Last night, enormous crowds were once again demonstrating across Sudan.
They were demanding civilian government, less than a week after the military effectively dismantled the country’s democratic transition.
The timing is difficult to ignore. Last Sunday, I wrote that Sudan had removed Omar al-Bashir in 2019 without fully removing the political principle that men with guns ultimately decide who governs. On Monday morning, soldiers detained Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, arrested other civilian political figures, dissolved the institutions through which civilians and the military had been sharing power and declared a state of emergency.
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the armed forces and Sudan’s Sovereign Council, says the military acted because political infighting was threatening the country and the transition itself. He has promised that Sudan will still move towards elections and eventually civilian government.
But there is an obvious contradiction in claiming to save a democratic transition by arresting its civilian leaders.
The military has not simply changed the government. It has changed the answer to the question of where political authority ultimately resides.
And perhaps Monday’s coup demonstrates that Sudan’s transition never fully answered that question in the first place.
When Bashir fell in 2019, protesters had forced an extraordinary political transformation. But the transition that followed was based on compromise with the military rather than the military’s complete withdrawal from politics. Civilians and generals shared authority through the Sovereign Council. Hamdok headed the civilian government, while Burhan remained one of the most powerful figures in the state. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, commanded the Rapid Support Forces and occupied another senior position in the transitional order.
This arrangement was understandable. Sudan could not simply pretend the armed forces and RSF did not exist. They possessed weapons, organisations, economic interests and enormous political influence. Excluding them completely might have produced immediate confrontation.
Power-sharing therefore bought time.
The problem is that time is useful only if something changes during it.
A transition is supposed to move political authority from one institutional arrangement towards another. Sudan’s was supposed to move from authoritarian and military-dominated government towards elected civilian rule. If the armed forces retained enough independent power to abolish the transitional institutions whenever they believed civilian politics was failing, then the transition contained its own veto.
That veto was exercised on Monday.
This is why I think calling the event simply a sudden military coup misses part of what happened. The seizure of power was sudden. The distribution of power that made it possible was not.
The military did not emerge unexpectedly from outside Sudan’s political system. It was already embedded inside it.
That makes this different from imagining a stable democracy suddenly interrupted by soldiers. Sudan was trying to democratise while the institution most capable of preventing democratisation remained one of the institutions managing the transition.
The arrangement depended on the military eventually agreeing to surrender political authority voluntarily.
That is an enormous institutional assumption.
Why would it?
This is where incentives matter more than promises.
Military leaders do not only possess political influence. Sudan’s security institutions have substantial economic interests. Civilian oversight could threaten those interests. A democratic government might scrutinise military businesses, restructure security institutions or pursue accountability for abuses committed under previous governments and during the transition.
Surrendering political power therefore does not simply mean a general loses a prestigious seat on a council.
It may mean losing control over money, institutions and legal protection.
Once viewed from that perspective, military resistance to civilian rule becomes easier to explain, although no more legitimate.
This is a recurring problem in democratic transitions. We often ask authoritarian elites to surrender power and assume that democracy itself will be sufficiently attractive to persuade them.
But democratisation can impose concentrated losses on precisely the people best positioned to stop it.
Citizens collectively gain political rights.
A small group of powerful officials may lose control of businesses, security institutions and protection from prosecution.
The benefits are widely distributed.
The losses are concentrated.
That gives the potential losers an enormous incentive to organise against reform.
Sudan’s protesters therefore face something more difficult than removing an unpopular ruler. They are trying to change the incentives of institutions that have benefited from political power for decades.
Burhan’s justification for the coup also deserves examination rather than dismissal. Sudan’s civilian political forces really were divided. The economy really is in crisis. The transition really was struggling. Political paralysis was not invented on Monday morning.
But this is exactly why military intervention is so dangerous as a supposed solution.
Every democracy eventually experiences incompetent politicians, divided coalitions and economic crises. If those conditions constitute sufficient justification for military intervention, then civilian government exists only while generals consider it successful.
That reverses democratic accountability.
In a democracy, civilians are supposed to decide whether politicians have failed.
Under military guardianship, generals decide whether civilian politics has failed.
The difference is not whether the generals’ criticism is correct. Sometimes it may be.
The difference is who possesses the authority to act on that judgement.
A voter can remove a government through an election. A parliament can remove a prime minister through constitutional procedures. A court can constrain unlawful action.
An army can remove all of them simultaneously.
That is precisely why democratic systems place armed forces under civilian authority rather than treating military competence as an alternative source of political legitimacy.
There is also something revealing about Burhan promising elections after suspending the institutions supposed to lead Sudan towards elections.
Military governments frequently describe themselves as temporary. They do not usually announce that they intend to establish permanent dictatorship. They say civilian politicians failed, the country requires stability, reforms must occur, and power will eventually be returned once conditions are suitable.
The difficult word is eventually.
If the military itself determines when the country is sufficiently stable for civilian rule, the transition has no independent endpoint. Every new crisis can justify another delay.
That is why timetables and institutions matter more than declarations of intention.
A promise to surrender power is not the same thing as a mechanism that requires power to be surrendered.
The international response has been rapid because foreign governments understand that distinction. The United States suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in economic assistance after the takeover. The World Bank has paused disbursements. The African Union suspended Sudan from its activities until civilian-led transitional authority is restored.
These measures are intended to change the military’s calculation: taking power should be economically and diplomatically more expensive than returning to the transition.
But sanctions and suspended aid create the same dilemma I have encountered repeatedly this year. Sudan’s generals do not exist separately from Sudan’s population. If foreign financing disappears, ordinary Sudanese people can suffer through weaker public finances, inflation and reduced economic activity.
The international community therefore wants to punish the people who disrupted civilian government without worsening the economic conditions that made the transition fragile in the first place.
That is extremely difficult.
Economic pressure can defend democratic principles while simultaneously making democracy harder to restore if it contributes to greater hardship.
This does not mean international governments should continue funding a military takeover as though nothing happened. It means sanctions should be judged by whether they alter behaviour rather than by how strongly they communicate disapproval.
Foreign policy repeatedly encounters this distinction between punishment and persuasion.
A sanction can successfully demonstrate moral condemnation and still fail strategically.
The protests this weekend may ultimately matter more than foreign pressure.
On Saturday, large crowds marched in Khartoum, Omdurman and elsewhere demanding civilian rule despite the danger involved. Security forces used force against demonstrators, and people have been killed during protests since the takeover.
These demonstrations challenge one of the military’s most important potential claims: that it intervened because ordinary Sudanese citizens had lost faith in civilian government.
Many Sudanese citizens were frustrated with the transition. That is clear.
But dissatisfaction with a civilian government is not necessarily support for military government.
That distinction is politically important.
Citizens can believe Hamdok’s administration performed badly and still believe soldiers have no right to replace it.
They can want different civilian leaders rather than fewer civilians in government.
Political preferences are multidimensional, yet governments frequently collapse them into convenient binaries.
If you oppose us, you support our enemy.
If you criticise the transition, you support the coup.
If you oppose the coup, you must support every civilian politician.
None of those conclusions follows automatically.
The protesters demanding civilian rule are defending a procedure for determining who governs, not necessarily endorsing every person who happened to occupy government before Monday.
That may be one of the clearest distinctions between democracy and political loyalty.
Democracy does not require believing the current government is good.
It requires believing that bad governments should be removed through rules rather than force.
Sudan also demonstrates why elections alone cannot establish that principle. The country had not yet reached its planned democratic elections. But even if elections had occurred tomorrow, they would not have solved the deeper problem if the military retained an independent ability to overturn their result later.
This is why civilian control of the military is not a secondary feature of democracy.
It is one of its foundations.
An election determines who formally governs.
Civilian supremacy determines whether that answer is final.
Without it, voters choose a government subject to an unwritten second ballot conducted by generals.
The experience of other countries should make the danger obvious. Military intervention often begins with claims of temporary necessity. But once the armed forces become political arbiters, future civilian governments learn that survival depends partly on keeping military leaders satisfied.
That changes civilian behaviour even when no coup occurs.
Politicians avoid reforms that threaten military interests. Investigations are softened. Budgets remain opaque. Generals acquire informal vetoes.
Military power therefore does not need to be exercised constantly to shape politics.
The possibility of intervention can be enough.
This resembles the difference between actual violence and coercion. If somebody obeys because they know refusal could produce force, force has influenced the outcome even when nobody fires a weapon.
Sudan’s democratic transition could never become fully democratic while that possibility remained credible.
There is also a broader regional concern. Guinea experienced a coup in September. Mali experienced military takeovers in 2020 and again this year. Now Sudan’s transition has been interrupted by another military seizure of power.
These countries have very different political histories, and it would be simplistic to describe them as one phenomenon merely because they are African states experiencing coups.
But successful coups can change expectations across borders.
Officers observe what happens elsewhere. They see whether regional organisations impose meaningful costs, whether Western governments eventually resume cooperation and whether coup leaders can transform military control into internationally accepted government.
Political behaviour responds to precedent.
If the international response eventually becomes normal diplomatic engagement regardless of whether civilian government is restored, the message extends beyond Sudan.
This is why organisations such as the African Union have strong reasons to defend anti-coup norms even when the civilian governments being overthrown are deeply flawed.
The principle is not that every elected government deserves unconditional international support.
It is that soldiers should not become an alternative electoral mechanism.
Sudan’s immediate future is uncertain. Hamdok remains under military control. Burhan says a new technocratic government will be formed and elections will eventually occur. Protesters continue demanding civilian rule. International pressure is increasing.
It is possible that negotiations restore some version of the previous transition.
It is also possible that the military consolidates control.
As of tonight, we do not know.
But I think this week has already answered the question I asked last Sunday.
Sudan’s revolution was unfinished.
The mistake was assuming that because civilians had entered government, civilian authority had been established.
Those are different achievements.
Power-sharing can place civilians at the table.
Democracy requires them eventually to control the table.
And perhaps that is why democratic transitions should be measured less by whether former dictators disappear and more by what happens to the institutions that made dictatorship possible.
Does the military become subordinate to elected government?
Do security budgets become transparent?
Can generals be investigated by civilian courts?
Can political leaders make decisions the military dislikes without fearing removal?
Can citizens replace governments without asking armed institutions for permission?
Those changes are slower than overthrowing a president.
They are also much more important.
Sudan’s protesters succeeded in removing Bashir in 2019. They forced one of Africa’s longest-serving authoritarian rulers from office and created a possibility of democratic government that had seemed almost impossible only months earlier.
Monday demonstrated that possibility was never the same thing as consolidation.
A dictator can fall in a day.
A democratic state is built when the people who possess the guns accept that possessing the guns does not give them the right to govern.
Sudan has not reached that point.
The people marching yesterday are demanding that it still gets the chance.
