The best answer may be the most obvious when it comes to the origins of the coup in Sudan

I am confident that international actors play at most a marginal role in such domestic upheavals, writes Borzou Daragahi

Demonstrators gather at a protest in Khartoum (Getty)

What was behind the recent coup in Sudan? There has been plenty of contradictory and restless intrigue-mongering about Lt Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s putsch, which involved quashing the civilian government of prime minister Abdalla Hamdok and detaining his courts.

A number of nations have been talked about but having lived through and covered coups in Egypt and Turkey, Iran and throughout the Arab world, and studied them in other countries, I am confident that international actors play at most a teeny, marginal role in such domestic upheavals.

Typically in such confrontations, governments blame “invisible hands” of foreign actors for stirring up unrest, and there is always blame for some – America, Israel and the Gulf – for backing the autocrats or coup plotters, even if it isn’t substantiated.

But where foreign nations do play a role it may be through vague assurances of continued support, very rarely though substantive kinetic action. Foreign actors often slip into the scene after the various antagonists and protagonists taking centre-stage have settled their scores, trying to associate themselves with the winner.

In the case of Sudan, the US and UAE helped broker the 2019 deal that brought an end to Omar Bashir’s era of dictatorship, creating a power-sharing arrangement between the armed forces and Hamdok’s nascent civilian government. It hardly makes sense that they would undermine that.

A well-reported piece in The New York Times recounts the messy calculations and frantic diplomacy that preceded the coup. It’s probably not a coincidence that a month before Burhan was set to lose power, he decided to stage a coup. “[A] picture emerged of a military that had grown frustrated with its civilian partners and was intent on maintaining its privileged position and avoiding any investigations into its business affairs or [alleged] human rights abuses,” said a report.

A nervous, aging general lashing out at those he feared were trying to take away his villas and put his pals in jail may not sound as sexy as tales of clandestine derring-do and backroom intrigue, but it’s probably closer to the truth.

Yours,

Borzou Daragahi

International correspondent