This piece is based on an article originally featured on ACCORD: "[AI-Powered Early Warning Systems and the Governance of Autonomous Surveillance Technologies in African Conflict Zones: Lessons from the Sudan Crisis (2023–2025)]" by Abraham Ename Minko.The Sudan war has become a live laboratory for autonomous drone warfare, AI-assisted surveillance and open-source intelligence — exposing what analysts describe as one of the most consequential governance failures of the era, with no continental framework in place to regulate AI-powered surveillance or autonomous weapons in African conflict zones.
The conflict, which erupted on April 15, 2023, between Sudan’s Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, has displaced more than 10 million people and produced mass atrocities documented in Darfur. What distinguishes the war from earlier African conflicts is not only its ferocity but its technological character. The same AI technologies that could save lives through early conflict detection are being weaponized to destroy them, while the African Union’s peace architecture — conceived before the AI era — remains dangerously under-equipped to govern them.
Both sides in the conflict have deployed commercially sourced unmanned aerial vehicles, from the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 to China’s Wing Loong II and FH-95. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project has recorded more than 1,003 drone strikes between April 2023 and January, accounting for more than 2,200 civilian deaths — with 80% of those deaths occurring in 2025 alone.
More significantly, AI-enabled swarm drone technology has entered the theatre for the first time, enabling coordinated autonomous strikes with minimal human oversight. The December 2024 attack on a hospital in Kalogi, which killed more than 114 people, exemplified how algorithmic targeting can produce mass casualties at a speed that accountability mechanisms cannot match.
Foreign involvement deepens the governance challenge. Iran, Russia and the United Arab Emirates have all supplied drone technology in exchange for strategic concessions, turning Sudan into a proxy theatre for emerging technology warfare. Any African regulatory response will therefore have to engage international supply chains rather than purely domestic deployments.
The same technologies enabling atrocities are simultaneously deployed with constructive intent. The United Nations Satellite Centre has used AI-assisted satellite imagery to document destruction in Khartoum and Darfur in near real time. Civil society open-source intelligence projects have tracked more than 1,700 civilian casualties through AI-assisted analysis — evidence now before the UN Panel of Experts. The AU Peace and Security Council acknowledged in June 2024 that AI tools for hate speech detection, displacement prediction and conflict pattern analysis are urgently needed in its early warning toolkit. Yet the Continental Early Warning System was designed before machine learning existed at operational scale.
The African Union has begun to respond. Its 1214th Peace and Security Council session in June 2024 — the first dedicated to AI and peace and security — acknowledged a dangerous “regulatory vacuum.” A follow-up ministerial session in March 2025 called for a Common African Position on AI. A November 2025 technical workshop in Kigali produced a joint AU and Regional Economic Communities and Mechanisms roadmap to integrate AI into the Continental Early Warning System, and the AU AI Advisory Group on Governance, Peace and Security convened in Nairobi in December 2025.
Critical gaps remain. No binding continental instrument governs autonomous surveillance technologies or lethal autonomous weapons systems. The Kigali roadmap lacks enforcement mechanisms, liability frameworks or civilian protection safeguards. Most regional early warning nodes lack the technical capacity to operationalize AI tools, and the question of digital sovereignty — who controls African conflict data — remains unresolved.
Analysts have proposed a tiered governance response. The first tier, prohibition, would establish an African Charter on Autonomous Weapons prohibiting fully autonomous lethal systems that select targets without meaningful human control — with the Sudan precedent of algorithmic targeting in hospitals and schools providing moral and legal grounding. The second tier, regulation, would create a continental licensing regime governing the import and deployment of dual-use AI surveillance technologies — enforced through the AU’s Committee of Intelligence and Security Services of Africa and an AI-equipped early warning situation room in Addis Ababa, with mandatory interoperability across IGAD, ECOWAS and SADC nodes. The third tier, empowerment, would establish an African AI for Peace fund to finance beneficial AI tools for conflict detection and atrocity documentation, with formal institutional recognition for civil society open-source intelligence actors and data-sharing agreements with AU bodies.
The AU’s recent diplomatic steps signal growing political will, but analysts argue that intent must now translate into binding law, institutional capacity and adequately funded implementation. The continent currently paying the highest price for ungoverned AI technology, they conclude, must now lead the world in governing it.
The analysis was authored by Abraham Ename Minko, a senior researcher and policy analyst in peace, security and conflict resolution.
