Capsules for Decoding the War

Who Loses from the Dialogue Preparatory Committee — and Who Gains?

The delay in achieving a ceasefire, caused by the Sudanese Dialogue Preparatory Committee’s consumption of time, is not neutral. Time spent on meetings and travel can itself become a resource that proponents of war exploit to prolong the conflict.

This can be understood through five overlapping economies of time.

There is the humanitarian economy, in which lost time means lost lives that cannot be recovered. There is the military economy, in which time provides an opportunity to acquire weapons and reposition forces. There is the political economy, in which time is invested in consultation, coalition-building and political mobilisation. There is also the procedural and diplomatic economy, in which meetings, travel, committees, guarantees and mediation efforts accumulate.

Finally, there is the economy of the fait accompli. War uses time to consolidate its networks, interests, authorities and lines of control. In doing so, what begins as a temporary geographical deployment can gradually become an entrenched and potentially separatist reality that is increasingly difficult to dismantle.

Each individual step taken by the Dialogue Committee may therefore appear reasonable when viewed in isolation. But the accumulation of reasonable steps can produce an unreasonable amount of time. The committee may succeed procedurally while failing in temporal terms, because it does not reach a ceasefire with the urgency demanded by the suffering of the Sudanese people.

The Dialogue Preparatory Committee should therefore not be evaluated only by the quality of its intentions, the number of its meetings or the documents it produces. It should also be judged by how much it shortens the road to a ceasefire.

The question is not simply: What will the committee accomplish once the dialogue process is complete? It is also: What will have happened to Sudan and its people by the time that dialogue is completed?

The principle is straightforward: in peacetime, delay may merely be a procedural cost; in wartime, delay can become a resource that sustains the war itself.

A Thought to Consider

Every day that a ceasefire is delayed does not merely add another day to the calendar. It adds new victims, new military positions, new wartime interests and new geographical realities that become increasingly difficult to reverse.

The Dialogue Committee must therefore ask itself: How much time will we take, and who will pay the price of that time before we finish?

The time lost by the victim is gained by the combatant. And the time politics needs to build consensus can be used by the proponents of war to construct a new fait accompli of fragmentation.

Professor Mekki El Shibly
Associate Researcher, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London
Executive Director, Centre for Strategic Studies (CCSS)