Political science has spent decades studying what wars destroy. Contemporary wars, says Eglal Hamed Abdulgadir, suggest it may be time to ask what they produce
Why do wars endure?
For decades, this has been one of the central questions shaping conflict studies and peacebuilding. The answers are familiar: failed political settlements, institutional collapse, war economies, or insufficient international engagement.
The assumption underlying these explanations is equally familiar. Wars are temporary moments of political breakdown. Peacebuilding, therefore, becomes the project of restoring what war has destroyed.
But what if this assumption is analytically incomplete?
What if some contemporary wars are not simply surviving adverse conditions while waiting for peace agreements? What if they are continuously reshaping the political realities within which they unfold?
If that is the case, then 'Why do wars endure?' may no longer be the most useful question to ask.
Most analyses of contemporary conflicts focus on absence. We document collapsed institutions, disrupted economies, humanitarian crises, and failed governance structures.
These realities matter enormously. Yet they tell only part of the story.
Wars do not suspend political, economic, or social life. People continue to govern, trade, organise, adapt, and negotiate new forms of coexistence under conditions of conflict.
Wars do not suspend political, economic, or social life. Instead, new economic networks and institutional arrangements emerge, and different forms of legitimacy and authority take shape
The longer wars last, the more political realities evolve around them. New economic networks emerge. Alternative institutional arrangements develop. Different forms of legitimacy and authority take shape. Civilian actors build mechanisms of survival and coordination that did not previously exist.
War, in other words, is not only a process of destruction. It is also a process of political production.
Describing protracted conflicts as simply 'enduring' can itself be misleading. The term suggests a static crisis that has lasted longer than expected.
But many contemporary wars are anything but static.
They adapt to changing circumstances. They reorganise political and economic relationships. And they reshape institutions and social arrangements over time. In practice, they increasingly behave less like temporary crises and more like adaptive political arrangements.
Peacebuilding approaches often address the causes of conflict while assuming that the political reality produced by war remains temporary or secondary
This matters because peacebuilding approaches often address the causes of conflict while assuming that the political reality produced by war remains temporary or secondary.
Yet war is continuously transforming that reality.
Sudan's current war provides a useful illustration.
Since April 2023, analyses of Sudan have understandably focused on state collapse, humanitarian catastrophe, and economic devastation. Reports by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the Assessment Capacities Project, and the International Crisis Group – Sudan have documented these developments extensively.
At the same time, however, something else has been happening.
Civilian-led emergency response rooms have organised humanitarian assistance across conflict-affected communities, while local actors have developed new mechanisms of coordination and survival. The political economy of Sudan's war has also evolved in ways that conventional conflict analysis often overlooks; see the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker.
Alternative financial mechanisms have emerged as the banking sector has experienced repeated disruptions. Trade routes, cash circulation, and supply chains have been reconfigured across borders and local markets. These transformations are reflected in recent political economy research, such as this Rift Valley Institute study on the political economy of cash and markets in wartime Sudan.
Sudanese civilians were not waiting for the war to end before reorganising their lives. They were doing so within the conditions created by war itself.
Sudan also remains one of the world's largest displacement crises, as UNHCR's Sudan data portal documents.
The country is not exceptional in this regard. We can see similar dynamics across contemporary protracted conflicts worldwide.
Contemporary peacebuilding may not be failing simply because peace processes are inadequate. It may also be limited by the questions it asks.
If we understand wars primarily as temporary moments of collapse, peacebuilding will naturally focus on restoring what existed before conflict. But if wars continuously reshape political, economic, and institutional realities while they unfold, ignoring these transformations makes durable peace considerably more difficult to achieve.
If we ignore the way wars reshape political, economic and institutional realities, durable peace becomes considerably harder to achieve
Some wars do not endure simply because political settlements have failed. They endure, in part, because they continuously reproduce the conditions that make their continuation possible.
It seems we do not need more answers to the question, 'Why do wars endure?'
The problem is not that contemporary wars have become too difficult to end. Rather, it is that we have spent too long asking why they endure, and too little asking what they have been doing while they do.
