1. A war on civilians and a society in crisis In the ruthless armed conflict since April 2023, ordinary people are the battlefield. Khartoum’s urban core has been devastated; the violence radiated into Darfur, Kordofan, Blue Nile and the central plains. The RSF besieged El Fasher in North Darfur for 18 months, before they fully captured it in October 2025. The war displays mixed pattern: conventional fighting over territory between armed entities alongside targeted assaults, including killings, sexual violence, disappearances, abductions, and systematic looting of civilians, their homes and the infrastructure meant to serve them. Impartial reports by UN-mandated investigators implicate RSF-aligned units in atrocities against Masalit, Zaghawa and other non-Arab communities in Darfur, while the SAF has been accused of indiscriminate aerial and artillery strikes in dense civilian areas. 2 Behind the headline violence sits a deeper unravelling. Sudan now faces the world’s largest internal displacement crisis, with more than 9 million 3 forced from their homes within the country, in addition to more than four million refugees. 4 Over half the population faces high levels of acute food insecurity, with pockets of famine where markets are broken and aid is blocked. 5 Conflict profiteering and checkpoint economies flourish; hate speech circulates rapidly online and offline, accelerating ethnicization and hardening communal boundaries that any future transitional justice process will have to bridge. 6 Trust in formal institutions is threadbare. At the same time, a counter-current of civic self-help has kept social solidarity alive. The neighbourhood infrastructure built for protest was re-tooled, almost overnight, for survival. 2. Civil society, in its many forms, remains a pillar of stability From April 2023 onward, Emergency Response Rooms(Ghuraf al-Tawari’, ERRs) surfaced as hyper­local coordination hubs for first aid, evacuation, food distribution, and information flows, often operating block-to-block. In both Khartoum and Darfur, volunteer­run community kitchens—El Takkaya, a revival of an older Sudanese ethos of communal feeding—kept households afloat when supply chains failed. 7 Women’s initiatives are part of this architecture with“women’s rooms”, quietly organized protection services, safe spaces, and referral pathways for survivors of gender-based violence, and offering psychosocial first aid where formal services have collapsed. 8 Diaspora networks amplified these efforts by fundraising, procuring medicines, and maintaining secure channels for information and remittances. This is the governance the war did not extinguish. Breadth is the civil sphere’s advantage. Professional bodies—doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers— reconstituted themselves outside regime-controlled unions in the 2010s and underpinned the 2018–2019 mobilization through the Sudanese Professionals Association. Women’s collectives and youth formations supplied both mass and moral energy to the revolution and still anchor mutual aid, rights monitoring, and trauma care. The media ecosystem— battered, partly exiled—survives through citizen journalists, verification desks, and diaspora-based outlets that challenge disinformation and elevate local voices. Traditional authorities, native administrations, and community reconciliation committees continue to matter in many locales, convening micro-truces, negotiating safe passage to water points, and mediating inter-communal flashpoints where state authority has receded. 9 As such, contemporary civil society actors in Sudan extend much beyond established, donor-dependent and elite-centred NGOs, including decentralized actors embracing a spirit of medania or“civicness”. 10 This revolves around notions of solidarity and the public good beyond ethnic, religious, or class divides. Civil society’s stabilizing role is practical and normative at once. Practically, civic actors deliver water, conduct emergency surgery, organize evacuation corridors, and provide food through El Takkaya community kitchens; they map needs faster than formal systems and adapt more quickly than large agencies. 11 Normatively, they keep the horizon of“civilian rule and accountability” in public view—through neighbourhood teach-ins, charters, legal drafts, and outreach. Even under repression and war, the institutional imagination persists. In 2022, the Sudanese Bar Association convened jurists and civic leaders to publish a draft transitional constitution that codified non-immunity for serious crimes and civilian oversight of the security sector. 12 During the war, activists keep humanitarian volunteering and political engagement separate to protect themselves. Civic education and advocacy have moved online. Mutual aid adds to social cohesion by creating a practical experience of solidarity and belonging. In that, volunteering serves another purpose:“Today, we fight the system by showing them: we are here,” says an activist who moved from going out in the streets in a resistance committee to volunteering with an ERR.“We tell people that war is not right because the right way for peace is to stand up together and not support the war by separating into groups supporting SAF and RSF.” 13 The civic field also includes explicit anti-war alliances of youth groups, women blocs, and political parties, even if they also struggle with polarization, fragmentation and co-option by the warring parties. Who is mandated to speak on whose behalf is hotly contested even within these civilian coalitions. Battling with impartiality and intense political pressure, these coalitions do manage to maintain a strict rejection of the war and a focus on civilian governance as means to end the crisis. 14 These/ their efforts include workshops, seminars and initiatives specifically focused on transitional justice. 15 The Role of Civil Society in Transitional Justice and Peace in Sudan. 2