Truth Perspective | Ibrahim Shaglawi The Sudanese Dialogue.. Before the Table

The official spokesperson for the Committee for Preparing the Dialogue, Othman Mirghani, announced that the committee had made progress in its consultations, which included more than one hundred community groups, in addition to political parties, alliances, and independent figures. He confirmed that the consultations are based on the principle of “No exclusion and no exception,” and that the committee’s role is limited to preparation and communication, without imposing the participants in the dialogue, its agenda, or its outcomes.

This figure, in light of the multiplicity of political entities and forces, presents the committee with a major challenge: How can this diversity be transformed from a multitude of visions into a productive political process? The Sudanese crisis does not lie in a lack of initiatives and proposals, but rather in transforming them into agreements that can serve as a foundation for further progress. The danger is that the dialogue may turn into a repetition of positions instead of becoming a space for bringing visions closer together and creating a solution.

However, the sheer volume of consultations alone is not enough. What matters now is for the committee to move from collecting opinions to organizing them and transforming them into clear issues for dialogue. This is where the “before the table” stage comes in. The committee prepares an initial draft of the most important national issues that require discussion, then presents it to political parties and community forces to provide their comments in writing. In this way, participants enter the dialogue carrying visions on specific issues and proceed from a common ground upon which they can build.

Accordingly, every party or entity becomes required not merely to announce a political position, but to present a specific vision regarding the issues on the table: What does it consider a priority? How does it diagnose the problem? What solution does it propose? And what mechanisms does it consider appropriate for implementing its proposal? At the same time, it may add other issues that it believes were absent from the initial framework and deserve to be part of the dialogue agenda.

This step may appear simple, but in reality, it moves the preparation process from a political level to a methodological one. The committee does not tell political parties what to agree upon, nor does it predetermine the outcomes of the dialogue. Instead, it establishes an initial framework for discussion and then allows the forces to fill that framework with their visions and positions. After that, the most important function begins: collecting, classifying, and analyzing these visions, and extracting their political map.

From here, the committee can produce two reference documents that form the basis for moving toward direct dialogue.

The first is a document on the issues agreed upon. It brings together the topics, principles, and proposals that reveal, through the submitted visions, the existence of a clear degree of consensus regarding them. This document should not remain an internal document. Rather, it could be made public and named “National Common Ground,” so that Sudanese people know from the outset what their political and community forces have been able to agree upon before negotiations begin over what remains. The purpose is not to announce a final consensus, but to establish the areas where agreement exists and upon which further progress can be built.

The second document is the document on disputed issues. It is the more important of the two in terms of its dialogic function, because it brings together the topics where the analysis process has revealed genuine differences in the visions of political parties and entities. Here, disagreement does not become a deferred problem; rather, it is transformed into organized material for dialogue: one position against another, one approach against another, while identifying points of divergence and possible areas of convergence.

In this sense, the second document can become the actual agenda for the opening sessions of the dialogue. Instead of the first rounds of meetings or direct sessions beginning from scratch, or participants spending a long time determining what should be discussed, they enter the table facing a clear list of issues that, based on the visions of the forces themselves, have been established as matters of disagreement requiring dialogue.

This methodology gives the principle of “No exclusion and no exception” a practical meaning. Participation is no longer merely presence on a list of invitees, but a genuine contribution to shaping the dialogue agenda itself. Every party or entity presents its vision, and every vision enters the process of collection, classification, and analysis. Its results then appear in the two documents, while maintaining attribution of positions to their owners and preserving the distinctions between them.

In my view, this approach can address one of the greatest problems facing Sudanese dialogues: the abundance of topics and the breadth of disagreements without a method for distinguishing between what has been agreed upon and what requires negotiation, and between issues that can be resolved through consensus and those that require a decision or popular mandate. Dialogue does not become productive through the number of participants, but through its ability to transform disagreement into specific questions, questions into approaches, and approaches into understandings.

In conclusion, according to #Truth_Perspective, the value of dialogue is not measured by the number of people sitting at the table, but by the visions and clear issues they bring to it. If the Preparatory Committee succeeds in identifying what has been agreed upon and what remains disputed, and in formulating the agenda, it will have accomplished the most important task preceding the dialogue. Genuine dialogue does not begin at the table, but before it; when points of agreement and disagreement become clear, so that the sessions do not turn into a repetition of the crisis, but rather into a serious search for approaches and solutions.

Wishing you continued health and well-being.

Tuesday, September 22, 2026. Shglawi55@gmail.com