In Sudan, hunger is not only a humanitarian emergency, it is a military strategy. For decades, starvation has been instrumentalized as a weapon of war, wielded by governments and militias alike. The current crisis unfolding in the country, following the outbreak of fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in 2023, is no exception. With close to 25 million people in need of humanitarian aid[1] and looming famine conditions in parts of Darfur, Khartoum, and Kordofan, collective starvation is not merely the byproduct of war but a deliberate manipulation of hunger as a method of domination and control.
A History of Hunger as Governance
To understand the current famine threats in Sudan, one must look beyond immediate violence and trace the long history of state formation in the country. Hunger has long been entangled with Sudan’s fractured statehood, where central authorities have relied on neglect, coercion, and selective provisioning to maintain control. It has been historically deployed to uproot populations, fracture social cohesion, and punish dissent.
During the 1980s and 1990s, droughts in western Sudan were compounded by government policies that diverted relief to regime-loyal areas. In 1998, tens of thousands starved in Bahr el Ghazal, now located in South Sudan, under circumstances that were avoidable, if not for the convergence of several human rights abuses depriving populations of access to food, crops, assistance, and capacity to survive[2].
Even after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement[3], food aid remained a currency of governance. NGOs operating in Darfur were often required to partner with government-aligned local actors, restricting their reach and making aid delivery vulnerable to surveillance and manipulation. The state could then „punish“ rebel-held areas through withdrawal of services and „reward“ pacified communities with relief. The result was a stratified humanitarian geography, where access became conditional, relief instrumentalized, and peace deeply uneven, inscribed with the very asymmetries the conflict had produced.
Under Omar al-Bashir’s regime, the Sudanese state weaponized food aid in Darfur, South Kordofan, and Blue Nile, either through the expulsion of international humanitarian organizations or by conditioning access to aid on political loyalty[4]. Humanitarian workers were surveilled, accused of espionage, and expelled. Meanwhile, civilians, particularly from ethnic and political groups associated with rebellion, were subjected to sieges, market burnings, and aerial bombardments of food infrastructure.
Famine by Design
This pattern has now resurfaced, perhaps more violently than before. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system indicates that famine conditions (IPC Phase 5) are imminent in multiple regions of Sudan if the conflict continues to obstruct humanitarian operations[5]. The UN’s World Food Programme estimates that over 24 million Sudanese,which represents almost half of Sudan’s population, are facing acute food insecurity, with hundreds of thousands of lives at risk of death from starvation[6].
Yet, these numbers fail to capture the strategic logic behind famine. This crisis is not the result of mere crop failure or natural disasters alone. Rather, it is the culmination of systemic blockades, targeted destruction of agricultural zones, denial of humanitarian access, and the collapse of basic services. Since the war broke out in April 2023 between SAF and RSF, aid convoys have been blocked, warehouses looted, and key agricultural regions transformed into battlefields. The deliberate targeting of civilians – especially in West Darfur – along ethnic lines echoes the genocidal tactics of the early 2000s[7]. Food scarcity is being exacerbated by both military encirclement and economic warfare. Markets are destroyed. Harvests go uncollected. Farmers flee their fields, fearing airstrikes or militia attacks.
The Architecture of Indifference
While primarily a domestic tool of repression, starvation occurs against the backdrop of regional and international power dynamics. The weaponization of hunger, then, operates not only as a tactic of ground-level warfare but as a proxy measure of control over resource corridors, cross-border smuggling networks, and political leverage in post-war reconstruction. Both SAF and RSF, despite engaging in widespread abuses, attempt to manipulate narratives around humanitarian access to garner international legitimacy and evade accountability. They block aid to opposition-held zones while accusing each other of preventing deliveries. This creates a deadly stalemate, where civilians are trapped in besieged cities, like El Fasher or Nyala, cut off from food, water, and medicine.
Even as international law condemns the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and regards it as a war crime, enforcement remains elusive. Despite repeated UN Security Council briefings and reports from organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, accountability is thwarted by political inertia. As the war drags on and international attention remains sporadic, starvation continues as a silent massacre, slowly suffocating the possibility of life.
This is further compounded by dwindling funds for humanitarian aid. In 2025, the UN appealed for $45 billion to meet the needs of 185 million people across dozens of crises. So far, it has received barely 5 percent of that total[8]. In Sudan, the consequences of this shortfall are already measured in lives. Food distributions that barely met survival needs are being suspended, kitchens once serving hundreds now stand shuttered, their gates locked not by conflict, but by the paralysis of cash flows. Three out of four health facilities are closed, and those that remain are increasingly hollowed out: shelves emptied of antibiotics, no stocks of oral rehydration salts, and no treatment for diseases that become inevitably lethal, such as tuberculosis, diarrhoea, and pneumonia.
The Politics of Humanitarian Access
Among the most insidious features of Sudan’s conflict architecture is the slow violence of humanitarian obstruction, a form of bureaucratic warfare through stalled paperwork and deliberate delays. The denial of visas, the imposition of arbitrary security clearances, extortion checkpoints, and the restriction of crossline access[9] have enabled both the SAF and the RSF to starve communities without ever lifting a weapon. In White Nile, Gezira, and across displacement corridors from Darfur to Blue Nile, millions of internally displaced persons (IDPs) now languish in overcrowded camps with collapsing infrastructure and only the thinnest threads of nutritional support. Malnutrition rates are spiralling, especially among children, yet humanitarian actors are routinely blocked, surveyed, or stalled, their operations choked by forced immobilization and donor fatigue.
The crisis is not only one of access but of militarized negotiation. Humanitarian corridors are no longer neutral pathways but contested terrain, often granted in exchange for political concessions, alignment with armed groups, or tacit recognition of territorial control. In some instances, aid is taxed, looted, or rerouted entirely; commandeered by militias who recast relief as reward. The result is a warped economy of survival in which humanitarianism itself is weaponized, reduced to a transactional currency that not only fails to alleviate suffering but risks entrenching it.
The Need for Immediate Relief and Reckoning
Sudan’s descent into mass hunger is not the outcome of environmental scarcity, but of a deliberate political and military architecture, defined by violent governance, securitized borders, and an exclusionary economy that renders entire populations disposable. Famine here is not a failure. It is a strategy crafted, maintained, and deployed to govern through deprivation. This risks amplifying the already large-scale suffering the Sudanese population has been subjected to, not because the land cannot sustain life, but because the systems in place are designed to extinguish it.
Ending famine in Sudan will not come through airlifts or emergency appeals alone. It needs not charity, but justice. What is required is a political reckoning that confronts the use of hunger as a weapon, that holds perpetrators accountable for the severe human rights abuses they commanded. One that dismantles the bureaucracies and militarized economies that turn food into leverage. Until we address famine not just as a humanitarian crisis but as a political weapon, not as a tragedy but as a strategy, we will continue to treat its symptoms while ignoring the machinery that fuels it.
Salma Daoudi is a policy analyst and consultant on MENA security. She is currently a DPhil finalist in International Relations at the University of Oxford, specializing in international security and global health, with a regional focus on the Middle East and North Africa and Syria in particular.
[1] OHCHR. (2025, April). Sudan faces worsening humanitarian catastrophe as famine and conflict escalate. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/04/sudan-faces-worsening-humanitarian-catastrophe-famine-and-conflict-escalate
[2] Human Rights Watch. (1999). Famine in Sudan, 1998: The Human Rights Causes.
[3] Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). (2005). The Comprehensive Peace Agreement Between The Government of The Republic of The Sudan and The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
[4] Human Rights Watch. (2012). Under Siege: Indiscriminate Bombing and Abuses in Sudan’s Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile States.
[5] IPC Famine Review Committee. (2024, July). Combined Review of the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) IPC Compatible Analysis for IDP Camps in El Fasher, North Darfur; and the IPC Sudan Technical Working Group Analysis of Zamzam Camp (North Darfur), Sudan. Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. https://www.ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ipcinfo/docs/IPC_Famine_Review_Committee_Report_Sudan_July2024.pdf
[6] World Food Programme (WFP). (2025). Sudan. Retrieved May 16, 2025, from https://www.wfp.org/countries/sudan
[7] Human Rights Watch. (2024, May 9). Sudan: Ethnic cleansing in West Darfur. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/05/09/sudan-ethnic-cleansing-west-darfur
[8] United Nations Development Programme. (2025, April 10). After 2 years of war, shrinking funds mean aid money needs to go further in Sudan. UNDP. https://www.undp.org/blog/after-2-years-war-shrinking-funds-mean-aid-money-needs-go-further-sudan
[9] The New Humanitarian. (2025, April 11). Sudan in-depth: Aid efforts blocked and weaponised amid sweeping cuts and army. https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/analysis/2025/04/11/sudan-depth-aid-efforts-blocked-and-weaponised-amid-sweeping-cuts-and-army