Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent

The question offers two outcomes, a durable democratic transition or an elite bargain that preserves existing power, and I want to begin by saying that in my experience of how small states change governments the two are not alternatives. Every durable transition I know of was an elite bargain, and most elite bargains have been dressed as transitions, and the difference between the ones that held and the ones that did not lies not in whether the old powers were preserved, which they always are to some degree, but in whether the bargain created institutions that outlived the men who made it. By that test, Sudan and Algeria are at different stages of the same process, Sudan has made a bargain and Algeria has refused one, and I think the Sudanese bargain, which looks like a sellout from the street, has a better chance of producing something durable than the Algerian refusal, which looks like principle, and I will explain why from the vantage of a region that has watched a great many such bargains made and broken.

Begin with Sudan, because the sequence is instructive. A movement that began over the price of bread in December became, by April, a professional-class uprising led by doctors and lawyers and engineers organised through an association that the old regime had never managed to crush, and it brought down a thirty-year dictator without a shot fired by the protesters. The army removed him, installed itself, and on 3 June its paramilitary wing, the Rapid Support Forces, cleared the sit-in in Khartoum and killed more than a hundred people. The movement answered with a general strike and a million-person march, and the generals, who had the guns and had just used them, nonetheless signed a power-sharing agreement in July and a constitutional declaration in August. Why? Not because they were persuaded. Because the movement had demonstrated that it could shut the country down without fighting, because the African Union had suspended Sudan and the generals’ patrons in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi preferred a managed transition to a chaotic one, and because the army’s own officer corps was not reliable enough to sustain a Tiananmen. That is the structure of a bargain: each side has something the other cannot take by force, and they agree to share the thing neither can hold alone.

The bargain’s terms are the thing to read, and I have read them. An eleven-member sovereignty council, military chair for twenty-one months, then civilian chair for eighteen; a civilian prime minister, the economist Hamdok, with a cabinet of technocrats; elections at the end of thirty-nine months; and the Rapid Support Forces, under Hemedti, intact and seated as deputy chair. The last term is the one the street hates and the one that made the agreement possible, because Hemedti is the man who did the killing on 3 June and he would not have signed anything that led to his own prosecution. Small states learn that a transition which requires the man with the guns to accept his own trial is a transition that does not happen. The Sudanese have accepted, for now, a transition in which he keeps his guns and his seat and his gold mines in Darfur, and in exchange the civilians have the government, the budget, the foreign relations, and thirty-nine months to build institutions that will be there when the council’s chair passes to a civilian. That is not democracy. It is the precondition for democracy, and it is the most a movement without weapons has ever extracted from an army with them.

Now Algeria, where the structure is different and the refusal is the point. The Hirak brought down Bouteflika’s fifth term in six weeks of Friday marches and has marched every Friday since, thirty-three of them, in numbers that have not fallen, with a discipline that has produced no deaths and almost no violence, which is extraordinary. The army, under Gaid Salah, has responded by arresting the former president’s brother, two intelligence chiefs, and a dozen oligarchs, which is the army purging the civilian wing of the old regime and presenting the purge as reform, and by scheduling a presidential election for December under the existing constitution, which the Hirak rejects because an election run by the system is an election that the system wins. The movement’s demand is that the whole apparatus go before any vote is held. The army’s position is that the apparatus is the state and the state cannot go. Neither has blinked. There is no bargain, because the movement has refused to name negotiators who could make one and the army has refused to accept that the movement has standing to be negotiated with, and the result is a stalemate in which the army controls the institutions and the movement controls the streets and each waits for the other to tire.

Here is where my regional experience bears. A movement that refuses to bargain preserves its purity and loses its leverage, because leverage must be exercised at a table or it evaporates in the square. The Algerian army has read this. It is proceeding with the December election, it is arresting protesters who carry the wrong flag, and it is betting that thirty-three Fridays becomes fifty and then thirty and then a dozen, and that a movement which would not take a bargain in September will have none to take in March. The Sudanese movement bargained early, at the moment of maximum leverage, after 30 June, and got a civilian government and a timetable. The Algerian movement has leverage now and is spending it on refusal. I understand the refusal; the Algerians remember 1992, when an election was cancelled and a decade of war followed, and they remember that every previous opening was closed by the same generals. But I have watched refusals in the Caribbean, and they end in one of two ways: the movement accepts a worse bargain later, or the movement dissolves and the army calls the dissolution stability.

So my assessment is that Sudan has produced an elite bargain with the architecture of a transition, and that its durability depends on whether the civilians use thirty-nine months to build institutions that can survive Hemedti’s ambition and the Gulf’s money, which is a real question and not a hopeless one; and that Algeria has produced a stalemate between a movement too principled to bargain and an army too entrenched to yield, which is likely to end in an election the movement boycotts and the army calls legitimate, which is the elite bargain without the transition. The question asks which is more likely, and the small-state answer is that elite bargains are the only vehicle through which transitions have ever travelled, that Sudan has boarded one and Algeria has refused, and that the Sudanese passengers have a long and dangerous ride ahead and the Algerians, on present course, are standing in the square watching the bus leave. I would rather be in Khartoum. I would not have said that in June.

Cheyenne, Wyoming Correspondent

I will say up front that before this year I could not have told you much about Sudan beyond Darfur and nothing about Algeria beyond the fact that it is large and sells gas to France, and that I have spent the past few months reading about both because my son is in the National Guard and the Guard has been going to Africa, quietly, for a decade, to places the public could not find on a map, and a woman whose son might be sent somewhere learns the place. So I am going to answer this question as a bookkeeper and a Guard mother, which means asking who is paying for what and whether the United States has any entry on the page at all, and the answer to the second is almost none, and I think that is the most important thing an American correspondent can say about it.

Start with the ledger in Sudan, because the money explains the bargain better than the speeches. The old regime fell in April because the economy had collapsed: the country lost three-quarters of its oil when the South seceded in 2011, inflation was running near seventy percent, the government was printing money to subsidize bread, and the subsidy ran out, which is what the December protests were about before they were about anything else. The generals who took over had one asset the civilians did not, which was friends with cash: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates pledged three billion dollars in April, Egypt provided diplomatic cover, and the general who runs the paramilitary force that did the killing on June 3, the one they call Hemedti, controls the gold mines in Darfur and has been supplying troops to the Saudi war in Yemen for pay. That is the generals’ balance sheet. The civilians’ balance sheet is a professional class that can shut the country down, a diaspora that sends money home, and a new prime minister who went to the United Nations last month to ask the United States to take Sudan off the terrorism list so the country can borrow again. The bargain they signed in August is the two balance sheets agreeing to share the books for thirty-nine months. The generals keep the gold and the Gulf money. The civilians get the budget and the hope of debt relief. Whether it holds depends on whether the civilians can bring in enough money to make themselves necessary before the generals decide they are not.

Now Algeria, where the ledger is simpler and the bargain has not been made. Algeria has gas, and gas is ninety-five percent of its exports and most of its budget, and the gas revenue has been falling for five years with the price, and the regime that ran the country for sixty years on gas money and the memory of the independence war found this spring that it could no longer afford the first and that the young people in the streets had no memory of the second. The army removed the president in April and has spent the months since arresting his brother, his spy chiefs, and the businessmen who got rich under him, which is the army settling its own accounts and calling it anti-corruption, and it has scheduled an election for December that the movement in the streets rejects because the army is running it. There is no bargain because the army does not think it needs one; it has the gas revenue, such as it is, the institutions, and the guns, and the movement has Fridays. I keep books, and when one side has all the assets and the other has only the ability to refuse, the refusal is a position and not a plan, and positions do not survive the fiscal year.

Here is the entry I actually want to write, which is the American one, and it is nearly blank. The United States has about six thousand troops in Africa, most of them in Djibouti and the Sahel, running counterterrorism operations that Congress has never debated and the public has never heard of, and some of them are Guard units. It has Sudan on the state-sponsors-of-terrorism list, where it has been since 1993, which blocks the debt relief the new civilian government needs to survive. It has said very little about either country’s transition, has sent no senior official to Khartoum since the agreement, and has let the Gulf states and Egypt, who want the generals to win, set the terms of the outside involvement. The administration’s Africa policy, as far as I can read it, is to fight terrorists where they are and to leave the politics to whoever shows up, and whoever has shown up in Sudan is Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, who paid for the generals, and in Algeria is nobody, because the army does not need anyone. A country that wants the democratic outcome and does nothing to fund it has made a choice, and the choice is being made by default, and defaults are the most expensive entries in any ledger because nobody signed them.

I want to say the plain thing about what this looks like from Wyoming. The people here have no interest in Sudan or Algeria and would say so, and they would be right that neither country’s politics is America’s to decide. But the Guard has been in Africa for a decade on missions nobody voted for, and the places it goes are the places where governments collapse and the collapse produces the groups the Guard is sent to fight, and a Sudan that fails its transition and an Algeria that cracks down on its young people are, in ten years, the kind of places the Guard goes. The cheapest entry in this ledger is the one that helps the civilians in Khartoum borrow money, which costs the United States nothing but a decision about a list. The most expensive is the one where my son’s unit is sent to a country that fell apart because the generals won and the Gulf paid for it. The administration is choosing the second by not making the first, and nobody in Washington has asked a Guard family whether that is the trade they want.

So my answer is that Sudan has an elite bargain with a civilian government inside it, which is more than any protest movement in the region has gotten in a decade, and that its durability depends on money the civilians do not have and the United States could help them get and has not; and that Algeria has a standoff between an army with the assets and a movement with the Fridays, which will end in an election the movement rejects and the army certifies, unless the movement finds a table, which it has so far refused. The American entry in both is blank, and the blank is a policy, and the policy will be paid for later by people in uniform from states like mine. I keep books. The entry nobody writes is the one that comes due.

Sydney, Australia Correspondent

The last time the Arab world produced a wave of uprisings, in 2011, the comparative-governance literature concluded within three years that the decisive variable was the army: where the army split or stood aside, as in Tunisia, a transition happened; where the army held together and chose the regime, as in Egypt and Syria and Bahrain, it did not. I want to apply that finding to Sudan and Algeria, because both movements have read the 2011 literature as carefully as any academic, both have built their strategies around it, and the two have drawn opposite conclusions from the same evidence, and the question of which produces a durable transition is really the question of which reading of 2011 is correct.

The Sudanese reading is that the army cannot be beaten and must therefore be bought, and that the price of buying it is a share of power for a defined period with a defined exit. The movement, organised through the professional associations the old regime never managed to dissolve, brought down Bashir in April without violence, survived the massacre of 3 June by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, and then, at the moment of maximum leverage after the million-person march of 30 June, sat down with the generals and signed. The result is a sovereignty council with a military chair for twenty-one months and a civilian chair for eighteen, a technocratic cabinet under an economist, elections in thirty-nine months, and the paramilitary commander Hemedti, whose men did the killing, seated as deputy chair with his forces intact. The Sudanese read Egypt and concluded that a movement which demands the army’s surrender gets the army’s tanks, and they read Tunisia and concluded that a movement which gives the old powers a stake in the outcome gets a constitution. They have bet on Tunisia. It is a wager with the murderer of 3 June sitting at the table, and the Sudanese know exactly what they have done and have decided it was the only move.

The Algerian reading is the opposite and it is grounded in Algeria’s own history rather than Egypt’s. In 1991 the regime permitted an election, the Islamists won the first round, the army cancelled the second, and a civil war followed that killed something like two hundred thousand people over a decade. Every Algerian over thirty-five remembers it and every Algerian under thirty-five has been raised on it. The lesson the Hirak has drawn is that any arrangement in which the army retains the power to cancel is an arrangement the army will cancel, and that the only durable transition is one in which the entire apparatus, the army’s political role, the intelligence services, the presidency as the army’s instrument, is dismantled before a single vote is cast. So the movement has marched every Friday for thirty-three weeks, peacefully, in undiminished numbers, has refused to name leaders who could be arrested or bought, has refused to negotiate with an interim government it regards as the regime in a new jacket, and has rejected the December election outright. The army, under Gaid Salah, has answered by arresting the old president’s brother and the intelligence chiefs, which is the army eating its civilian partners, and by proceeding with the election anyway. The Algerians have read 1991 and concluded that bargains are traps. They have bet on purity. It is a wager that the army will tire before the street does, and the army has gas revenue, pensions, and barracks, and the street has Fridays.

Now the comparative judgment, which is what I am for. The 2011 literature, read honestly, supports the Sudanese and not the Algerians, because the Tunisian transition that everyone cites as the success was itself an elite bargain, between the Islamists and the old secular establishment, brokered by the trade union federation, with the army kept out of politics by being given no reason to enter. The Sudanese have reproduced that structure almost exactly: a professional association as broker, a technocratic government as the neutral ground, and a timetable that gives the men with guns a reason to wait rather than act. What they have not reproduced is the Tunisian army’s indifference to power; Hemedti is not indifferent, he is ambitious and rich and backed by Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, and the Sudanese bargain will hold only as long as the civilians can make themselves more useful to the Gulf than he is, which means bringing in the money that only Western debt relief can supply, which means Washington removing Sudan from its terrorism list, which Washington has not done. The Sudanese transition is durable in design and fragile in finance, and the fragility is in a decision an American administration has not made.

Algeria’s wager I rate lower, with respect for the discipline behind it. A movement that will not bargain cannot convert its strength into institutions, and a movement that will not name leaders cannot be offered anything, and the Algerian army has read this and is simply waiting. The December election will happen; the Hirak will boycott it; turnout will be low; a candidate acceptable to the army will win; the army will declare the question settled; and the Fridays will continue, in smaller numbers, as the winter comes and the stalemate becomes the new normal. That is not a transition. It is the regime surviving by outlasting its opponents, which is what the regime has done since 1962, and the movement’s purity, which has kept it alive and bloodless for eight months, is also the thing that has kept it from winning. I say that with no satisfaction. The Hirak is the most disciplined mass movement I have watched in years, and discipline without a table is a demonstration, not a politics.

So my assessment is that Sudan has produced an elite bargain designed as a transition, which is the only form in which transitions have ever arrived in this region, and that its durability turns on money the civilians cannot raise without a decision from Washington that Washington is not making; and that Algeria has produced a principled refusal that the army is waiting out, which will end in an election the movement rejects and a regime that calls itself renewed. Clarity over fashion: the fashionable view admires the Algerian purity and distrusts the Sudanese compromise. The clear view is that the compromise is the mechanism and the purity is the obstacle, and that the one capital which could tip the Sudanese outcome is the one that has said the least about it. Canberra has no standing here and I claim none for it. I would simply note that the 2011 literature was written by people who watched the Egyptian army win, and that the Sudanese have read it, and the Algerians are about to learn why it was written.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent

I am going to disagree with what I expect will be the consensus on this question, which is that Sudan’s negotiated transition is the promising one and Algeria’s refusal to negotiate is the dead end, and I am going to do it as a civil engineer, which means asking not who signed what but what the state underneath the signatures is actually capable of doing. A transition is a construction project. It needs a foundation, which is a state that can collect taxes, pay salaries, keep the lights on, and deliver bread, and it needs a load-bearing structure, which is institutions that will still stand when the men who built them are gone. Sudan has a beautiful set of drawings and almost no foundation. Algeria has a foundation and has refused to approve the drawings. I know which of those I would rather be hired to finish, and it is not the one with the drawings.

Let me describe Sudan’s foundation, because it is the thing the agreement does not address. The country lost three-quarters of its oil revenue when the South seceded in 2011 and has never replaced it. Inflation has been running at rates that make a monthly salary worthless by the end of the month. The bread subsidy that triggered the December protests was a subsidy the state could not afford and cannot remove without another round of protests. The electrical grid fails daily in Khartoum and barely exists outside it. The country has a dam dispute with Egypt and Ethiopia over the Nile that it cannot influence because it has no leverage and no money. The civil service is staffed by thirty years of the old regime’s appointees. And the one institution that works, the one with discipline and payroll and equipment, is the paramilitary force that killed a hundred people in June and whose commander now sits as deputy chair of the council that is supposed to oversee the transition, funded by his own gold mines and by the Gulf states that pay his men to fight in Yemen. The agreement gives the civilians the government. It gives them a government with no revenue, no grid, no bread, and a security force it does not control, for thirty-nine months, at the end of which there is supposed to be an election. I have been handed projects like that. The drawings are approved, the budget is zero, and the one subcontractor who can actually build anything has his own plans for the site.

Now Algeria’s foundation, which the movement in the streets despises and which is nonetheless there. Algeria is a functioning state. It collects its gas revenue, it pays its civil servants and its pensioners and its soldiers, it runs a grid and a water system and a subsidized food distribution that reaches the whole country, it has a bureaucracy that has operated continuously since 1962, and it has an army that is a national institution rather than a warlord’s militia. All of that is corrupt and sclerotic and run by men who have been in charge too long, and the young people marching every Friday are right that it is their country and not the generals’, and I do not minimize what they are asking. But the thing they are asking to reform exists. It has a foundation. The question in Algeria is not whether a state can be built but whether the one that is there can be made to answer to the people it governs, and that is a renovation, and renovations are hard and slow and they have a structure to work with. The movement has refused to approve the army’s drawings, which are an election in December under the old constitution, and it is right that those drawings would reproduce the old building. What it has not done is submit its own, because it has no architect, by design, and a renovation with no architect and a client who will not negotiate is a renovation that waits.

Here is where the engineering view diverges from the diplomatic one. The diplomats look at Sudan and see a bargain, which they admire, and at Algeria and see a stalemate, which they deplore. I look at Sudan and see a bargain that assigns the civilians every responsibility and the generals every capability, which is a structure designed to fail on the civilians’ watch and be rescued by the generals. The first time the bread runs out in Khartoum, which it will, the civilian government will own the shortage and the paramilitary commander will own the trucks, and the thirty-nine months will be remembered as the period in which the civilians proved they could not govern. I look at Algeria and see a state that can keep the bread on the shelves while the argument continues, which means the argument can continue, which means the movement can lose Fridays and come back, which means the stalemate is sustainable in a way the Sudanese bargain is not. A stalemate on a foundation beats a bargain on sand, and I would rather be an Algerian protester in year two than a Sudanese minister in month ten.

I want to say the practical thing about what outsiders could do, because the question will be read by Americans who may wonder. In Sudan the one thing that would pour a foundation is money, and the money is blocked by Sudan’s presence on the American list of state sponsors of terrorism, which prevents debt relief and most lending, and which the new prime minister went to New York last month to ask about, and which Washington has not moved on. That is a decision, not a project, and it costs nothing, and the fact that it has not been made tells you how much of a foundation the United States intends to help pour. In Algeria the outsiders are irrelevant and the Algerians would like them to stay that way, and I respect that, because a country that has a foundation does not need foreign contractors.

So my answer is that Sudan is likely to produce an elite bargain that fails as a transition, not because the bargain was wrong but because the state underneath it cannot carry the load the bargain assigns to the civilians, and the failure will be blamed on them and exploited by the general with the gold; and that Algeria is likely to produce a long stalemate that preserves the existing structure in the near term and that is, for exactly that reason, the more likely of the two to produce a durable change eventually, because the structure exists to be changed and the people demanding the change have shown they can wait. That is not the hopeful answer. It is the engineer’s, and engineers are paid to tell the client which building will stand. The one with the better drawings is the one I would not sign.

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Correspondent

In June, for about two weeks, a large share of the profile pictures on my feeds turned blue. The color was for a young man named Mohamed Mattar who was killed in the Khartoum sit-in on June 3 and whose favorite color it was, and the hashtag that carried it, Blue for Sudan, was one of the most effective pieces of spontaneous online organizing I have watched, because it was built around the one thing the generals had done that could not be argued with, which was to turn off the internet. For three weeks after the massacre Sudan was dark; the military council cut mobile data for the whole country so that the videos from the sit-in could not get out, and the diaspora responded by making Sudan the loudest subject on the platforms the Sudanese themselves could not reach. I do this for a living, and I want to answer the question about durable transitions from inside that episode, because it taught me something about what attention can and cannot do for a revolution, and the something is the answer.

Here is what the attention did. It made the massacre a global story in a week when it would otherwise have been a regional one, it put pressure on the Gulf states and Egypt who were backing the generals and did not want to be seen backing a slaughter, it gave the African Union cover to suspend Sudan, and it kept the professional associations inside the country from being isolated, because they knew the world was watching even when they could not post. The generals, who had calculated that a dark country could be cleared quietly, found that darkness itself had become the story, and within a month they were at a table they had refused in May. I will not claim the blue squares did that. The million-person march on June 30, inside Sudan, with the internet still down, did that. But the march happened in a country that knew it was being watched, and the watching was the diaspora’s work, and the diaspora did it with the only tool it had, which was my industry’s tool.

Here is what the attention could not do, and it is the harder half. By July the blue had faded, the way it always does; the squares went back to vacation photos, the hashtag dropped off the trending lists, and the agreement signed in August, which gave the generals a military chair for twenty-one months and seated the man whose forces did the killing as deputy, was covered in the business pages. Attention is a flood, and a flood can move a boulder once. It cannot hold it in place, and a transition is a boulder that has to be held in place for years, through bread shortages and budget fights and the slow discovery that the man with the gold mines has his own plans. The Sudanese civilians now governing the country are governing in the dark again, not because the internet is off but because the world has looked away, and the generals know the world has looked away, and the question of whether the bargain holds is a question that will be answered when nobody is watching. That is the structural problem with attention as a political tool: it arrives at the moment of crisis and departs at the moment of governance, and governance is where transitions are won or lost.

Algeria is the opposite case and it is instructive. The Hirak has marched every Friday for thirty-three weeks without a massacre, without a martyr the world could rally around, without an internet shutdown, and consequently without a hashtag, and it has gotten almost no attention outside France. I have checked the engagement numbers; Algeria has been a fraction of Sudan all year, despite the movement being larger, more disciplined, and more sustained. The absence of a massacre is the absence of a story, and the absence of a story is the absence of outside pressure, and the Algerian army has understood this perfectly: it has not fired on the crowds, it has arrested protesters quietly and in small numbers, it has purged the old regime’s civilians and called it reform, and it has scheduled an election for December, all without producing a single image that would turn anyone’s profile picture a color. It is running out the clock in the dark, and the dark is working, because a movement that depends on Fridays and gets no amplification is a movement whose numbers are the only thing anyone counts, and numbers fall in winter.

So what does that say about the question? It says that the two movements have the opposite problem, and that neither problem is solved by the thing my industry sells. Sudan had the world’s attention and spent it, well, on a bargain that now has to survive without any. Algeria has never had the world’s attention and has built a movement that does not need it, which is the more durable design, and is also the design the army can wait out because nobody outside is making waiting expensive. A durable transition requires something that attention cannot provide and that neither movement has yet found, which is an institution that keeps going when the crowd goes home: a party, a union federation, a parliament with real power, a civil service that answers to the elected. The Sudanese professional associations are the closest thing either country has, and they are now inside a government with no money, and the Algerian movement has refused to build anything of the kind on principle.

I want to say what I would tell a client who asked me to design a campaign for either movement, because it is the honest answer to a question about durability. I would say that the campaign is the easy part and I can run it, and that it will move the boulder once, and that what happens after depends entirely on whether they have built something to hold the boulder while I am working on the next client’s campaign. Sudan had the campaign and signed a bargain and the bargain is now alone. Algeria never got the campaign and is standing in the square with the boulder on its shoulders, refusing to set it down on any ground the army owns. I admire both. I would not bet on either without the thing that holds, and the thing that holds is not a hashtag, and I have never been able to sell it, because nobody has figured out how to make it trend.

So my answer is that Sudan is more likely to produce an elite bargain that preserves the generals’ power under civilian cover, because the attention that forced the bargain has already left and the men with the gold have not; and that Algeria is more likely to produce a standoff that the army outlasts, because the movement’s discipline has denied the world a reason to watch. The blue squares were real and they mattered and they are gone. The Fridays are real and they matter and nobody is counting them. Durable transitions are made in the months after the color fades, by people the feeds have forgotten, and I have spent my career making things trend and I know exactly how little that is worth in month fourteen. The Sudanese are two months into their bargain. The Algerians are eight months into their Fridays. Nobody is posting about either, and that silence is the most important data point in the question.

Clermont, Florida Correspondent

I follow migration, and the thing about Sudan and Algeria that the democracy question leaves out is that both countries sit on the roads to Europe, that Europe knows it, and that the European interest in how these transitions end has almost nothing to do with democracy and almost everything to do with whether the roads stay closed. I want to answer the question from that angle because I think it predicts the outcome better than the quality of the movements does, and because the people who will decide whether Sudan’s bargain holds and whether Algeria’s army is pressured are not in Khartoum or Algiers. They are in Brussels and Rome and Paris, and they have made their preferences clear for a decade, and the preference is stability, and stability in this part of the world has a specific meaning, which is a government that can be paid to stop people.

Let me describe the roads. Sudan is the central corridor for migration from the Horn of Africa to Libya and across the Mediterranean to Italy: Eritreans, Ethiopians, Somalis, and Sudanese themselves move through Khartoum and the eastern deserts toward the Libyan border, and the business of moving them has been, for years, in the hands of the same paramilitary force that killed the protesters in June. The Rapid Support Forces, under Hemedti, have been Europe’s de facto border guard on the Sudanese side of the Libyan frontier, intercepting migrants under a European Union program that has sent money to Khartoum since 2014 for exactly that purpose, and Hemedti has said so in public, with pride. Algeria is the western corridor, less traveled since the Libyan route opened but reviving as Libya has become more dangerous, and the Algerian state has been deporting sub-Saharan migrants into the desert by the thousands with little European complaint. The European position toward both countries is therefore the one a migration analyst recognizes immediately: whoever governs, the roads must stay shut, and the actor who can shut them is the actor Europe will deal with. In Sudan that actor is the man whose forces did the massacre. In Algeria it is the army.

That structure explains the Sudanese bargain better than any account of the negotiations. The civilians got the government. Hemedti got the deputy chair, kept his forces intact, kept his gold mines, and kept his contract, formal and informal, as the man who controls the desert. The Gulf states that backed him want him there because he supplies troops to Yemen. The Europeans want him there because he controls the road. The Americans have said little because Sudan is on the terrorism list and the administration’s Africa policy is counterterrorism and not much else. So the one figure in the transition who everyone outside the country has a reason to protect is the one figure the movement most wants gone, and a transition in which the outsiders’ man is the spoiler is a transition that the outsiders will not help the civilians win. The bargain is durable in exactly the dimension that preserves him and fragile in every dimension that would remove him, and that is not an accident of the drafting. It is the shape of the external interest.

Algeria is the other case and the European interest is, if anything, more naked. Algeria supplies a large share of the natural gas that Italy and Spain burn, and France has a relationship with the Algerian state that is older than the Algerian state and is conducted almost entirely with the army and the intelligence services. The Hirak has marched for thirty-three Fridays and received, from Europe, expressions of concern and nothing else, because the European governments have run the calculation that a destabilized Algeria is a gas shock and a migration shock at once, and that the army, whatever else it is, keeps the gas flowing and the migrants in the desert. The army has scheduled an election for December that the movement rejects, and it has done so knowing that no European capital will refuse to recognize the result, because recognizing it is the price of the gas and the closed road. The movement is being outlasted not only by the army’s patience but by the indifference of the people it might have expected to care, and the indifference is purchased, and the purchase is the thing nobody in the democracy debate mentions.

So what does the migration lens say about durability? It says that a transition is durable when the outside powers with leverage want it to be and fragile when they want the alternative, and that in both countries the outside powers want the men with the guns to stay, because the men with the guns are the border. That is a brutal answer and I will soften it only this much: the Sudanese civilians have one card the outsiders need, which is legitimacy, since a Sudan governed openly by Hemedti would be a Sudan that Europe could not be seen to pay, and the civilian government is the thing that lets the payments continue respectably. That gives the civilians a bargaining position, and it is a humiliating one, and it is real. The Algerians have no such card, because the army has never needed a civilian face and Europe has never asked for one.

I want to add the Florida observation, because migration is my brief and this state is the American version of the European calculation. Florida has absorbed the exiles of every collapsed arrangement in the hemisphere and has, each time, concluded afterward that it would have preferred the arrangement not to collapse, whatever it thought of the arrangement. The Europeans have concluded that in advance about North Africa, and are paying to prevent the collapse, and the payment goes to the generals, and the generals know it, and the movements in the streets of Khartoum and Algiers are negotiating against not only their own armies but against the checkbooks of the democracies that praise them. That is the honest shape of it. The question asks whether the protests can produce durable democratic transitions. The answer from the roads is that they can produce whatever the people who control the roads are paid to permit, and the people who control the roads are, in both countries, the men the protesters marched against, and the people paying them are the ones who call themselves the movements’ friends.

So my answer is that Sudan is likely to produce a bargain that preserves the paramilitary commander because every outside power with leverage has a reason to preserve him, with a civilian government that survives as the respectable face of the payments; and that Algeria is likely to produce an election the army certifies and Europe recognizes, because the gas and the desert matter more to Europe than the Fridays do. The movements are admirable and the outcomes are not theirs to decide. The roads are the politics. The men on the roads are the power. And the democracies that could change that have been paying the men on the roads for five years to keep doing what they do, and nobody in the democracy debate seems to have read the invoices. I have. They are addressed to Brussels. They are paid on time.

Novi, Michigan Correspondent

I will start with a confession, which is that I had to look up where Algeria’s gas goes before I could say anything useful about its politics, and that when I did, the politics made more sense than any account I had read, because the whole thing is a supply-chain problem and I manage supply chains. Algeria is a single-product company. Hydrocarbons are about ninety-five percent of its exports and the majority of government revenue, the gas goes by pipeline to Spain and Italy, the oil goes wherever the price is, and the regime that has run the country since 1962 has been, in business terms, a holding company whose only asset is a wellhead and whose only expense is buying the loyalty of a population that has nothing else to do. When the price of the product fell in 2014 and stayed down, the holding company’s cash flow fell with it, and the dividend it had been paying the population, in subsidies and public jobs and housing, became unaffordable, and the February protests were the shareholders discovering that the dividend had been cut while the directors were still voting themselves a fifth term. Sudan is the same company after it has already lost its main asset: three-quarters of its oil went with South Sudan in 2011, and the regime spent eight years printing money to pay a dividend it no longer earned, and the December protests were the shareholders discovering that the currency was worthless. Neither of these is primarily a story about democracy. Both are stories about a single-source supply chain failing, and the question of what comes after has an answer that any purchasing manager would recognize.

The answer is that the people who control the remaining revenue control the transition, and that in both countries the revenue is controlled by the men with guns rather than the men with votes. In Algeria the army controls the state oil company, the budget, and the gas contracts with Europe, and it has used the spring and summer to purge the civilian oligarchs who had been skimming the revenue under the old president, which the movement in the streets has read as the army eating its rivals and which it is, and which is also the army consolidating its control of the one asset that matters. The movement has marched every Friday for thirty-three weeks and has no revenue of its own, which is why it has no leverage of its own, which is why the army has scheduled an election for December without consulting it. A supplier with no product does not get a seat at the sourcing meeting, however many Fridays it shows up. In Sudan the structure is more interesting because the revenue is split: the state has the oil that remains and the budget, which the civilians now hold, and the paramilitary commander Hemedti has the gold, which comes out of Darfur in quantities that make his force the richest institution in the country and which he sells through Dubai, plus the fees the Gulf states pay him for the troops he sends to Yemen. The August agreement gave the civilians the first revenue stream and left Hemedti the second, and the second is larger, more liquid, and does not require anyone’s approval. That is the bargain, in cash terms, and the civilians are the minority shareholder.

Now what makes a transition durable, from a supply-chain view, because I think the political scientists have it backward. They look at agreements and institutions. I look at whether the people who are supposed to behave have a reason to, and the reason is always a dependency: a party that needs something from another party behaves toward it. The Sudanese civilians need money, badly, and the money is available only through debt relief and lending that are blocked by Sudan’s presence on the American terrorism list, which Washington has not moved on despite the prime minister’s trip to New York last month. If the civilians can get the list lifted and the lending restarted, they become the channel through which the country’s revenue flows, and Hemedti, who cannot borrow from the IMF with his gold, becomes dependent on them for the one thing his gold cannot buy, which is a functioning state to spend it in. That dependency is the transition. It does not exist yet. It is a decision in Washington away from existing, and a purchasing manager would call that the single point of failure in the whole arrangement. In Algeria no such dependency exists, because the army already has the revenue and the contracts and the only thing it needs from the movement is for it to go home, and a party that needs nothing from you does not negotiate.

I want to say something about Europe and the gas, because it bears on the Algerian side and because it is the thing a supply-chain manager would check first. Spain and Italy depend on Algerian gas by pipeline and have very few alternatives on short notice, and the European governments have therefore treated the Algerian army as a supplier whose internal management is not their concern, in exactly the way my industry treats a sole-source vendor in a difficult country: you do not ask how the plant is run, you ask whether the shipments arrive. The shipments have arrived every month of the protests. The movement has not touched them, which is to its credit as a matter of discipline and its cost as a matter of leverage, because the one thing that would make Europe care about the Fridays is a Friday that stopped the gas, and the Hirak has decided, correctly from a moral standpoint and fatally from a bargaining one, not to hold the country’s only product hostage. The Sudanese movement, by contrast, shut the country down in June with a general strike, and the generals signed in July. The lesson is not pretty. It is that a movement is heard when it interrupts the supply chain, and the Algerian movement has chosen not to.

So my answer is that Sudan is more likely to produce a durable transition than Algeria, but only on a condition that is outside Sudan’s control, which is that the civilians acquire a revenue stream that the general with the gold needs, and that stream runs through a decision in Washington that has not been made; without it, the bargain preserves the general and the civilians are the respectable face of a paramilitary state. Algeria is more likely to produce an elite bargain in the plainest sense, the army certifying its own election, because the army has sole-source control of the only product and the movement has chosen not to interrupt the shipments. I qualified a second source for a critical part last year because I had learned what sole-source dependency does to a buyer’s leverage. The Sudanese civilians are trying to become a second source. The Algerian movement has refused to be one. The outcomes will follow the sourcing, as they always do, and the people writing about democracy would do well to read the shipping manifests.

Jacksonville, Florida Correspondent

Port Sudan is the only real deep-water port on the African side of the Red Sea between Egypt and Djibouti, it sits across the water from Jeddah and a few hundred miles north of the strait through which a tenth of the world’s seaborne trade passes, and the Russians have been trying to get a naval base there for two years, the Turks had a lease on an old Ottoman island nearby, the Saudis and Emiratis have been buying up the coast, and the Chinese already have the base in Djibouti. I move freight through ports for a living and I grew up in a Navy town, and I want to begin with the port because it is the thing about Sudan that every outside power actually cares about, and because the question of whether a protest movement can produce a durable transition in a country whose coastline is that valuable has an answer that the democracy debate does not want to hear, which is that the transition will be permitted to go exactly as far as the people who want the port allow it to.

Let me say what I mean by the people who want the port. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates put three billion dollars into Sudan in April, the week the dictator fell, and they put it into the hands of the generals and not the civilians, and the general who got the most of it is the paramilitary commander Hemedti, whose men fight for the Saudis in Yemen and who controls Darfur’s gold. Egypt backed the generals because Egypt’s own general-president does not want a successful civilian revolution next door and because Egypt needs Sudan quiet on the Nile dam dispute with Ethiopia. The Russians have been courting the generals for the base. The Americans have Sudan on the terrorism list and have said almost nothing. So when the civilians and the generals sat down in July and signed in August, with a military chair for twenty-one months and Hemedti as deputy and his forces intact, the shape of the agreement was the shape of the outside interest: the generals who can deliver the port and the coast and the Yemen troops kept their guns, and the civilians who can deliver nothing to anyone outside got the budget and a timetable. From a dock, that is a terminal where the people who own the berths kept the berths and the people who run the paperwork got the paperwork, and I have seen that arrangement last a long time, and I have never seen it turn into the paperwork people owning the berths.

Algeria has a coast too, but the Mediterranean is nobody’s chokepoint and the Algerian ports are not strategic, and the Algerian army has what the Sudanese generals do not, which is the gas revenue and a state that works, and so the outside interest in Algeria is simpler: Europe wants the gas to flow and the migrants to stay in the desert, France wants its old relationship with the army kept, and nobody needs a civilian face for any of it. The movement in the streets has marched every Friday for eight months without a death, and the army has arrested the old president’s brother and the intelligence chiefs and the oligarchs, which is the army cleaning its own house and calling it reform, and has scheduled an election for December that the movement rejects. There is no bargain because the army does not need one; it has the product, the ports, and the patience, and the movement has Fridays. A dispatcher learns that the party who controls the gate controls the yard, and the Algerian army controls every gate in the country and has not fired a shot to keep them, which is the most dangerous kind of control because it leaves nothing for the world to object to.

Now the Navy view, because I grew up with it and because it explains the American silence better than any policy document. The Navy cares about the Red Sea the way it cares about every chokepoint, which is as a place where a hostile base would be a problem and a friendly one would be useful, and the Navy has watched the Russians angle for Port Sudan and the Chinese build at Djibouti and the Gulf states buy the Eritrean and Somali coast, and the Navy’s interest in Sudan is that whoever runs it does not hand the port to Moscow. That interest is served by the generals, who can deliver the port, and not by the civilians, who cannot promise anything the generals can refuse. The administration’s Africa policy is counterterrorism and chokepoints, and both of those point toward dealing with the men who have the forces and the coast, and so the one thing the civilians need, the removal of Sudan from the terrorism list so they can borrow, has not happened, because the list is leverage and the leverage is being held for the port question and not spent on the democracy question. I am not a mascot for the Navy or against it. I am saying that the American silence is a policy and the policy is about the water.

So what does the port view say about durability? It says the Sudanese bargain will hold as long as the generals get what the outsiders are paying them for, which is the coast, the Yemen troops, and the quiet border with Libya, and that the civilians will govern on sufferance until the first crisis, a bread shortage or a currency collapse, gives the generals a reason to say the civilians have failed, and the outsiders who paid for the generals will not object. It says the Algerian army will certify its election in December and Europe will recognize it before the ballots are counted, because the gas flows and the gates are closed, and the Fridays will continue in smaller numbers through a winter in which nobody outside counts them. Neither of those is a democratic transition. Both are the men with the berths keeping the berths.

I will say the plain thing I would say to anyone at the terminal who asked. The movements in both countries have done something I did not think possible, which is to bring down two of the longest-ruling regimes in Africa without a civil war, and the Sudanese did it through a massacre and came back a million strong, and the Algerians did it without a single death across eight months, and I admire both more than I can say in a forum like this. But the ports are the politics, and the ports are held by the men the movements marched against, and every outside power that matters has decided it would rather deal with the men who hold the ports than with the people who hold the streets. Until that changes, the transitions will be permitted to proceed to the water’s edge and no further. I move freight. The freight moves through Port Sudan under the same management it had in April. That is the answer, and it was decided on the coast, and nobody in the square was consulted.