Structured Custodianship: Sudan’s Post-State Future | Shahid Bolsen

I think that there's gonna be some very difficult things, about decolonization. Some very difficult things about decolonization, think we're gonna have to come to terms with, psychological decolonization, economic decolonization, political decolonization, so on, all of these things. Because it's a whole way of looking, it's a whole way of approaching the world, it's a whole way of approaching, for example, governance, a whole way of approaching economics and so forth, as well as approaching the concept of national identity. And all of these are actually artifacts of colonization, and it's gonna be quite challenging, I think, for us to unlearn all of this and to adapt. I think that we're more influenced by Western world views than we might think.

There's a whole set of unquestioned assumptions that we all sort of live by, and it sort of sets the parameters of how we understand the world, which the West actually imposed upon our thinking, and it's very binary, it's very narrow, it's very rigid, and frankly if we're not able to liberate ourselves from these parameters, I think we're gonna have a very much we're gonna have a much harder time moving forward. Look, first of all, understand something about the West, it's deeply uncreative as a society, intellectually, extremely unadaptive. They came up with ways of doing things that they felt worked best for them in Europe, for example, and then they never changed, they never developed, they never grew. That's why they're they're still feudal, you know, they were feudal a thousand years ago, they're feudal today, that's their system. They decided on an approach and they've stuck with it, they've stuck with it across time and across circumstances, across locations and so forth, never really substantively changing in any way.

And what's more, as I say, they actually apply this everywhere, whatever worked for them in Europe they apply it everywhere, regardless of the conditions and circumstances and history and so forth. They think what works for them, which I mean is arguable, it's it's actually arguable whether it works or not in reality, but they think that it must necessarily be absolutely true and workable everywhere in the world. Everywhere for all people forever, that's what they think. You know, whatever they decide to be true, whatever they decide is true for them, they immediately universalize it, and they say that this is actually just a natural fact, and it applies to the entirety of humanity in all times, all places, for all times to come, forever. It's obviously not just arrogant, but it's absurd.

But there it is, this is the Western approach, this is the European approach. It's like, you know, I saw a video I saw a video of a Native American guy, a Native American man responding to a right wing sort of western supremacist who had mocked Native Americans for not having used the wheel. Okay? And his response was absolutely brilliant. This right winger had had mocked the pre colonial Native Americans for not using the wheel as if this was a demonstration of how primitive and how backwards they were as a as a civilization, as a people, because obviously the wheel is just basic, it's a fundamental piece of technology that everyone must always utilize everywhere if they're even remotely civilized and intelligent.

If you don't use the wheel, you must be a moron, because that's how westerners think. But this native American man explained that his people, after all, had been in North America for over thirteen thousand years, and they sort of did have a a fairly good comprehension or grasp about what was the best and most effective means of transversing the land, and that did not include using wheels. You know, he mentioned other cultures like the Bedouin Arabs, who also did not use the wheel in their traveling because using the wheel in the desert makes no sense. So he said that the environment poses questions, and different people will come up with different answers, and different answers will be required depending on the peculiarities of the environment that they are in. Okay?

This is adaptive, this is flexible, this is creative thinking, But of course when Europeans came to North America, all they knew was using the wheel, you know, carriages, wagons, and whatnot, and then of course that doesn't really work in North America, so they have to build roads, they have to flatten landscapes, and so on. They they they have this insistence upon their way regardless of the peculiarities of the environment, they imposed that. You actually made it much more difficult and much more complicated for you because your answer was the wrong answer, But you had to force all sorts of changes to the environment to make your wrong answer right. This is what they do in in every field. They do this with everything, you know, whatever they come up with, even if it does not actually correspond to existing circumstances, existing conditions in this or that country, well, you have to apply it anyway.

Well, obviously this is ridiculous, but that's what they've done. And I think to a great extent we have actually accepted, we've accepted this absurdity as logical. And undoing this is not gonna be as easy as you might think, because frankly I I I think that we have accepted so many assumptions from the West about how things should be, and of course now I'm not talking about technology, the wheel and so forth, I'm talking about political and economic assumptions, assumptions about states, assumptions about governance and so forth. We've been wearing western lenses to look at the world, they were never the right prescription for us, but we got used to seeing through them, you know, no matter how blurry it was, no matter how misshapen those lenses made our vision, that's what we've been wearing, and taking those lenses off is going to take some time for our eyes to adjust. I mean, just look at the concept of states, or maybe more relevantly look at the concept of failed states, state collapse and so on.

Well, this is a western binary, the nation state is just like the wheel. Understand? They pretend that it's the only way, it's the only approach, it's the only sort of political or governmental technology that works, the nation state. And this must be applied everywhere by all people forever. And if the state fails, if that tire goes flat, well then there's simply no movement left, there's no way to move forward.

It's a failed state. Well, that's obviously wrong, you know. This is part of why I think it's very important for us to understand real existing power dynamics, you know, epistemological sovereignty, we need to be able to claim and establish our own epistemological sovereignty because what the West has done has been to drape a tapestry of lies over reality, so we never really know what's going on, and we never really know what our options are, And then they can tell us how things are supposed to be and what our options are in this fabricated world of propaganda they have submerged us in. Because look, in the real world, actual power lies in the control the ownership and control of resources and infrastructure. And for instance, control of resources and infrastructure can and does cross national borders.

Resources cross national borders, oil fields, gas fields, right, mineral deposits, fresh water, rivers, so on. None of these things are bounded by the arbitrary borders of nation states, but somehow the companies and the investors who own and control the infrastructure, the infrastructure that is utilized to extract benefit from these cross border corridors of resources, those companies' investors are not defined as sovereigns even though that is what they are. You understand me? I don't necessarily mean to imply that there's anything particularly nefarious about this, it just is what it is. So like the same company or the same consortium of investors might actually own and control, for instance, say a natural gas field that is technically divided between two countries.

Right? That resource is under singular unified management, but the countries are divided. But which one is more real in terms of its power and in terms of its authority? Country a and country b claim the resource. Right?

But company x has real existing sovereignty over that resource. This is just to point out the flimsiness of the of of the nation state construct, it isn't what you think it is. And this makes you wonder, or it should make you wonder to some extent at least, how important is it really to maintain the nation state? Is it worth fighting for, for example? Especially when you're talking about states whose borders were imposed by colonizers, say in Africa or The Middle East and so forth.

Is this not an unnecessary source of friction? Can we develop a more adaptable attitude that deals with resources and deals with infrastructure as as already autonomous zones within or between nation states, because that's already how things really operate in reality, that's how things really do operate in the world. So you see what I mean about reframing, how we understand the world, and how we understand power dynamics, and how we understand national identity. Now of course opposition to the nation state model, this is already a pervasive sentiment in the Muslim world, and in all of the really formerly colonized countries, it's already there, that sentiment is there. But even though we disdain the colonizers' borders, we still cling to our nationalities, don't we?

And this is the hard thing to untangle. I think that the conversation up until now has been pretty superficial about this, you know, Muslims who would say nationalism is haram because it's a form of tribalism, versus people who say no, nationalism is not tribalism, or anyway it's not that form of tribalism that is haram, so on and so on and so on. This is not a very deep dissection of the issue in my opinion. When I criticize the nation state model, there's gonna be a knee jerk reaction from most people, either positive or negative. It will activate whatever preexisting opinion people have about nation states, and everyone will just recite the script of this side or that side, but we need to be more serious about this in my opinion.

And we need to be more serious about this because the world is undergoing a very dramatic transition right now, as I've talked about many many times. And as a result of that transition we're going to need intellectual frameworks, we're going to need new political frameworks, new economic frameworks, and new frameworks of group identity that will enable us to maximize the benefit that this transition can potentially bring for our ummah and for all the people of the global South. And those frameworks are gonna have to reflect both the actual reality on the ground and respond to reality in a flexible and and adaptable manner. Now, okay, and all of this sounds very abstract, but let me look at a few situations or one particular situation so you know what I'm talking about, because this is gonna be particularly important in the context of navigating so called failed states, because the whole concept of a failed state, if you think about it, it presupposes that the state itself is the most important thing, and that state consolidation of power, state consolidation of control is the definition of a successful state, and a successful state is the only success there is.

Absent state consolidation of power and control, there is and only can be failure, state failure, failed state. But like I've said, in fact, the state largely does not have consolidated control in many many parts of the world, especially in the West. Corporations do, investors do, the private sector does, you know. We fixate on talking about state power, we we fixate on talking about state authority and overlook other very real power structures, very real power relationships, power dynamics that do exist parallel to state power and even in the absence of state power. So look at Sudan for example, you can also look at Somalia, these are sort of textbook cases of what the West would call failed states, but what are they failing at?

They're failing at being something that they were never supposed to be in the first place, which is a Westphalian nation state. The fiction is failing, you can say, and violence and conflict are raging especially in Sudan for the sake of defending and for the sake of upholding that fiction. Now remember what I said before about how the way things have always been is the way they always will be, and any deviation from that is most likely an anomaly of history that will inevitably be corrected. Well, the nation state of Sudan for example adheres to borders that they inherited from colonial times. Borders that were not drawn according to the interests of the people of Sudan, those borders were drawn for the interests of the empire.

Like in so many other places, prior to colonization, Sudan was just a mosaic of territories, a mosaic of jurisdictions, you know. For centuries the land that we now call Sudan was not a monolithic entity, no. They had several distinct kingdoms, Sultanates, different societies, the Fung Sultanate, the Sultanate of Darfur for example, various kingdoms in the South and in the East. These all operated as politically coherent units inside of that territory. They were connected by trade and so on, but nevertheless they were separate, they had separate identities and separate governance.

That was the reality at that time. Then this reality was violently overwritten by the colonial project. They drew borders for administrative convenience for them, for imperial strategy, forcibly bundling together vastly different peoples, under a single centralized authority. So after independence in 1956, Sudan inherited this fractured colonial apparatus that was destined to govern from the center in Khartoum over a periphery that had historically governed itself, multiple separate administrations had governed themselves, so conflict was obviously immediate in Sudan. Decades of civil war in Sudan, the eventual secession of South Sudan in 2011, these weren't anomalies, this wasn't to be unexpected.

These were arguably the logical consequences of an unsustainable, unnatural, inorganic model. The central state governed in Khartoum was repeatedly captured by a narrow elite, and that narrow elite failed really to offer any sort of compelling vision of shared citizenship, citizenship rights and so forth, and they were just interested in extraction and subjugation. So from a what you can call a macro historical perspective, the current war between the Sudanese armed forces, the SAF, and the Rapid Support Forces, the RSF, this is just the latest and the most violent eruption of the Central periphery conflict. Now don't get me wrong, the RSF is a criminal mercenary organization. I'm not saying that there's some noble political movement that's dedicated to reviving Sudan's, precolonial, sultanates.

No. They're a vicious brutal extractive mafia in my opinion. They're killers and smugglers and warlords. I think that's quite clear. I don't think there's anyone who would argue against that, but that doesn't change the reality on the ground in terms of the regions that are under their control, and it doesn't change the reality of the apparent unsustainability of a centralized nation state model for Sudan.

RSF has declared a provisional government or a parallel government, and they are now holding territory that was historically in pre colonial times largely that territory that they hold now was separate and autonomous. So again from a macro historical perspective this could be seen as a reversion to pre colonial political logic. So, look, we have to deal with the facts on the ground, nobody likes the RSF, but we have to prioritize conflict resolution and ending the violence. So if RSF has now declared a a parallel government or provisional government, we can take that potentially as a signal that they have accepted that they're not gonna take over Khartoum, and it's conceivable in that scenario that a deliberate negotiated and just political reorganization might be possible. This is what I mean about how challenging and how even painful it might be to recalibrate our thinking with regards to states.

Because I've never been personally, I've never been someone who supported any secessionist movements. I never supported any partitions of any countries, whether that's Chechnya or Xinjiang or Sudan or Libya or Syria or Somalia or anywhere else. In my thinking, I've always thought in terms of state permanence. Right? And therefore, any sort of secessionist movement that can carve itself off from the main state, then I always saw that that's inevitably going to be vulnerable, they're going to be vulnerable, they're going to be dependent, and they're going be easily preyed upon by western multinationals.

But I myself am having to recognize that this perspective might be too rigid because times are changing, and to some extent the times might be changing back to conditions that existed before the anomalies that were imposed by colonization, do you understand? And I think that we do need to develop a framework for addressing this, we need to identify, for example, when state dissolution actually represents a correction, because, being unable to recognize this or refusing to recognize this can lead to catastrophic violence as we are seeing now, when we insist upon maintaining these colonial anomalies because that's what they are, those borders are anomalies. So in my opinion we need to develop basically post state models, post nation state models, something more like a a a a structured custodianship of resources and infrastructure, you know, where function and provision of services to the public, these become the sources of legitimacy and authority. In other words, your control over resources, your control over infrastructure will be respected and will be rewarded and will be recognized so long as you use that control to benefit the population. That will be the basis of your authority, your responsibility to the public and how you use it.

Because again, this is what's going on anyway in reality, this is how power really works, the one who controls resources, the one who controls infrastructure have actual power, and that's not always the state. But the state though is still the one who's treated as the responsible one, the accountable one, the one with authority, the one with sovereignty, even though the state might just be an empty box. So this leaves the actual owners and controllers of infrastructure and resources off the hook because ownership and control of resources and infrastructure should be tied to service and responsibility. Okay? If the state has ownership, alright then, but if the state does not have ownership, then frankly they cease to be the exclusive authority in that land.

That's the real world, and our conception of power needs to reflect that fact. Because otherwise, the private sector owners and controllers of infrastructure and resources are never going to be held accountable to the population. While they have real existing power, then you have unaccountable power. And you're you're going to hold a state accountable for what they don't even have control over. You understand?

So we have to recalibrate our thinking in terms of who we attribute authority to, who we contribute, who we attribute power to, and who we attribute sovereignty to, and by recalibrating that, then we recalibrate who we assign responsibility to and accountability to. The state can't just have guns and have the power of violent coercion and be regarded as legitimate authority on this basis. If they don't hold ownership over resources and over infrastructure and if they do not provide for the population, then the state, the government is just one limited actor in any given land, and there's not necessarily anything wrong with that. This is actually, as I say, this is the situation all around the world. The nation state model is almost ceremonial at this point in many many countries, that's a fact including in the West, especially in the West to be honest.

Most countries are actually ruled by informal power networks, and if we were to draw the borders on the basis of those power networks, well, every country or every map of every country would be completely altered, look you wouldn't even recognize it. There wouldn't even be a Sudan as it appears on the map today, there wouldn't be a Somalia as it appears on the map today, There wouldn't be an America as it appears on the maps today. There wouldn't be a Europe as it appears on the maps. Do you understand what I'm saying? I'm saying if we drew maps according to what you could call economic cartography, well, the whole world would look completely different on paper than when we look at a map today.

You would realize if you looked at a map like that, that nation state boundaries are just a thin overlay of artificial demarcations that don't really mean anything because real authority and real sovereignty has almost nothing whatsoever to do with nation state structure except in those countries where the state does own and does control the resources and infrastructure. So yes, going back to Sudan, the RSF absolutely are murderous criminals, but they have functional control over territory through coercive violence, but they have control over resources, they have control over the resources in those territories, and the infrastructure in those territories, the gold mines for example, they control trade routes and so forth. Obviously, they also have a long standing relationship with The United Arab Emirates. So in my opinion, it's not inconceivable that the territories that they control could end up becoming autonomous zones, if not entirely separate from the rest of Sudan by by means of an official partition. The areas that they control, like Darfur, would essentially become autonomous or independent Sultanate as it was in the pre colonial times.

And of course, they would have that very important external partner, The UAE, who provides them with the most viable destination for their gold, would be the main source of their income, the main source of their revenue. So they would be independent from Khartoum, but they would be basically vassalized by The UAE. And of course Khartoum itself would be vassalized, basically vassalized, subordinated by Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Turkey, which is not terribly unlike how the situation was during the Khilafa period, you know. If you think in terms of the nation state model, what I'm talking about is gonna look like a failure, it will look like a humiliation for Sudan. But if you think in terms of the more historically precedented system of collective sovereignty, then there's no real failure.

Both sides of that partition would end up being developed, Both sides of that partition would free themselves from Western domination, from Western subjugation, from Western debt. Both sides would become eventually significant influential nodes in that new regional order. So you have to ask yourself at some point, in my opinion, is it really worth fighting to prevent this outcome? Because realistically, let's be realistic, Sudan's vassalization is inevitable and that was the case with or without the current conflict. Sudan is not now didn't suddenly find themselves at some unexpected fork in the road to find its destiny has suddenly become uncertain.

No. The war did not create this trajectory for Sudan. Sudan realistically was never in a position to be fully independent, not before the RSF SAF conflict and not now, and even if peace had endured and there had never been a conflict. I mean look at the pattern, Sudan has lived as a rentier state for decades, their leaders took the easy money. They didn't go down that hard path of building their economy, productive self reliant economy, diverse economy.

Oil rents from 1999 until 2011 flooded the coffers of the elites and made them very rich, but not the people. But when South Sudan seceded and walked away with something like 75, 80% of their oil reserves, Sudan was exposed. They didn't have anything, so they pivoted to gold, another single commodity economic plan, but that was even worse because the mines are not controlled by the state but by militias, by groups like the RSF, and ultimately by their external patrons like The UAE and Russia and so forth. Gulf money, GCC money propped up their currency and they didn't do that out of charity. They did it in exchange for loyalty, so that you'll send your troops to Yemen, for example.

You're aligned with our foreign policy. You'll tow the line. This is subsidy in exchange for subordination because that's how it works, and that's not necessarily unfair. That's just how it works. By the time the current conflict erupted, the economic foundations in Sudan were already in ruins.

Hyperinflation, crushing debt, IMF dependency, subsidies cut, bread lines swelling, people were going hungry. Even without a bullet fire, Sudan was already structurally captive. The war just turned that chronic illness of their of their economy into an open hemorrhage. The geopolitical board was already laid out. UAE The and Saudi Arabia had already cultivated ties with both the SAF generals and with the RSF militias.

Russia and The UAE had their hands on the gold, Turkey had the Swakin, China owned the oil infrastructure mostly, they dominated their trade, that was the main trading partner was China. And Sudan, it's not like Sudan was playing these part the the these powers off of each other. No, Sudan was being partitioned in slow motion, one contract at a time, one concession at a time, one bank deposit at a time. So when we talk about vassalization of Sudan, this is not the product of the current conflict. That's the culmination of decades of mismanagement and weakness.

Sudan is too weak to stand alone, that's a fact. Their only hope in Sudan is in the concept of regional collective sovereignty, trying to embed themselves in a regional structure where the whole is stronger than the sum of its parts. You understand me? And this isn't pessimism, this is realism, and it's not unique to Sudan by the way, Syria is the same, Jordan's the same, Lebanon, even Egypt to one extent or another is the same, and in fact eventually the same is gonna happen to Israel. As I've talked about many many times, what is being built between g c c and Turkey is a soft empire with no capital, but just a sovereign ecosystem, and Sudan is gonna end up being a node in that system, just like everybody else.

Everyone else is gonna be a node in that system, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. I mean, you know that between 80% to 90% of Sudan's gold is being smuggled, illicitly out of the country, that's 80 to 90% of the gold revenues, that Khartoum is not benefiting from, that the society is not benefit benefiting from, and it's not a new phenomenon. I know people like to pretend that this just started happening now because of the war, but that's not the case, that's not true at all. This has always been the case because again real ownership and real control of that resource, the resource of gold and the infrastructure of the mines has never actually belonged to Khartoum. That gold has been flowing out of Sudan all along.

So if RSF becomes an autonomous government instead of just being a militia and The UAE as we know has leverage over the RSF, well, that illicit gold trade can be regulated. Because after all, smuggled gold does not bring as much money as legally traded gold. Whether you like to believe it or not, it is not in The UAE's interest to allow smuggling to continue, but Khartoum is not in a position to enforce compliance, and they never did do that even before the war. Look, you know, people imagine that The Emirates prefers Sudanese gold smuggled in sacks, but that's a very shallow view. Smuggling is a liability.

It's less profit, it's more risky, and it's reputationally toxic. You can't sell smuggled gold at premium prices. You can't access, for example, ESG funds, and you can't keep Dubai as the world's gold hub while laundering conflict gold. Regulation on the other hand means control. It means clean certification.

It means higher value, higher prices, larger markets, stable supply chains, international legitimacy. It ties Sudan's minds into Emirati investment and locks in long term partnerships, and that shields The UAE from sanctions. Smuggling is chaos, understand. Regulation is empire and empire is what's being built. Look, like I said, the RSF is a criminal militia.

They're extremely violent and they're accused of and undoubtedly guilty of atrocities. But I'm sorry, you are naive if you think that that disqualifies them from forming a government. You could have said the same thing about SPLM in South Sudan, and it was said about them, and it was true about them. You could say the same thing about the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. You could say the same thing about Paul Kagame.

I mean, technically, you could say it about the IRA and Sinn Fein, you could say it about the ANC, you could say it about Hezbollah, you could say it about Hamas, you certainly could say it about the Houthis. Militias become governments all the time, they become political parties all the time, despite having sometimes an atrocious record of violence. Now you could argue about how effective they are, or how corrupt those those movements were, or or or how corrupt those movements are once they become political players, once they become governments and so on. I mean, you can talk about the Taliban, for example, can even talk about Sharia in Syria. Right?

These are people who were armed insurgents and they became leaders. So like I say, you can argue about whether they're good at it or not, whether they are whether they are whether they have integrity, whether they're good administrations once they come to power. But I think generally speaking, they are undoubtedly better than they were when they were malicious. They're more responsible, they're more mature, they're more disciplined. And that would generally be even more the case when that militia turned government is under the management of a patron, an external patron that they rely upon who expects them to be more responsible, more mature, and more disciplined.

So like I say, you have to deal with the reality on the ground. You have to deal with the fact on the ground, whether you like it or not, whether you approve of it or not, and you have to consider and you have to pursue realistic and plausible and actually achievable outcomes based upon the facts on the ground. And at this point, a complete rejection of RSF autonomy might be unrealistic because the de facto control that they have in Darfur and in other areas isn't actually exclusively the result of the war. They already had it to a great extent. So I think any workable solution is probably going to have to be built on a on a sort of a a grand bargain type scenario that balances regional autonomy against strong central safeguards and so on.

But Sudan cannot move forward by trying to revive the very model that failed it again and again and again, the colonial state with Khartoum as the center, and the rest of the country as the periphery. That's collapsed. That that model has collapsed and it's not coming back, and it shouldn't come back because that system was never Sudanese, that system was never African, that system was never Islamic, it was imposed by colonizers. So what you have before you in Sudan now, in my opinion, is the opportunity to potentially pioneer something new. And when I say new, I mean new to the modern world, but but deeply rooted in our history and in our principles.

We need to transition from a paradigm of state sovereignty as monopoly, to sovereignty as custodianship, or custodianship as sovereignty, because authority in Islam is an it's a trust, it's conditional. Power is custodial, and it's held only as long as it fulfills its purpose. So how does this apply to Sudan? Well, right now in Sudan you have the the SAF on one side, you have the RSF on the other side, and you have tribal authorities, you have local actors, you have civilians, all competing but none are able to dominate, and no one is gonna be able to dominate, and that's created war. The solution is not to try to to have one annihilate the other, the solution is to integrate them into a framework of custodianship where each has defined jurisdiction, has defined responsibility, but not monopoly.

RSF becomes the custodian of Darfur in the Western corridors, for example. SAF retains custodianship of Khartoum in the Nile Valley, other custodians say are acknowledged in their in their own regions. And above all of them is not a new dictator in Khartoum, but say for example a a council where authority is balanced and conditional, and that council is not self arbitrating, it's guaranteed and balanced by the external custodians, the GCC in Turkey, and China, and Russia, and so forth, their external partners and patrons. And I want you to this point, the Gulf States and Turkey, like I've said before many times, and in this talk, they're building a soft empire. But this isn't like the old colonial empires of Europe, it's not about annexing territory, it's about integrating corridors of infrastructure, corridors of investment and resources and security and so forth into a shared collective sovereignty.

Sudan's ports, its farmland, its gold, its trade routes, all of these are gonna be linked into the GCC Turkey system. And the question is, will Sudan just be a dependent pawn in this system, or is it going to pioneer a new model of governance? Because if Sudan embraces a model of, as I say, structured custodianship, then it can present itself not as a failed state that needs to be rescued, but as a leader in innovation, in governance, and it can be the first to demonstrate that post colonial governance does not have to mean either fragmentation or dictatorship, it can mean a higher form of collective sovereignty. So Sudan's message to its own people and to the region should be, in my opinion, we're not collapsing, we are correcting. We're not breaking apart, we are becoming sufficient.

We are pioneering a new model where power is shared, power is balanced, power is conditional, and power is always accountable to the people. And this, I would argue, is not only the path forward for Yemen, for Somalia, and for every other society that's trapped in the failures of the colonial nation state model. Sudan can be the pioneer. Sudan can be the first one to turn the chaos of war into the foundation of a new custodial order, rooted in Islam, protected by regional partners, and owned by its own people.