driven and increasingly promoted through short-term arrangements that lack legitimacy, political vision, and sustainability. The continent must not succumb to these approaches at the expense of principled, strategic diplomacy.

Ambassador Konjit represented the opposite of this decline. She embodied diplomacy as service, discipline, and responsibility.

She also mentored generations of Ethiopian diplomats, shaping not only careers, but values. Her influence will endure through those she trained, mentored and inspired.

Her passing should therefore not only invite mourning, but celebrating her legacy and reflection.

What kind of diplomats does Ethiopia need today?

What kind of diplomats must Africa produce in an age of fragmentation and crisis?

These are strategic questions.

If diplomacy is to recover, it will require the return of seriousness, principle, and professionalism and the stubbornness for finding solutions and common ground —the very qualities Ambassador Konjit represented.

She leaves behind more than memory. She leaves behind a standard.

A standard of patriotism, Pan-Africanism, professionalism, and principled service.

In mourning her, we honor not only her life, but a diplomatic tradition that must be sustained and renewed.

May she rest in eternal peace.

Solomon Ayele Dersso, PhD, Founding Director, Amani Africa

The candidacy of former Senegalese President Macky Sall for the top United Nations (UN) job has unleashed enormous controversy both in his homeland and at continental level since Burundi, the 2026 Chairperson of the African Union (AU), submitted his name as a candidate to the UN on 2 March 2026.

This issue almost plunged Africa and the AU into a major diplomatic and institutional crisis.

In a development that raised serious questions about the scope of discretion of the Chairperson of the AU and the Bureau and after reports claiming AU support for Sall’s candidacy were exposed, At the behest of Burundi in its capacity as AU Chairperson, the Bureau of the AU Assembly (made up of Burundi, Ghana, Tanzania and Angola, minus a North African representative yet to be agreed by the region) convened on 26 March 2026 to consider the proposal for endorsement of the candidacy of Sall through a silent procedure outside of AU’s established process for on candidatures. At the bureau meeting, two out of four members of the Bureau, including Burundi, reportedly supported the motion. One member reportedly did not participate. The lack of objection meant that Burundi’s motion to table a draft decision of endorsement for AU member states carried the day.

As a follow-up to the Bureau meeting and under the direction of Burundi’s President as AU Chairperson, the AU Commission sent out a letter on the same day, 26 March, addressed to AU Member States carrying a draft decision for endorsing Sall’s candidacy. The letter, referencing Rule 19(1) of the Rules of Procedure of the Assembly on decision-making by consensus or by two-thirds majority, presented the draft decision for adoption through a silent procedure. The letter offered no explanation as to why the established process of considering candidatures through the Ministerial Committee on African Candidatures within the International System on the basis of the AU Executive Council decision EX.CL/213(VIII) was circumvented. Neither was there any compelling reason for displacing the role of the Ministerial Committee nor any consultation that established that AU member states are disposed to support Sall’s candidature and outside of the regular process.  Additionally, in an unprecedented departure from established practice, the letter gave AU member states only 24 hours to communicate their views. Also unprecedentedly, it set a threshold of one-third of member states to breaking the silence for the draft decision to be considered as not adopted.

By the close of business on Friday, 27 March, 20 AU member states, representing more than the unprecedently high threshold of 1/3^rd majority, broke the silence. The total number of countries that broke the silence increased to 21 after receipt of a communication from Tunisia apparently after close of business on the same day. As a result, the AU Commission stated, in a letter dated 27 March, that the draft decision ‘on UN Secretary General candidacy of H.E. Macky Sall…has not been adopted.’ The fact that more than 1/3^rd of AU members broke the silence within the very tight (less than) 24hrs time limit highlighted the resolve of AU member states to avert the institutional crisis the situation posed.

‘Gross breach of AU rules’ and ‘jettisoning of …established practice’ of regional rotation 

Both substantive and procedural irregularities led to this outcome. First and substantively, the draft decision would have led to the flouting of the AU’s rules and regular processes on the endorsement of African candidatures in the international system. Not surprisingly, member states that broke the silence, including South Africa, thus observed that ‘the established rules…for submission of States Candidacies appear to have been bypassed.’ This outcome also reflected concerns about the lack of transparency and due process, which are guaranteed under the AU Ministerial Committee on Candidatures. Thus, for Nigeria, as stated in its letter responding to the AU Commission letter of 26 March, the proposal to present Sall as an AU consensus candidate came ‘as a surprise as the candidate is being fielded for such a coveted position…without subjecting it to the scrutiny of the Ministerial Committee of the African Union.’ Rwanda’s Minister of Foreign Affairs went further and stated that ‘a direct rush to a 24-hour “silence procedure”, through which the AU Chairperson would wish to force a 2/3 “silent” majority endorsing his solo and irregular decision, without any attempt to seek an open discussion and a consensus on the African candidate for the position of UNSG, is also a gross breach of AU rules and regulations.’

Second, and procedure-wise, unless the plan was to constrain member states, there was no justification for limiting the timeline for the silence procedure to 24 hours rather than the established standard of at least 48 to 72 hours. Burundi’s Permanent Representative publicly acknowledged that the AU Legal Counsel and the Secretariat objected to the 24-hour timeline. Yet their objection was apparently overruled despite there being no compelling reason for not heeding the opinion of the Legal Counsel and the AU Commission, who are duty-bound to defend and ensure respect for established AU rules and processes. Additionally, as pointed out in the letter by South Africa, ‘the standard practice is that silence procedure is broken if one or more members raise an objection within the designated timeline.’ South Africa’s letter thus held that the requirement that silence can only be broken by one-third of the majority ‘is not standard practice within the international system.’

Third, there is an established, albeit legally non-binding, informal rule and practice of regional rotation that allows alteration of the position of the Secretary-General to candidates from various regional groups of the world. According to this rule and practice, the turn for taking the position of the Secretary-General is for a candidate from the Latin America and Caribbean group. As pointed out in Nigeria’s response, ‘…Africa considers the Caribbean as the sixth region of the continent. By jettisoning this established practice (of regional rotation), the Federal Republic of Nigeria believes the African Union is putting its position and interest in jeopardy now and in the future.’

It is worth noting that the 21 March Declaration of the summit of Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC), with whom Africa held the first joint high-level forum co-chaired by Burundi and Colombia on the same day committing to strengthen ties between the two regions, affirmed that ‘the time has come for a national of Latin America and the Caribbean to assume the responsibility of holding the position of Secretary- General of the United Nations, in accordance with the principle of equitable geographical balance and diversity in the leadership of the Organization.’ Under the circumstances, let alone endorsement by AU member states Sall’s candidacy on its own undermines the spirit of the CELAC-Africa high-level forum and South-South cooperation as well as the principle of regional rotation. This is never in the interest of Africa, as it will be the turn of the Africa group for the next round of the election of the Secretary-General.

A win for Africa and AU’s institutional stability

The outcome rejecting the proposed endorsement by AU of Sall’s candidacy is a major win for Africa’s diplomacy and AU’s established rules and processes. It prevented the emergence of an unjustifiable precedent that would have scuttled established AU rules and processes on the consideration and endorsement of candidates for leadership positions within the UN and the international system writ large.

Through this decision, AU member states saved from collapse the most important diplomatic device that was in place since the time of the Organisation of African Unity and served Africa well in putting Africans in leadership roles within the international system, including such important UN agencies as WTO, WHO, ILO and UNESCO.

Equally important is the rejection of the draft decision that saved Africa from breaching the informal rule of regional rotation, hence from undermining its own ‘current and future’ interests.

No –the silence of the rest of the AU members is not a signifier of support for Sall

Despite the collapse of the proposal for AU endorsement and Africa’s interests at stake, Sall’s candidacy and campaign continue to be imbued with misinformation and deceitful propaganda. Indeed, Sall’s campaign is doubling down on the claim of having wide support from AU member states, arguing that only a minority of countries registered their objection. Yet, the claim that ‘the silence’ of those who did not respond to the silence procedure is a signifier of wide support for Sall could not be far from the truth. First, even Senegal, from where Sall hails, distanced itself from his candidacy. Second, if Sall was confident about the support from this ‘silent’ majority, he would have subjected his candidacy to the scrutiny of the AU Ministerial Committee.

Despite the fact that the planning for his candidacy started in 2025 and he had the possibility of even having his candidacy considered during the AU summit in February 2026, he did not opt for it. There was no other reason for opting for an irregular and rules upending route for securing AU support other than Sall’s fear that he would not succeed in securing the support of the so-called ‘silent’ majority that his supporters claim he continues to enjoy even after the rejection of his endorsement by the AU.

Honourable path – Withdrawal of Sall’s candidacy

These dynamics, together with the candidacy’s ethically questionable practices involving both misinformation and the bending or circumventing of AU rules and established multilateral practice of particular interest for Africa warrant the reconsideration of the continuation of the candidacy. As chairperson of the AU and the country that sponsored the candidacy, Burundi has a responsibility to take a lead in this regard for reaffirming respect for established AU rules and the practice of regional rotation. In view of all the foregoing and the fact that the next round in the regional rotation for the position of the Secretary-General is for Africa, it is incumbent on Burundi, as Chairperson of the AU, to reconsider its stance and press on Sall that the most honourable path is to withdraw his candidacy. Burundi supported him to the point of leveraging its role as Chairperson. And it stumbled but not irredeemably. By reconsidering Sall’s candidacy, it can restore the erosion of its credibility as AU Chairperson and safeguard Africa’s collective interests, including the multilateral norm of regional rotation.