After more than 18 months of conflict in Sudan, a peaceful resolution seems further away than ever. With hundreds of deaths in just a few days in Gezira state at the hands of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), close to 26 million people suffering from acute hunger, and 10 million displaced, the grim reality is that even if a cease-fire came tomorrow, the long-term effects will linger for generations to come.
The ongoing humanitarian crisis spilling over Sudan’s borders is one of the largest in modern history—possibly the world’s largest refugee crisis since 1947, when India’s partition left over 15 million displaced. However, despite the harrowing statistics, stories, and images coming out of Sudan, members of the international community, like the European Union and United States, have largely been standing by, unwilling to support the newly displaced in any meaningful way and denying them the same protections given to displaced people from places like Ukraine.
After more than 18 months of conflict in Sudan, a peaceful resolution seems further away than ever. With hundreds of deaths in just a few days in Gezira state at the hands of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), close to 26 million people suffering from acute hunger, and 10 million displaced, the grim reality is that even if a cease-fire came tomorrow, the long-term effects will linger for generations to come.
The ongoing humanitarian crisis spilling over Sudan’s borders is one of the largest in modern history—possibly the world’s largest refugee crisis since 1947, when India’s partition left over 15 million displaced. However, despite the harrowing statistics, stories, and images coming out of Sudan, members of the international community, like the European Union and United States, have largely been standing by, unwilling to support the newly displaced in any meaningful way and denying them the same protections given to displaced people from places like Ukraine.
Foreign states have wrongly focused their involvement in Sudan on attempting to bring the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF into negotiations, therefore validating both entities as potential leaders of a postwar Sudan. They did this rather than holding each party accountable and redirecting support to civil society organizations and the resistance groups that better represent the Sudanese people. In the most recent edition of failed negotiations in August, the Americans, Saudis, and Swiss attempted to bring the warring parties to the negotiation table in Geneva—only for neither to show up.
Rather than organizing and “mediating,” the international community must step up to support Sudan’s growing displaced community—but they refuse. As two foreign powers armed with substantial economic power and far-reaching influence in shaping international standards, the United States and EU have largely ignored Sudan, and the greater international community has followed suit.
For instance, the EU completed its most recent council meeting in October, which was focused almost entirely on migration, with plans to limit and export migrants. Italy has begun exiling male migrants to Albania for asylum vetting and processing, and right-wing European Council members, along with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, have been urging the rest of the EU to emulate actions to restrict immigration and facilitate deportations by establishing “migration hubs” for “irregular migrant” processing in non-EU nations. These are referred to as “third” countries.
Migration policy in Europe has begun replicating tactics seen in the United States, such as former President Donald Trump’s use of detention centers to imprison children or Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s forced expulsion of migrants to Democratic-leaning states. While the EU has wrapped its efforts up in more elegant terms—it takes special pride in referring to migrants as “irregular” instead of “illegal”—the shiny exterior quickly rubs off. This is especially clear amid calls from agencies like the United Nations Refugee Agency and the International Organization on Migration to offer aid and support to refugees from conflict zones, such as Sudan.
Instead, the U.S. government, EU, and others remain steadfast in limiting their efforts in Sudan to financial aid, unwilling to acknowledge that in a country near collapse, money and humanitarian aid are often undeliverable when groups like the RSF, which foreign powers failed to get to the negotiating table, are blocking it. When aid does make it, it’s too little, too late.
Peter Stano, lead spokesperson for the EU’s external affairs, presented the issue of Sudan as a regional one, saying, “It’s not our neighborhood. We recognize the leadership of the Arab League and the African Union because it’s the African continent. Sudan is an Islamic or Arab country.” Because Stano is a senior organizational representative, his statement, delivered to a group of American and Canadian journalists, attempted to project the EU’s desired external image—an organization that doesn’t engage in interventionist policies. What it does instead, though, is dismiss the situation entirely.
The reality is that even if the EU wants to respect regional initiatives, they themselves have become complicit in the war’s longevity through funding security forces in the region to deter migration, and through a lack of enforcing the accountability of regional partners such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In September, the EU held its first summit with the Gulf Cooperation Council, where there were no discussions of the UAE’s funding of the RSF or of Saudi involvement with the SAF. The irony was not lost on EU leaders, either, as Stano admitted to a group of U.S. and Canadian journalists, “We are funding the conflict basically.”
He isn’t wrong. It was also EU-funded security forces in Egypt that were used in a campaign of mass arrests and deportations of refugees coming from Sudan earlier this year, according to Amnesty International. Therefore, the EU’s assertion that they must leave this conflict to the region, or that it “isn’t our neighborhood,” as Stano said, is simply a cop-out—a way to avoid addressing meaningful opportunities to help, especially in resettlement.
In the United States, engagement in the conflict has been reserved to failed mediation attempts and financial support. But Washington is the largest contributor to the UN OCHA Humanitarian Response Plan. The money is there, but pressure on the SAF to allow aid into affected areas has been far too light. The United States’ lack of pressure on the UAE to be accountable for their role has also been striking.
Just days after a three-tweet thread about an allegiance to the Sudanese people from President Joe Biden, he welcomed UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan to the White House, praising their strategic partnership while charting “an ambitious course for the future.” Such lukewarm efforts to address the conflict and its effects have enabled the U.S. government to turn a blind eye to the growing displacement crisis in the region.
With such blatant efforts to keep migrants at bay across the West, it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid comparing the circumstances of Sudanese refugees with the open-arms reception offered to Ukrainian refugees. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the EU unanimously invoked a Temporary Protection Directive for those fleeing the war in Ukraine, extended to March 2026. Such protection includes residence permits; access to employment, medical care, social welfare, and education; free movement within the EU; and additional privileges.
Up until November 2023, over 4.2 million people from Ukraine received temporary protection, offering stability for millions who were forcibly displaced. Ukrainians were considered part of the neighborhood.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Sudan. While the United States has a Temporary Protected Status in place for Sudanese refugees through April 2025, fewer than 1,200 people have been able to successfully resettle, and the upcoming election threatens any extension or permanence of such a protection. Across the Atlantic, EU-supported interceptions across North Africa have enabled Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco to keep Sudanese refugees, among others, from crossing into Europe—often resulting in the distressing images we see of capsized boats in the Mediterranean.
Interceptions at sea by North African forces often result in a flurry of human rights violations, including detention in Libya, expulsion to neighboring countries by Tunisian authorities, and even forced labor and human trafficking. Instead of directing funds to protecting and supplying refugee camps, European funds have instead gone to policing the Mediterranean—with the hope of curbing any immigration.
Those who have successfully resettled have done so in very low numbers. Germany resettled the most Sudanese asylees in 2023, at 472 people. This meager number is indicative of the lack of clear resettlement pathways available to Sudanese displaced people. Of the 10 million displaced, over eight million remain in the war-torn nation. Slow-moving asylum processes, the lack of a welcoming community, and gradual economic integration—setbacks that have not inhibited migrants from Ukraine in the same way—have acted as barriers to their leaving, even before the EU began introducing harsher migration limits.
The day-and-night treatment of Ukrainian and Sudanese refugees is representative of larger issues within the EU. Ukrainian refugees have evoked a sense of fraternity in many EU nations. Cultural, religious, and historical ties certainly bring them closer to many member states, but the indifference and hostility toward non-white, non-Christian refugees who are also fleeing a devastating conflict suggest a disturbing double standard.
As the EU plans to adopt Italy’s approach, the upcoming U.S. election threatens the current migration policy, and the war in Sudan continues with little aid or promise to Sudanese citizens, the international norms of humanitarianism are being called into question. As international observers, the EU and United States must mobilize their available resources to support suffering populations by offering similar pathways to resettlement and pressuring Sudanese forces to allow through the aid they’ve spent millions on.
Because it is our neighborhood.
