Why Militia Politics Is Preventing Democratization and Stability in Sudan

Guest post by Brandon Bolte

On April 15, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) surprised many Western observers when it launched an assault against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in Khartoum. Led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemeti”), the RSF previously fought for the Sudanese regime against rebels for years. In 2019, it participated in a coup alongside General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the SAF that ousted Sudan’s long-time dictator, Omar al-Bashir. Both generals have since been on a transitionary council meant to shape a new government before popular elections take place. In the 11 days since the violence in Khartoum began, over 400 people have been killed, thousands are trying to flee the capital, and there are signs of the conflict spreading to other parts of the country.

Transitions to democracy are usually rocky, but coups can lead to democratization when coupled with the kind of popular mobilization seen in Sudan. The irony of the current situation is that at one point the RSF was considered by al-Bashir as his “praetorian guard,” meant to deter the SAF from staging a coup. Coup-proofers aren’t usually successful coup-perpetrators. Moreover, the current rupture was caused by a disagreement between the two generals over how the RSF might be integrated into the army’s command structure. Why is the proposed merging of forces so contentious? What do we expect the long-term outcome of this conflict to be?

In a study published in International Studies Quarterly, I unpack the politics of how governments try to manage, regulate, and contain militias like the RSF. I describe how and why states and professed pro-state militias compete for power at one another’s expense. Viewed in this light, the outbreak in Khartoum is part of a predictable, if not inevitable, vicious spiral of poor militia management politics over the course of the last two decades.

Pro-government militias are commonly defined as organized armed groups allied with the state but are not formally part of the official security forces. These groups range from well-equipped paramilitaries designed to supplement the regular army to localized civil defense forces meant to hold territory and extract local information about insurgents. Sometimes they are tasked with carrying out human rights violations like mass killings or genocide, allowing the government to evade accountability. Professionalized militias are also used by certain types of dictators to counterbalance the official military in order to prevent coups d’état.

The challenge for governments employing militias is that militias themselves are perfectly aware the state could eliminate them once they are no longer needed. This is why governments often keep their auxiliaries contained in some way, by actively monitoring them or restricting their capabilities. Otherwise, these militias could switch sides in a conflict, restart a war, be more difficult to disintegrate or integrate, or otherwise undermine the state’s long-term ability to govern.

Weak states facing capable rebellions, however, are usually unable to regulate and contain their militias. Instead, they have to focus on short-term threats from insurgents, allowing militia allies to have free reign. The consequence is that militia groups have incentives to take advantage of these windows of opportunity to “bargain” with the state for resources that they can eventually use to stave off their own future demise.

The RSF is a reorganization of disparate Arab militias called the Janjaweed, which were remobilized from scattered murahileen groups after a coalition of rebel groups shocked Khartoum by seizing an air force base in 2003. The SAF and Janjaweed militias then perpetrated a genocidal campaign in Darfur, leading to over 200,000 deaths.

Over time, the combination of weak state capacity and a significant rebel threat drove al-Bashir’s regime to become dependent on militias for survival. Militia leaders knew this and pursued their own interests unabated. Many leaders profited from looting and extortion during the war, so when the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) was signed in 2006 with a provision to disarm the Janjaweed, many, including Hemeti’s faction, revolted against the state. Eventually, Khartoum weakened Hemeti enough to force him to negotiate. There the government again co-opted Hemeti by providing his militia more weaponry, financial rewards, and eventually legitimacy by reorganizing it into the RSF. Al-Bashir soon brought the RSF out from under the command of the National Intelligence and Security Services, ensuring the group’s independence from the constraints of the state.

In the end, al-Bashir’s failure to contain these militias was part of a vicious cycle of his own doing. His growing dependency on militias like the RSF afforded Hemeti multiple windows of opportunity to increase his own capabilities, which he then used to resist his group’s demobilization. Now, even integration is worth resisting for Hemeti, since it would effectively represent the dissolution of his autonomy and influence.

A durable resolution can only occur if the RSF loses its bargaining power. This may require immediate international commitments by Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to stop supplying weapons to the RSF and/or the SAF suppressing Hemeti’s forces to a point where the latter has incentives to negotiate but not retreat to remobilize for large-scale war. Unlike the immediate post-DPA period, however, appeasement cannot come in the form of greater autonomy, resources, and capabilities if the end goal is political stability. Al-Burhan knows this, and given the SAF’s own involvement in repression and mass killing, the military will resist appeasing Hemeti in an effort to signal to the pro-democracy movement a desire to turn a new leaf.

The problem is that the RSF is situated with considerable bargaining leverage and has every incentive to use force to preserve the status quo. “Power is as power does.” Temporary ceasefire efforts notwithstanding, until the RSF is demobilized or neutralized, Sudan’s pro-democracy advocates will be sidelined while military strongmen violently compete to fill the void in Khartoum.

Brandon Bolte is a 2022–23 Peace Scholar Fellow with the US Institute of Peace and a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Penn State University. He will start as an assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois Springfield in the fall. The views expressed in this commentary are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the US Institute of Peace.

Counterrevolutions Are Much More Successful at Toppling Unarmed Revolutions. Here’s Why.

Guest post by Killian Clarke

Counterrevolutions have historically received much less attention than revolutions, but the last decade has shown that counterrevolutions remain a powerful—and insidious—force in the world.

In 2013, Egypt’s revolutionary experiment was cut short by a popular counterrevolutionary coup, which elevated General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to the presidency. In neighboring Sudan, a democratic revolution that had swept aside incumbent autocrat Omar al-Bashir in 2019 was similarly rolled back by a military counterrevolution in October 2021. Only three months later, soldiers in Burkina Faso ousted the civilian president Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, who had been elected following the 2014 Burkinabè uprising.

These counterrevolutions all have something in common: they all occurred in the aftermath of unarmed revolutions, in which masses of ordinary citizens used largely nonviolent tactics like protests, marches, and strikes to force a dictator from power. These similarities, it turns out, are telling.

In a recent article, I show that counterrevolutionary restorations—the return of the old regime following a successful revolution—are much more likely following unarmed revolutions than those involving armed guerilla war. Indeed, the vast majority of successful counterrevolutions in the 20^th and 21^st centuries have occurred following democratic uprisings like Egypt’s, Sudan’s, and Burkina Faso’s.

Why are these unarmed revolutions so vulnerable? After all, violent armed revolutions are usually deeply threatening to old regime interests, giving counterrevolutionaries plenty of motivation to try to claw back power. There are at least two possible explanations.

The first is that, even though counterrevolutionaries may be desperate to return, violent revolutions usually destroy their capacity to do so. They grind down their armies through prolonged guerilla war, whereas unarmed revolutions leave these armies largely unscathed. In the three cases above, there was minimal security reform following the ousting of the incumbent, forcing civilian revolutionaries to rule in the shadow of a powerful old regime military establishment.

A second explanation focuses on the coercive resources available to revolutionaries. During revolutions waged through insurgency or guerilla war, challengers build up powerful revolutionary armies, like Fidel Castro’s Rebel Army in Cuba or Mao’s Red Army in China. When these revolutionaries seize power, their armies serve as strong bulwarks against counterrevolutionary attacks. The Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba is a good example: even though that campaign had the backing of the CIA, it quickly ran aground in the face of Castro’s well-fortified revolutionary defenses. In contrast, unarmed revolutionaries rarely build up these types of coercive organizations, leaving them with little means to fend off counterrevolutions.

After looking at the data, I found that the second explanation has more weight than the first one. I break counterrevolution down into two parts— whether a counterrevolution is launched, and then whether it succeeds—and find that armed revolutions significantly lower the likelihood of counterrevolutionary success, but not counterrevolutionary challenges. In other words, reactionaries are just as likely to attempt a restoration following both armed and unarmed revolutions. But they are far less likely to succeed against the armed revolutions, whose loyal cadres can be reliably called up to defend the revolution’s gains.

Unarmed revolutions are increasing around the world, especially in regions like Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, violent revolutions are declining in frequency, particularly those involving long, grueling campaigns that seek transformational impacts on state and society, what some call social revolutions. In one sense, these should be welcome trends, since unarmed revolutions result in far less destruction and have a record of producing more liberal orders. But given their susceptibility to reversal, should we be concerned that we are actually at the threshold of a new era of counterrevolution?

There are certainly reasons for worry. Counterrevolutions are rare events (by my count, there have only been about 25 since 1900), and the fact that there have been so many in recent years does not augur well. Counterrevolutionaries’ prospects have also been bolstered by changes in the international system, with rising powers like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates acting as enthusiastic champions of counterrevolution, particularly against democratic revolutions in their near-abroads. Today’s unarmed revolutions, already facing uphill battles in establishing their rule, with fractious coalitions and a lack of coercive resources, must now also contend with counterrevolutionary forces drawing support from a muscular set of foreign allies.

But though they may struggle to consolidate their gains, unarmed revolutions have a record of establishing more open and democratic regimes than armed ones do. Violent revolutions too often simply replace one form of tyranny with another. The question, then, is how to bolster these fledgling revolutionary democracies and help them to fend off the shadowy forces of counterrevolution.

International support can be crucial. Strong backing from the international community can deter counterrevolutionaries and help new regimes fend off threats. Ultimately, though, much comes down to the actions of revolutionaries themselves—and whether they can keep their coalitions rallied behind the revolutionary cause. Where they can, they are typically able to defeat even powerful counterrevolutions, by relying on the very same tactics of people power and mass protest that brought them success during the revolution itself.

Killian Clarke is an assistant professor at Georgetown University.

Popular Mobilization Makes Democracy More Likely After a Coup

Guest post by Marianne Dahl and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch

Some have suggested that military coups are the best hope for removing autocratic leaders and promoting democracy. Others contend that coups are more likely to spur increased repression and new autocratic regimes, undermining hopes of democratic reform. There are certainly historical examples where coups have preceded democratic reform—take for example the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal. But coup attempts have also ushered in harsher autocratic rule, such as in Equatorial Guinea after 1968. The empirical record shows no clear or consistent relationship. A look at changes in Polity democracy scores, a common comparative measure of democracy and political transitions, shows that although political change is much more likely after a coup, moves towards democracy and autocracy are about equally likely.

In a recent article in the European Journal of International Relations, we argue that what happens after a coup hinges on popular mobilization. Democratic reform is more likely when coups occur in the context of popular mobilization, and autocratic entrenchment is more likely in its absence.

Considering leader incentives after coup attempts sheds light on why coups spur democratic reforms at times and autocracy at others. Both failed and successful coups leave political rulers in a challenging position. A coup reveals divisions among elites and is likely to exacerbate competition. It is often unclear who remains loyal and how much support an incumbent can count on. There is a high likelihood of new coup attempts, and rulers challenged by a coup are more likely to be exiled, jailed, or executed.

Rulers can respond to these challenges in different ways. They can try to annihilate threats or repress opposition. Increasing control through repression and purges is often an autocrat’s preferred response. But such strategies can be fraught with risks. Potential threats can be difficult to identify, and harsh repression can backfire and fuel opposition.

An alternative strategy is to promise democratic reform. Promises of reform can help enhance a leader’s appeal, and it is difficult to claim popular consent for seizing power in a coup without promising elections. Moreover, free elections and respect for political rights are increasingly held up as conditions for avoiding economic sanctions or securing external aid. Democratic reform can also allow rulers to establish a safer exit route should things not go their way. One out of three leaders who lose power in a coup are imprisoned or killed within the next year, but only one out of fifty leaders who lose power in elections face that fate.

Whether leaders choose repression and autocracy or democracy and elections depends on the presence of popular nonviolent mobilization. Popular mobilization—public protests, sit-ins, acts of defiance to orders, and strikes—decreases the viability of repressive strategies and increases revolutionary threat.

Coups reveal cracks within a regime, which popular mobilization can leverage and deepen. Further, a fractured regime is more vulnerable to popular mobilization. Divisions among elites can increase citizens’ expectations of success and encourage wider participation, resulting in more effective threats. Popular mobilization therefore increases a coup leader’s incentives to promise democratic reforms. In the risky aftermath of a coup attempt, incumbents may try to reach out to a mobilized opposition or the general population to increase their popularity and contain threats from elites. In this context, democratic reforms can decrease the risk of a new coup, since coup attempts are more likely when incumbents are less popular.

By contrast, leaders who do not face threats from mass protests have fewer constraints to repress or selectively accommodate potential coup-makers and less need to seek broader support. Repressive strategies are especially likely after successful coups without mobilization because repression is easier to enact after a display of power in seizing control, with at least the tacit support of security forces. In contrast, failed coups leave an incumbent weakened, with worse prospects for consolidating power.

Of course, popular mobilization by itself can trigger political change, and coups and mobilization may have common causes. Our article, which provides systematic empirical analyses using data for the period 1950–2019 on coups, mass mobilization, and changes in the level of democracy, shows that popular mobilization makes changes toward democracy more likely after a coup. In the absence of mobilization, successful coups are more likely to result in changes toward greater autocracy.

Coups and political disruptions happen all over the world, and their occurrence presents an opportunity for reform—towards democracy and openness—or away from democracy and towards further repression. The transition to democracy after the coup in Portugal was not a foregone conclusion, rather, popular mobilization helped steer the country toward a political transition. Although hope for a democratic transition in Sudan after the military coup ousting Bashir in 2019 was undermined by military rulers backtracking on promises, continuing protests make it more difficult to secure autocratic rule. Popular protests helped bring down the 1991 coup attempt in the Soviet Union and preceded a period of subsequent democratic opening in Russia. And if there were to be a coup against Putin, the prospects for subsequent democratic reform seem much better with popular mobilization than without.

Marianne Dahl is a senior researcher at International Peace Research Institute Oslo. Kristian Skrede Gleditsch is the Regius Professor of Political Science in the Department of Government at the University of Essex and a research associate at the Peace Research Institute Oslo.