The 12 September 2025 roadmap issued by the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt prescribes a tightly sequenced exit from Sudan’s war: a three-month humanitarian truce, a permanent ceasefire, and a nine-month transition to civilian rule. The plan converts complex political choices into calendar milestones, inaugurating a form of diplomacy that substitutes dates for durable changes in incentives. That approach, here described as “calendar peace”, is rhetorically appealing and politically visible, but might risk structural fragility. Deadlines without credible enforcement or meaningful alterations to combatant payoffs risk producing episodic pauses rather than a sustainable settlement.

Historically, efforts to establish peace in Sudan have yielded little lasting significance. From the Addis Ababa accord of 1972 to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005, Sudan’s negotiated settlements have followed a recurring pattern. Deals are brokered by elites, signed by principal combatants, and left to sputter without durable enforcement, political inclusion, or the redistribution of stakes on the ground. The Darfur accords in Abuja, Doha and Juba each promised security guarantees and development packages. However, each also failed to dismantle militia economies or to build impartial monitoring that could prevent rearmament. Those historical lessons are not academic. They explain why short, elite-driven bargains tend to collapse once external attention fades and local incentives favor predation. Any fresh plan that repeats this template- fast timetable, narrow signatory set, weak verification will likely produce a temporary break and then renewed violence.

The most recent attempts at mediation read like a chronology of frustrated design. The Jeddah Declaration in 2023 promised protection of civilians and humanitarian access but in practice its commitments did not translate into predictable relief on the ground. Subsequent rounds, including Bahrain’s Manama contacts in January 2024 and the U.S.-led Geneva platform in August 2024, failed to unify the principal military actors around enforceable terms. London’s April 2025 conference, convened on the war’s second anniversary, produced aid pledges but no diplomatic breakthrough; neither SAF nor RSF presence in those fora produced a binding settlement. What unites these initiatives is not simply poor drafting but omission. They repeatedly sidelined broader civilian voices and substituted diplomatic choreography for the hard work of operational guarantees monitoring, interdiction of external supplies, and credible snapback penalties.

The failure of Geneva peace talk is instructive. The talks proceeded in Switzerland but the Sudanese army was reluctant to attend without the RSF withdrawing from occupied towns and questioned the UAE’s involvement. The RSF also had concerns. That asymmetry undercut the central objective, an enforceable national cessation of hostilities and exposed how both sides still calculate that battlefield gains can yield better political terms than any negotiated compromise. Put simply, these rounds demonstrate how a mediation that lacks the simple baseline of both principals at the same table cannot build the trust necessary for disarmament or for the protection of humanitarian corridors. The new roadmap must navigate these challenges carefully and avoid repeating past mistakes.

Moreover, human suffering provides moral urgency and political cover for intervention, and the roadmap explicitly leverages that emergency to press for a truce. Yet humanitarian relief can become an instrument rather than a neutral good when access to convoys and corridors is conditioned on compliance. Parties that control territory can permit or deny assistance to secure concessions; external funders can withhold resources to induce cooperation. Such conversion of aid into leverage presumes transparent monitoring and enforceable consequences. In the absence of impartial mechanisms to verify and punish violations, humanitarian pressure operates mainly as political theater.

Calendar peace also downplays a second, underappreciated dynamic: institutional mimicry. The conflict has produced parallel governing structures. The Rapid Support Forces and affiliated coalitions have announced governing organs in Darfur and parts of Kordofan—claiming executive authority, appointing officials, and performing bureaucratic functions. On the other side, the Sudanese Armed Forces and allied civilian appointees maintain a distinct administration in Khartoum. This competition in statecraft converts battlefield gains into claims for recognition, taxation and revenue control. Control is not solely territorial; it is administrative legitimacy and the capacity to deliver services and collect taxes. A ceasefire or transition that fails to address how rival bureaucracies will be merged, subordinated, or compensated misunderstands the transactional nature of authority on the ground. The roadmap’s sequencing assumes a single sovereign to which all parties can cede power but reality reveals multiple, competing sovereignties that a mere timetable cannot dissolve. Furthermore, ‘launching and completing’ a civilian transition within such a short timeframe is questionable, particularly with the stipulation that it must be a “transparent process not controlled by any warring party.” Neither Burhan nor Dagalo has shown any willingness to compromise their hold on power.

Political exclusion is another structural flaw in the roadmap, sidelining armed or socially entrenched constituencies without credible reintegration or disarmament mechanisms often produces spoilers. In Sudan’s case, various networks are still embedded in its politics and linked to regional sympathizers that could predictably resort to violence or external backing to derail the process.

Besides, the external dimension complicates enforcement and makes the implementation of the fifth element of the proposal difficult. Calls by foreign ministers that “an end to external military support is essential to ending the conflict” are correct in principle. They become hollow if the same capitals that make that demand have been accused of transactional support to one side or the other. Allegations levelled in multiple settings and summarized by investigative groups and human-rights organizations have pointed to Gulf and regional entanglements. The UAE has been accused of material flows to RSF elements, while Egypt and Saudi Arabia retain close links to parts of the SAF. Those dynamics turn the conflict into a regional proxy contest and weaken the Quad’s claim to be an impartial guarantor of restraint. A roadmap that insists on ending external support must therefore be prepared to back that insistence with verifiable interdiction, inspection regimes and conditional incentives. Otherwise, the declaration that “external support must stop” will be another unimplemented clause.

A comparative glance clarifies the distinctive peril. Compressed-timetable diplomacy has failed elsewhere when deadlines were not matched by enforcement. The Djibouti Agreement in Somalia, UN roadmaps for Libya, and South Sudan’s 2015 ARCSS each envisioned fast transitions that collapsed when spoilers re-emerged or external patrons shifted posture. Sudan differs insofar as competing actors are constructing alternative state apparatuses while also having access to lucrative resources such as gold, trade routes and ports that reduce the immediate material cost of continuing conflict. In such an environment, calendar peace is a significantly weaker instrument than in states where the capacity for parallel governance and revenue capture is lower.

A few plausible trajectories flow from these structural features. If truces repeatedly fail, parallel administrations may consolidate into de facto partition. In addition, rival bureaucracies will harden control over taxation, security, and local legitimacy, rendering future reunification politically and economically costly. Alternatively, both sides might seize on an incomplete or opportunistic truce as a window to a positional advantage (rearm themselves), reposition their forces, and consolidate territorial control, turning what was meant as a pause for relief into preparation for the next phase of fighting.

Policy instruments that could alter those trajectories must move beyond calendars and address incentives directly. Regional institutions should be empowered as visible custodians to confer local legitimacy and to manage logistical burdens. The new peace process must not replicate the mistakes of the past. The Quad’s roadmap is the first plausible diplomatic architecture in months to propose a clear sequence. That is necessary but not sufficient. If the Quartet wants its plan to alter incentives on the ground it must convert public pledges into enforceable mechanics, impartial monitors with operational guarantees, independent interdiction and verification of external supplies, immediate and protected humanitarian corridors, a ring-fenced stabilization fund, and credible accountability commitments. Without that translation, another round of high-level diplomacy will leave Sudan where it has too often ended up, buried under agreements that paper over conflict rather than resolve it.

By Yonas Yizezew and Bezawit Eshetu, Researchers, Horn Review