On the morning of April 15th, residents of Khartoum awoke to find themselves trapped between two military factions who had turned the city into a battleground, destroying whole neighborhoods with artillery, air strikes, and door to door combat. Nearly a year later, the battle still rages, having claimed the lives of thousands and displaced more than ten million in the “largest internal displacement crisis in the world.” With its capital leveled and the rest of the country divided between the two warring camps, Sudan’s attempted democratic transition has ended in tragedy. Democratic transitions are difficult and uncertain ventures (Ulfelder 2010), yet just two years earlier Sudan looked like a potential model for emulation rather than a cautionary tale. Sudan was a case, where “sustained mobilization but also organization, divided regimes, and international pressure [converted] a revolution into a transition.” Compared to Algeria whose own uprising struggled to achieve any goals beyond deposing the country’s longtime dictator, in Sudan “Three factors stand out: 1) the differing level of organization among protesters; 2) the unity/disunity of the regime’s security forces; and 3) international mediation, or lack thereof”. These three factors, the high level of organization that coordinated calendars of protest and forged a political coalition, disunity in the security forces that led to defections away from the countries longtime dictator and two competing military bodies, and international mediation that established the United Nations Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS) turned bread protests into a robust movement for change. This paper asks: why did a well-organized, long running, mass protest movement that toppled a dictator and installed a transitional government fail to lead to a democratic transition in Sudan? What factors prevented the country’s “glorious revolution” from achieving its aims? To answer these questions I focus on a key set of actors: The revolutionary forces of the RCs and the Sudanese Professional Association (SPA), the political parties, international actors, and the counter-revolutionary forces of the military and its regional supporters. Instead of adopting merely a revolutionary versus counter-revolutionary perspective, I highlight the complex and often unexpected web of incentives that set pro-democratic forces against each other resulting in a transition trap that turned the very prospect of democratic politics into a catalyst for war.