Malik Agar Ayyir, deputy chairman of Sudan's transitional government, has proposed a national dialogue aimed at ending the country's civil war and steering it toward democratic civilian rule, Al Jazeera reported on July 8, 2026. The proposal calls for restoring the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force and dissolving non-state armed groups as conditions for a transition to elected civilian government.

Agar is a former guerrilla commander who once chaired the Sudan Revolutionary Front and led the SPLM-N faction that bears his name, before joining Sudan's transitional leadership as deputy chairman of the Transitional Sovereignty Council. That trajectory — insurgent to power-broker — is precisely what gives his intervention weight in Khartoum's fractured landscape, and precisely why the RSF and its sympathizers will scrutinize his motives.

The dialogue framework, as described, seeks to settle four unresolved questions: the future role of the Sudanese Armed Forces, how to handle the war with the Rapid Support Forces, what part outside powers should play, and how Sudan should ultimately be governed. Agar's document explicitly separates any SAF-RSF negotiation into its own track, distinct from the broader national dialogue — consistent with his earlier public stance ruling out direct talks with the RSF. He has framed disarming non-state actors and restoring exclusive state control over weapons as prerequisites rather than outcomes of a political settlement.

The proposal draws explicitly on the 2020 Juba peace agreement, the landmark deal between Khartoum's government and several rebel factions that first brought Agar and fellow commanders El Hadi Idris and El Taher Hajar into the Transitional Sovereignty Council. That agreement is the closest precedent Sudan has for translating armed opposition into formal governance, and Agar's new dialogue reads as an attempt to extend its logic to the SAF-RSF war itself.

The war that Agar's plan targets began in April 2023, when fighting broke out between the SAF and the RSF. It has since killed thousands and displaced roughly 14 million people, producing what aid agencies describe as the world's largest ongoing humanitarian and refugee crisis, per Al Jazeera. Every prior mediation effort has foundered on the same fault lines this proposal now tries to address directly.

Sudan's own 2025 peace plan, presented to the UN Security Council, demanded RSF withdrawal from western and central Sudan as a precondition for any negotiation; RSF leadership dismissed it outright. The Quad initiative — backed by the United States, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt — proposed in November 2025 a three-month humanitarian truce leading to permanent peace alongside major government reforms. The SAF rejected that plan as biased, citing the UAE's alleged role in the conflict. A separate, civilian-led effort known as the Nairobi roadmap emerged in December 2025, seeking to build a credible third pole distinct from both the SAF and RSF, aimed at restoring agency to Sudanese civilians rather than armed factions.

Agar's plan explicitly states that no durable progress is possible without acknowledging the role external actors have played in Sudan's internal affairs — language that aligns with repeated accusations by Sudanese officials that the UAE has armed and financed the RSF's rebellion. The UAE has consistently denied such allegations. This grievance is not new to Agar's political vocabulary; Sudanese officials invoked the same UAE allegation when rejecting the Quad framework months earlier, and its recurrence here signals that any dialogue mechanism will need to resolve, or at least neutralize, the question of foreign patronage before domestic factions can credibly negotiate among themselves.

Sudan's history with "national dialogue" as a device is uneven. Omar al-Bashir invoked the same term in 2013, announcing the release of political prisoners as part of a dialogue process that ultimately preceded his 2019 ouster rather than any lasting settlement, per Al Jazeera's archival reporting. More recently, a July 2024 Cairo gathering of Sudanese political factions, convened with what Reuters described as little prospect of peace, ended without Agar or Darfur governor Minni Minawi signing the resulting communique, per Reuters. That history of Agar declining to endorse Cairo-brokered outcomes makes his authorship of a new dialogue proposal notable in itself — he is not simply a participant in this process but its architect.

Agar's regional diplomacy in the months preceding this proposal offers some context for its timing. He met Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni at State House Entebbe in February 2026, according to Uganda's State House, continuing a pattern of Sovereignty Council engagement with regional heads of state that has included Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Cairo. Egypt has repeatedly called for peaceful dialogue as the route out of Sudan's war.

What distinguishes this proposal from its predecessors is less its content — restoring state monopoly on arms, civilian transition, elections — than its authorship and its sequencing. By quarantining SAF-RSF negotiations as a separate track, Agar avoids the trap that sank the 2025 UN plan and the Quad initiative, both of which tried to fold battlefield de-escalation and political reform into a single negotiating basket. Whether Sudan's fractured armed and civilian constituencies accept a dialogue built around that separation, and whether external patrons named or implied in Agar's framing respond to the accountability language embedded in it, will determine whether this proposal joins the list of dialogues that produced communiqués, or becomes the one that produces a settlement.