State fragility, endless wars, and suspended democracies: when time does not flow but breaks
Abstract: On November 26, 2025, Guinea-Bissau plunged into a coup that overturned its fragile democracy within hours, while Sudan continues to be engulfed by a war that, since 2023, has transformed the country into a hollowed-out and de-institutionalized territory. Two distant crises, yet united by the same root: the structural fragility of the State, shaped by internal conflicts, parallel armed powers, and institutions unable to withstand the weight of the past and the pressures of the present. In Guinea-Bissau, the armed forces neutralized civilian power through a surgical operation; in Sudan, the RSF militia imposed a strategy of attrition aimed not at governing the territory, but at emptying it, making it controllable without administering it. The result is a continent crossed by chronic fractures, where time does not flow but breaks, leaving space for a suspended future marked by instability, silence, and humanitarian crises. The political, military, and social dynamics connecting these scenarios raise a central question for the international community: intervene before states collapse, or continue to watch as the continent fades into the shadows of its own history?
Keywords #Geopolitics #Africa #GuineaBissau #Sudan #MilitaryCoup #CoupdEtat #CivilWar #Darfur #ElFasher #RSF #HumanitarianCrisis #Refugees #FragileState #AfricanConflicts #InternationalCrisis #HumanRights #GlobalSecurity #WorldPolitics #CristinaDiSilvio #AlbertoFloresHernández #EthicaSocietas #EthicaSocietasJournal #ScientificJournal #SocialSciences #ethicasocietasupli
Alberto Flores Hernández, Ph.D. Minister to the UN, Permanent Vice President Abroad and, concurrently, Member of the Senior Advisory Council of the Vietnam and World Foreign Affairs Agency (VWF). Global Advisory Council Member of the World Leaders Consortium. https://worldleadersconsortium.com/global-councils. LinkedIn Profile.
“Time does not flow beside us. It passes through us.” This is not abstract philosophy: it is pure geopolitics. A continent crossed by time like an open wound that cannot heal.
In Guinea-Bissau, democracy was overturned in a single night. In Sudan, the war devours cities and populations as if the present were a minefield with no escape. Time does not pass: it breaks. And within that fracture, we are there too.
November 26, 2025, was not an ordinary day. The country was still awaiting the results of the November 23 elections, already marked by tensions and accusations of irregularities. The air was heavy, like the humidity of the dry season.
Then, in the dead of night, democracy went dark. The military moved with surgical precision: they seized the presidential palace, besieged the electoral commission, stormed the Ministry of the Interior, and arrested or neutralized key figures of the state apparatus.
A few hours later, General Horta Nta Na Man was proclaimed President of the transition. A curfew sealed the streets, borders were closed, and the constitutional order was suspended. Former president Umaro Sissoco Embaló fled to Senegal, forced into exile.
But this coup is not an isolated episode. It is the repetition of a recurring pattern: whenever civilian power attempts to consolidate, it is swallowed by the internal shadows of the armed forces, by clan loyalties, by personal rivalries that precede the law. In Guinea-Bissau, the past does not leave. It returns. In uniform.
The coup was not improvised: it was almost doctrinal. The military struck the three vital points of a fragile state:
• Legitimacy, by neutralizing the presidency and the electoral commission;
• Communication, by isolating ministries and information hubs;
• Public force, by absorbing or paralyzing units loyal to the government.
The chain of command in Guinea-Bissau is not a structure: it is a network. A network contaminated by clans, shifting loyalties, and historical rivalries. This is why the coup was “silent”: it found no real opponents. The junta did not have to conquer the state. It was already inside it.
The coup is not the beginning of the crisis: it is its natural maturation. A bitter fruit fallen from a tree with roots too weak to support democracy.
If Guinea-Bissau collapses overnight, Sudan has been falling for years.
The war that began in April 2023 has become an autonomous system: an economy, a geography, a social structure built on violence and flight. The state has been reduced to a ghost.
The siege and subsequent fall of El Fasher, in North Darfur, represent one of the most tragic chapters. For months—no longer measurable with accuracy—the city was strangled: food and water cut off, hospitals bombed or looted, neighborhoods razed, civilians massacred or forced to flee.
In recent weeks, over 100,000 people have left the city, many unable to survive the journey.
The paramilitary militia RSF is not fighting a conventional war. It has developed a hybrid and brutal strategy that combines:
• total attrition (siege, resource strangulation);
• irregular mobility (pick-ups, motorcycles, modified drones);
• psychological terror;
• economic predation (mines, illegal trafficking, wartime taxation);
• social fragmentation (mass displacement, deportations, systematic rape).
El Fasher was not a simple conquest. It was a dark lesson in modern urban warfare: the objective is not to govern the territory, but to empty it—until it becomes controllable without administering it.
The RSF does not want to govern El Fasher. It wants to prevent anyone else from doing so. It is war as permanent de-institutionalization.
Today, Sudan is one of the darkest places on the planet. A darkness that spreads.
What links a coup in West Africa to a genocidal war in East Africa?
A harsh answer: state fragility as a permanent condition.
In Guinea-Bissau, the state is fragile because it has no foundations: it floats on military interests.
In Sudan, the state is fragile because it has been consumed by militias faster, richer, and more ruthless than the government they were supposed to serve.
The past—coups, wars, colonialism, poorly drawn borders—does not disappear. It remains in institutions, in barracks, in weapons.
The future—peace, stability, reconstruction—remains suspended. Possible, but not guaranteed.
The present becomes a battlefield.
International observers condemn. Governments hesitate. NGOs plead for humanitarian corridors that never arrive.
And the night stretches on. In Bissau as in Darfur.
Time does not pass. It passes through us.
And it asks us, with no room left for escape:
Do we want to keep watching while states collapse?
Or do we want to act before the continent becomes a geography of silence and smoke?
The choice can no longer be postponed.
The future—that suspended future—awaits only to be chosen.
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