"As of today, I would not say there is a war going on in Darfur," Martin Luther Agwai told correspondents.
"You see, the causes of the conflict in Darfur have changed completely," said the Nigerian officer, who will be replaced next week by Rwandan Patrick Nyamvumba.
"If war is a conflict whereby today you attack and then go back home and stay until three, four, five months and come back... If that is a definition of war then there is a war in Darfur.
"But if that is not the definition then there is no war as of now in Darfur," said Agwai, according to a transcript of his statements given late on Wednesday.
The conflict in Darfur began in 2003 when ethnic rebels took up arms against Sudanese forces and their Arab militias.
The war left around 300,000 dead and 2.7 million displaced according to UN figures. Khartoum says 10,000 died in the conflict.
Today, rebel groups in Darfur have fragmented into around 20 small groups, of which only the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) headed by Khalil Ibrahim, has the ability to launch attacks against the government, Agwai said.
JEM launched a daring attack against Khartoum's twin city of Omdurman in May 2008, while carrying out military operations in May this year in Muhajiriya and Umm Barru in Darfur.
"Since May until today, what have we had on the ground? The only thing I see is banditry taking place now: carjackings, breaking into people's homes to look for electronics and mobile telephones," Agwai said.
"I think the real thing now is to speed up the political process. Militarily there is not much," he concluded.
Earlier, Rodolphe Adada, outgoing head of UNAMID, told AFP in a interview that his soldiers have ended the massacres that long plagued the Sudanese region.
"I have achieved results. The main result is the end of massacres in Darfur," Adada said as he prepared to step down as head of the world's biggest peacekeeping operation.
Diplomats and observers have slammed UNAMID as inefficient, knocking Adada for his conciliatory tone with the Sudanese authorities, which the West accuses of atrocities in Darfur.
"I would like to be judged, for UNAMID to be judged, on the number of deaths in Darfur," since the force's deployment there in 2008, said Adada, a former foreign minister of the Republic of Congo. "That's how we should be judged."