Nothing says ‘solidarity’ like a summit without Sudanese voices.

Weaponized Information | April 9, 2025

On April 15, the French government—faithful descendant of the old colonial aristocracy—will host a “ministerial humanitarian conference” on Sudan in Paris. From the outside, it might look like compassion: diplomats in crisp suits, PowerPoint decks with bar graphs of suffering, catered lunches paid for by ministries of foreign affairs. But behind this theater lies the same tired colonial logic—imperial powers convening behind closed doors to manage crises of their own making, while the people bleeding on the ground are denied even a seat at the table.

The official pretext is noble: Sudan is collapsing. And indeed it is. Since war erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), more than 30 million people now require humanitarian aid, and millions more have been displaced across the region. The United Nations warns it’s the worst humanitarian crisis on Earth today.

But crises don’t fall from the sky. They are made. And Sudan’s unraveling is the product of decades of imperial tinkering, neoliberal sabotage, and military adventurism—all rationalized by the gospel of “stability,” “transition,” and “security cooperation.” France now wants to appear as a peace broker. But we at Weaponized Information know better: this is neocolonial optics dressed up in humanitarian drag.

Imperial Footprints in the Blood

Let’s not pretend France is neutral here. From Algeria to Mali to Chad, France’s African empire has always rested on a dual foundation: control of the state and looting of the land. In Sudan, it’s no different. In the early 2000s, France and its Euro-American allies poured weapons and cash into the Sudanese military state while turning a blind eye to atrocities in Darfur. They saw Sudan not as a nation, but as a strategic buffer between Arab and African spheres, a resource corridor, a pawn on the global chessboard.

The RSF itself—the very militia France now pretends to oppose—was born out of the Janjaweed death squads unleashed in Darfur, later integrated into the Sudanese state with Western approval. And when the Sudanese revolution erupted in 2018, it wasn’t Macron or the UN who stood with the protestors in Khartoum’s streets. It was the Sudanese working class, youth, and women who laid their lives down to demand democracy, bread, and peace. France, the U.S., and their Gulf State allies offered a different bargain: a “civilian-military power-sharing agreement” that left the killers in uniform and the generals in charge.

Diplomatic Theater, Colonial Scripts

Now France wants to stage a summit—but without any Sudanese revolutionary forces in the room. The SAF and RSF are not invited. Neither are grassroots resistance committees, trade unions, women’s groups, or independent journalists. Why? Because they might actually tell the truth. That the empire is the arsonist pretending to be a firefighter. That Sudan doesn’t need another blueprint for stability drawn up in the 16th arrondissement. It needs the complete dismantling of the economic and military machine that has strangled it for decades.

This summit is not about Sudanese liberation. It is about French repositioning. What we are witnessing is imperialist recalibration through humanitarian discourse. In a world where multipolar alliances are gaining ground—Russia in the Sahel, China on the Red Sea coast—France is desperate to retain its relevance. If it can’t hold Africa through soldiers, it will try with aid packages, media narratives, and closed-door negotiations.

This is what we call “accumulation through collapse.” The war creates refugees; the West funds camps. The economy implodes; World Bank loans arrive with structural strings. The healthcare system breaks; NGOs flood in with contracts, metrics, and “capacity-building.” And through it all, the imperial core rebuilds its control over the very disaster it helped engineer.

The Revolution Wasn’t Invited, But It’s Still Coming

The Sudanese masses aren’t fooled. They remember how their uprising in 2019 was co-opted. They remember who repressed their marches and who shook hands with their jailers. From Port Sudan to the diaspora, the people know this struggle is bigger than two generals. It is a struggle between the old world of colonial domination and a new world built from below—by committees, by workers, by survivors.

At Weaponized Information, we believe in the internationalism of the oppressed—not the diplomacy of the oppressors. Our solidarity is not with Parisian diplomats but with the people who are organizing mutual aid under siege, who are documenting war crimes with a dying battery, who are building democracy with nothing but vision and will.

France’s conference may get its headlines. It may even secure some short-term pledges. But it will not deliver peace, dignity, or justice. Those can only be won through struggle—and the struggle is already underway.