Malik Agar Ayyir, deputy chairman of Sudan's transitional government, has proposed a national dialogue framework aimed at ending the country's civil war and moving toward elected civilian rule, Al Jazeera reported on July 8, 2026. The proposal centers on two key demands: restoring the state's exclusive control over weapons and dissolving non-state armed groups as preconditions for a transition to civilian government.

Agar himself embodies Sudan's fractured recent history. A former guerrilla commander who once led the Sudan Revolutionary Front and the SPLM-N faction bearing his name, he has since joined the transitional leadership. That trajectory — from insurgent to power-broker — gives him credibility across Sudan's competing factions, but it also means the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and their backers will scrutinize his true intentions.

The dialogue framework addresses four unresolved questions: the future role of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), how to resolve the war with the RSF, what role outside countries should play, and how Sudan should ultimately be governed. Crucially, Agar's plan separates any SAF-RSF military negotiation into a distinct track rather than folding it into the broader political dialogue. He has framed disarming non-state actors and restoring state weapons monopoly as prerequisites — things that must happen before, not after, a political settlement.

The proposal explicitly draws on the 2020 Juba peace agreement, the landmark deal between Khartoum's government and several rebel factions that first brought Agar and fellow commanders into the Transitional Sovereignty Council. That agreement remains the closest precedent Sudan has for transforming armed opposition into formal governance roles. Agar's new framework reads as an attempt to apply that same logic to the SAF-RSF conflict itself.

The war Agar aims to end began in April 2023, when fighting erupted 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. Multiple mediation efforts have tried and failed — each one foundering on the same underlying disputes this proposal now attempts to address.

Sudan's own 2025 peace plan demanded RSF withdrawal from western and central Sudan as a precondition for talks; the RSF rejected it. 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 and government reforms. The SAF rejected that plan, claiming the UAE had shown bias by allegedly supporting the RSF. A separate civilian-led effort called the Nairobi roadmap emerged in December 2025, seeking to build influence for Sudan's civil society rather than just military factions.

Agar's plan explicitly acknowledges that outside countries have meddled in Sudan's conflict — language that aligns with repeated claims by Sudanese officials that the UAE has armed and financed the RSF. The UAE denies these allegations. This grievance is not new. Sudanese officials invoked the same UAE charge when rejecting the Quad framework months earlier. Its recurrence here signals that any dialogue mechanism will need to address, or at least defuse, the foreign patronage question before domestic factions can negotiate credibly with each other.

Sudan's history with "national dialogue" as a peacemaking tool is mixed. Former president Omar al-Bashir announced a dialogue process in 2013 that preceded his 2019 ouster rather than any lasting settlement. More recently, a July 2024 Cairo gathering of Sudanese political factions ended without Agar or Darfur governor Minni Minawi signing the resulting agreement. That history of Agar declining to endorse Cairo-brokered outcomes makes him authoring a new dialogue proposal particularly significant — he is not simply participating in this process but designing it.

Agar's regional diplomacy in preceding months offers some context. He met Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni at State House Entebbe in February 2026, continuing a pattern of Sovereignty Council engagement with regional leaders that has included Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Cairo. Egypt has repeatedly called for peaceful dialogue as Sudan's way forward.

What sets this proposal apart from earlier failed attempts is less its specific content—restoring state weapons control, civilian transition, elections—than its authorship and its structure. By isolating SAF-RSF negotiations as a separate track, Agar sidesteps the trap that defeated both the 2025 UN plan and the Quad initiative, which tried to solve battlefield de-escalation and political reform in a single negotiation. The real test will be whether Sudan's armed and civilian factions accept this two-track approach, and whether the external powers named or implied in Agar's accountability language respond seriously. Those factors will determine whether this dialogue becomes another communiqué or, unexpectedly, an actual settlement.