There is a dilemma for mediators: whatever decision they take on the format and agenda for emergency talks

will
determine the path of peace-making in Sudan through to its conclusion.

To silence the guns, the American and Saudi diplomats will deal only with the rival generals who have each sent a
three-person negotiating team to Jeddah.

The agenda is a humanitarian ceasefire, a monitoring mechanism and corridors for aid. Neither side wants to open
negotiations towards a political agreement.

The civilian parties and neighbourhood resistance committees, whose non-violent protests brought down the
authoritarian regime of long-time leader Omar al-Bashir four years ago, will be onlookers.

It will not be easy to get the two generals to agree to any kind of ceasefire.

The army chief, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, will insist that he represents the legitimate government. He will label
Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as "Hemedti", as a rebel.

But Hemedti, his de facto deputy until the clashes, will demand equal status for the two sides.

He will want on a freeze-in-place, leaving his paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters in control of much of
Khartoum. Gen Burhan will require a return to the positions in the days before the clashes began.

Getting a compromise means hard bargaining with the generals.

The mediators need to gain their confidence and assure them that, if they make concessions now, that will not leave
them exposed and vulnerable.

The downside is that the two warring parties will then demand the dominant role in political talks and an agenda
that suits their interests.

One thing on which Burhan and Hemedti - and the Arab neighbours - agree is that they do not want a democratic
government, which had been on the cards before the fighting began. The two military men had run the country since
the 2019 which ousted Bashir, refusing to hand power to civilians.

Another point of agreement will be amnesty for war crimes.

Negotiations dominated by the generals are likely to end in a peace agreement in which they share the
spoils, setting back the prospects for democracy for many more years.

But if the fighting is not stopped soon, Sudan faces state collapse.

Abdalla Hamdok - prime minister of the joint military-civilian government ousted by the generals in 2021 -
has said the country's new war threatened to be worse than Syria or Yemen.

He might have added, worse than Darfur.

This is the decidedly low-rent campaign headquarters in Bang Bon for Move Forward, the most radical
party contesting this month's general election in Thailand.
Pacing among them is the parliamentary candidate, Rukchanok "Ice" Srinork, a 28-year-old woman
brimming with energy, who constantly flicks through her social media pages. Ice's team have bought cheap
bicycles, and for weeks now they have been using them, in brutally hot weather, to reach out to residents
in the smallest alleys of Bang Bon.

Ice is one of a slate of young, idealistic candidates for Move Forward who have joined mainstream
politics in the hope that this election allows Thailand to break the cycle of military coups, street protests
and broken democratic promises in which the country has been trapped for two decades.

Move Forward is the successor party to Future Forward, which exploded onto the political stage in
Thailand five years ago.

It contested the first election permitted since a coup in 2014 deposed the then-elected government. Future
Forward was something new, promising sweeping changes to Thailand's political structures, including
limiting the power of the armed forces, and, more quietly, suggesting changes to the monarchy, then a
strictly taboo topic.

"Their agenda was basically about taking Thailand's future back from the powers-that-be," says Thitinan
Pongsudhirak, from the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University. "In this
century young people have had to live in a country that has been lost to an endless cycle - we had two
coups, two new constitutions, a series of judicial dissolutions of parties. I think the younger demographic
got sick and tired of it. And Future Forward tapped into that sentiment."