The war in Sudan is entering its second year. In 2019, Sudan witnessed a massive popular revolution that ousted its former president, Omar al-Bashir, who had ruled for over two decades. Sudanese civilians were key in bringing down al-Bashir and establishing a civilian government in his place. Two armed organizations also played an important role in the revolution: the government’s military, called Sudanese Armed Forces, known as the SAF, and the paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces, known as the RSF. These two groups collaborated to bring down al-Bashir during the revolution and also worked together to sideline the civilian government that replaced him. 

Since then, the military has been in charge, with the Sudanese Armed Forces in control of the government. The Rapid Support Forces were supposed to be integrated into the SAF, consolidating both armed groups under the same cohesive government. However, the two groups quickly turned on each other in the years following the revolution, which culminated in the RSF launching attacks on the SAF in 2023. The fighting has taken place in heavily populated civilian areas and resulted in mass death, displacement, and gender-based violence. 

Today I am joined by two Assistant Professors at the American University in Cairo, Amira Ahmed and Manuel Schwab. Professor Amira is the daughter of Sudanese immigrants in Egypt and her research explores the intersectionality of gender, class, and ethnicity within local and global dynamics. Professor Manuel’s research explores economic and political anthropology, specifically, he addresses how value operates under regimes of both humanitarian protection and the exercise of military force.

Transcript Below

Abigail Flynn: Thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast, Professor Amira and Professor Manuel. For my first question, we wanted to discuss the fact that the war in Sudan has been going on for more than a year and many atrocities have been committed, notably the RSF’s attack on ethnic Masalit civilians in Darfur. UN officials have repeatedly raised the alarm regarding famine in Sudan but the international community seems indifferent. What is the situation like for the people on the ground and where, if anywhere, can they look for hope?

Amira Ahmed: Okay. Thank you for the interview. And thanks also for highlighting this disastrous situation that is going on in the region. For Sudan, this savage war that has been going on for over a year now, unsurprisingly, generated massive amounts of humanitarian crises that are not going to be resolved in the near future. 

I echo what you have said that the UN Security Council actually declared that this is the largest humanitarian crisis in recent history. And even though we have, it seemed that the region is actually now racing against which humanitarian crisis is the worst, and we know that there are fires going everywhere, there are wars around us. And without comparing any crisis with another, I think, compared to Gaza, compared to Ukraine, probably the Sudanese crises are probably the most horrendous one in terms of people who are affected, in terms of a gloomy future that doesn’t really tell that this war is going to stop at any minute. And also, in terms of if the war has ever stopped, in the post war time when people will come back, hopefully, and think about reconstruction. 

So basically, as you said, famine on the just around the corner. 5 million people in Sudan are threatened to be in famine, also 25 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance. And look, more than 9 million people are between internally displaced 7 million plus, and 1.5 and probably plus, are already refugees in neighboring countries. So basically, if you count these figures, you’re talking about the whole population, that the total population of Sudan is 40 million plus. 

So basically, we’re talking about the whole country that’s actually at risk of famine, of humanitarian suffering. So we don’t see I mean, I myself, I don’t see when this war is going to stop. But I see that human suffering are really mounting, and how people are going through at the moment is incomparable to what happened a year ago, and I can’t just really think about what is going to happen if this war continues. And in the middle of all this, I see that an interview like the one you’re doing now is extremely important to highlight this, you know, horrendous crisis that’s going on.

Manuel Schwab: And it’s interesting to put that in kind of global perspective, the 30 million people roughly who are in acute humanitarian aid in Sudan that is only rivaled on a global level in terms of raw numbers of people in humanitarian need, by Syria and Afghanistan. That is a stunning comparison, if you think through it. 

Now, I mean, when Sudan became what some commentators are calling the “Forgotten War”, of course, you know, nobody here would be interested in trying to draw attention away from the cataclysmic level of suffering and attrition that we’re seeing in Gaza. But it’s really a shame that we do not have the form of analysis and the form of public discourse that puts the kinds of connections between these wars together in a way where we see the lines of solidarity that actually frankly, both the Gazan street, even though they are so beleaguered that there’s very little time to think beyond their own borders, but also the Sudanese street were in the midst of this war, we’ve seen repeated gestures of solidarity coming from resistance committee spokespeople and from the Sudanese Street, pointing to Gaza. And there’s an awareness that there are some deeper structural similarities. 

And those similarities can be found in the role of the Gulf states, the very difficult role of the Gulf states in both conflicts, in Sudan in particular, which is our topic. We know that the Emirates, the Emiratis, have been critical in keeping the RSF forces alive, well funded, they were critical in producing the ground for the rise of Hemedti, as was Saudi’s proxy war in Yemen. 

In a certain sense, you can see that the Saudi and Emirati states have acted, in a certain sense, as the local distributors of weaponry in the region. And this also goes into thinking about how we have the conditions for the violence we’re seeing in Gaza, for producing networks of proxy wars. And while Sudan has its own internal dynamics, it certainly also has been fueled and there have been repeated attempts, some more successful than others, to hijack internal political processes in Sudan, for the proxy war. 

Quite frankly, if Sudan were not networked in the way that it is in the kind of security economy and military economy that we see in the region, this war would not be as severe as it is. I’m not saying we wouldn’t have war at all, but it would not be as severe and the actors would be entirely different. 

If I can speak for a second to our European listeners. European listeners, in particular, need to start to realize that what they tend to look at as a kind of quintessential exotic African conflict zone is actually intimately tied to the ways in which we have positioned Sudan, in particular, in things like the Khartoum Process, were 200 million, as far as the figures that I know, that were promised to Omar al-Bashir, while he was already indicted by the International Criminal Court, in order to act as a local executor of controlling migration processes, something that I think that Amira can speak to much better than I can. We are intimately tied to these processes. And those networks of responsibility are ones we need to start turning into strategies of solidarity and strategies of articulating how this conflict matters.

AF: So, I would really like to know more about these resistance committees, and especially Professor Amira, you have written before about the central role of Sudanese women, especially in the 2018 revolution, and their ability to organize and protest and impact both their regime but also their society. But then, in the past year, we have seen a really drastic surge of gender based violence due to the war. I’m wondering at this point in time, what is the role of the Sudanese woman on the Sudanese Street? 

AA: So the Resistance Committee, which are called now Emergency Committee, these are the same entities who have always, and they actually did not start that role only after the war, even during the transitional government, and the three years after the war, because they were really supporting that government, they believe that this government is the government of the revolution. 

And of course, that government had to face many challenges, mainly the resistance of what we call the deep state, or the former regime. They were in immensely supported by the Resistance Committees who were helping to provide bread and cleaning the roads and defending this government and all this, in all senses, not only politically, and not only in terms of advocacy and showing support, but also in the street by solving, by trying to address the gaps and the suffering that people have to go through. So this is what they’re doing now. 

So basically, for those who are following the Sudanese war, it was a young and it was, we call it a women revolution, but also young women and men revolution. So, this is the composition of the resisting communities, they are mainly come from women and come from young people. And these are still the ones who are, again, as I said, they continue to play that vital role in the everyday life of the Sudanese people, but also maintaining these principles of bringing democracy and peace. But also will typically in all wars, young people and women suffer the most, they suffer as citizens, as civilians who are really targeted by violence and brutality, but also they suffer as women, by their gender, as citizens, but also based on their gender. 

So they are targeted, because they are seen as cheap, quote-unquote “commodity” that can help in the budget of the war. They can do with the everyday chores that the soldiers need, they can also provide entertainment, they can also provide, how women used. That’s why the spread of rape always comes with wars. 

So basically, but also in the Sudan war, I think it went to the very, very extreme, because women are not only raped, they’re also kidnapped, they’re also sold and bought, and they kidnap not only in the war zones, but also when they try to escape violence from one area to another area, these people in uniform, from that side or the other side, they stop them in the street, they harass them, they could kidnap them, they could rape them. 

The revolution was a women’s revolution because women again suffered the most, as women and as Sudanese, and actually, the Islamist regime, discriminated women in that special way because they came with this Islamist ideology, religious ideology, to say their own version of Islam, that actually rules in a way to control women. 

So they dictated how women should look, how women should speak, what kind of jobs women should be. And it’s not a secret that women were arrested in the streets because they didn’t wear a scarf, or they wear pants or not a proper uniform, or not a proper outfit. And, of course, this is a very extreme way of discrimination against women, 

The good thing, also from the bright side that women also are trying to organize inside Sudan and outside Sudan, and the figures that we’re getting about only the reported cases of rapes, I would actually, I would actually guess that the real numbers on the ground are much, much, much higher, but at least the reported ones are coming from Sudan, are reported by Sudanese women inside Sudan. And for the Sudanese women in the diaspora, they are taking on themselves the responsibility to actually report these cases, to make it reach women activists and women organizations and of course to the UN to open investigation on those cases. 

I can also see in a country like Egypt, for example, where I live, I see also women are grouping to talk about, again, what is happening inside the world, the all these types of gender based violence, but also on how they can contribute in bringing peace to Sudan engaged in all these, negotiations, and all these peace agreements. 

MS: I mean, I have nothing to add, it’s really that that’s it. Women have been running this revolution. And within a women-led revolution, the Resistance Committees have been the beating heart that keeps the place alive when everything else is engineering to smash it down. So, that’s, Amira told the whole story, exactly.

AF: I have a follow up question for both of you. When we see activists, particularly in the West, protesting about Gaza, we often see them calling for divestment. We’re seeing a lot of college campuses doing that. Is there a version of divestment, of trying to weaken those structures that you said that are funding the war by proxy, that we can call for in the West? What would you advise activists who are trying to bring attention, who are trying to bring change, what should they be calling for in their protests?

AA: And I think from my perspective, if I would like to analyze that, I think, I know that many, many people are either in the Middle East here or in the Global North, I think nobody actually would be happy about seeing people suffering, but I think one of the main issues is that many people do not have a good understanding of Sudan and the political situation in Sudan. 

And when you don’t really understand what is going on, even the way you express your sympathy would be challenged. But to know, what can you demand, even, if you don’t understand the situation? You won’t be able to decide what kind of demand we should seek? 

So I think one of the misunderstandings, for example, is that this war in Sudan is characterized as an African war, another African war between warlords. And I mean, again, no media attention. The international community intervenes only seeking their interests and also fighting each other. And this is not a secret. 

There are many reports now that talks about how this region and powers in the region, and now actually Iran is the last one to join, they are fighting each other, either for gold like Russia and Emirates, or either for power, like other countries. So I think this misunderstanding of the war as a local war, as purely an African war, and purely between two military groups is actually a misconception. 

So I think the first thing that people need to do, activists, if you want to say that, any people who are after peace and democracy, I think they should really debunk this war, they should really make this war, explain this war and what it entails. And at the same time, focus not only on the wars and warlords, but also on the civilians, those civilians who have been aspiring for democracy, who have actually been engaged in a revolution that’s actually continuous until now, despite the war.

These Resistance Committees that my dear colleague, Professor Manuel, was speaking about, are the same ones who are now saving life on a daily basis. So these Resistance Committees at the moment became Emergency Committees. And these are the ones who help people to survive their everyday lives through providing basic materials like food and drinking water and medication. And even now, they are actually mobilizing to get Starlink to exempt Sudan, to get free internet access, and it is happening at the moment. But again, Sudan are left under the mercy of two war organizations. And they are not only sympathy about how they are suffering for the war, but also highlighting what is happening in the country in the first place. 

So I call on activists to really get engaged in Sudan, to understand what is going on, and to support and show solidarity to civilians on the ground, either by helping them to save lives, or to empower the resistant communities to take charge of the political scene and humanitarian scene in Sudan.

MS: Here here, and absolutely. And if I can just elaborate a little bit, because this is really the only direction that I would have gone myself is the one that Amira is saying. If we take seriously the Sudanese Street, and I realize how insane what I’m about to say sounds to those who see Sudan as an absolute conflagration, but I think actually what we’re seeing in the Resistance Committees has all the makings of the future of the humanitarian paradigm. 

I think the pipeline economies that we have seen, this picks up on something we talked about last year when the war was just beginning, the future of the pipeline economies, the one we’re seeing right now that flies in an airdrop from Dubai, as far as I know, into Port Sudan, and then allows the warring parties, whether RSF or SAF, to distribute the aid. This has been the crippling problem with humanitarian distributions, not only in Sudan, in the long histories of the humanitarian things like Operation Lifeline Sudan in the south, but this goes all the way back to the Biafra war, this goes all the way back to the emergence of alternate modes of humanitarianism that we saw emerging out of that war. 

That model has no future. The Revolutionary Committees, Resistance Committees, Emergency Committees, producing clinics in living rooms. They’ve opened up hospitals, 70% of the hospitals in Sudan were not working. Even before the war some of them were already broken down. 

These committees have opened up hospitals that weren’t working before the war, in the midst of it. The international community, in the meantime, has refused entirely to engage them, with the usual set of alibis that these are non-state actors, that we do not know their political process, they don’t have a centralized leader so we don’t have a single accountability mechanism. In other words, they are alibis for not engaging with the Street that, Amira is totally right, is the center of hope, that point to exactly the strength of these Resistance Committees, as the reason not to engage them. And I think what we’re seeing is an absolutely remarkable tenacity that could genuinely be the new humanitarian paradigm. 

AF: Can you tell me a little bit more about why the current approach to stopping the violence isn’t working? 

MS: We have a bunch of paternalistic processes that are trying to bring the parties to the table and explain to them, as Amira said, please stop fighting. The same parties that tend to sponsor these things, or stand at the sidelines and give advice, are the enabling pathways of funding weapons, and as Amira very importantly said, legitimacy for these fighting groups. 

Turn this on its head, listen to the Sudanese Street, listen to the Resistance Committees, look at the demands that they make, which include among them, the absolute and fundamental criminalization of military involvement in politics. This is a lesson that most countries in the world, including the U.S., could probably handle a little bit of advice from the Sudanese street on. And instead, we run this the other direction. 

If anybody is confused about how internationalized the proxy dimension of this war is, they need look no further than the fact that, not only do we have Wagner Group fighting on the side of the RSF, but Ukraine, in the middle of a war, an existential war, for its own survival and independence, still directs a large number of their special forces troops. I don’t know the exact figures, I don’t know if they’re publicly known. But they have acknowledged that they direct a large number of their special forces troops to combat the Wagner Group in Sudan. If people in the midst of a war in which they can barely get enough of their own citizens fighting in self defense, are diverting their soldiers this direction, it shows you how strategically important this is. 

If we began as Amira, this is just echoing what Amira said, if we began to really map the international networks of responsibility, of funding, the, if you want to put it this way, the big gifting networks, by which different regional powers enable each other to brutalize the Sudanese Street, because of its strategic positions. If we map that entirely, I think the landscape of our activism would be a very different one. And frankly, it would probably also have a good effect. 

If we look from the perspective of civilians, it would have a good effect for civilians in all the major conflagrations we’re seeing. Look at how important this is for Ukraine. But I think this would also have a great effect on civilians in Gaza, who are also not helped by the circulation of these kinds of proxy logics. Who, sorry to say, the Emirates have absolutely, doing the opposite of helping, we need to start to put this together as a highly complex but comprehensible political region and political war and start to map it as a real historical center and not this old “ancient hatreds” thing.

AF: So a bit of a follow up on this is that it really seems like as you’ve said, Sudan, is the geographical space where a proxy war is being fought by multiple international actors. So for our listeners who maybe are not as familiar, who is the winner? Is it the Emirates? Is it Saudi? Who are the people who are coming away with a victory? And what is that victory for them?

AA: So I don’t know who is going to benefit. Of course, they have their political goals. But I mean, what kind of victory you are actually achieving over the bodies of people, over a country that’s, again, has been in war. And, again, as we have we started our conversation, when this worry started, things were already bad. And now they are getting worse, and they are getting worse. 

And we also forget to look at this war, and resultant crises in the regional and international perspective. Because what is happening in Sudan can threaten the regional security for many years to come. I mean, if people continue to leave their homes and their countries, now we have almost 1.05 million families, not people, who had to be, they were uprooted. They had to leave their own homes where they used to live. 

And we learned also from history that when war starts, it takes really long for things to come back to before the war and also for people to go back to their country or to their homes. Let us assume that there is no war in Khartoum, at the moment, we will automatically go back to Khartoum, where water is not supplied, where there is no food, there is no security, because people don’t really trust is either the SAF people or RSF, they don’t trust them, they don’t believe that they can bring security to to the country. 

So I think that’s the question about not who’s winning, I think we’re all losing. Suffering on everyday level, security, and on the immediate place where people live, and also on the regional, international level. So I think the loss of this war really overweights the gains of this war if, if any.

MS: Agreed. And I mean, I think the way to look at this is in always a double perspective. You have what the different parties hope will be their gains and benefits from supporting and interacting with this war in the way that they do. And then you have the reality of what is likely to come out. 

And I’m gonna go even a little bit beyond the Saudis and Emiratis, if I may, for a second. Look, I mean, you have a Saudi hope that by strengthening the SAF, they will end up with basically, I don’t want to say client regime, because that is, you know, it partakes a little bit too much in that same paternalistic discourse, but certainly a friendly military regime in the region that will continue, as we already saw in Yemen, to provide support for the Saudi regional interest by proxy. That’s their hope. 

What is more likely to happen, is that on the Saudi side, this conflagration will end up messing everybody up because, well, it’s going to end up messing with shipping more than we’ve already seen. On the Emirati side, the hope is that by supporting the RSF they end up with their own side and, you know, the Emiratis and Saudis are fighting a slight, you know, they’re, they’re often, in certain conflicts, on the same side, but one thing, one place where they’re not quite aligned, is in Yemen with the Houthi question because they they can really, the Emiratis would like to see a division, because then they control the Gulf of Aden. 

Now put Sudan into that picture, and Port Sudan done into the picture, add that to the shipping lane, add the way in which Port Sudan is already emerging as a location, next to Somalia and some others, where we see strategic securitisation of these shipping lanes. You’ve got a small struggle about who’s actually going to be doing this control. And what the reality is, is that, like all these forms of proxy wars, blowback is going to end up in a catastrophe for everyone. 

Oh, and I’m sorry, one afterthought, that’s really important here, don’t forget the European and U.S. investment in controlling the migration corridor of East Africa. Omar al-Bashir would have probably renamed the Janjaweed militias of Darfur the RSF simply to kind of consolidate his control and his capacity to hold power within the military cabals. 

But another background that we cannot forget is that with the Khartoum Process, we needed a legitimized fighting force that was able to securitize these migration routes, the same groups that in the early 2000s, and the 2010s, were all over the news as the militias committing an atrocity-based counterinsurgency in Darfur that many groups called the genocide, renamed as the RSF, could very easily be deployed. I don’t know how far we got down that before the ouster of Omar Al Bashir, but can easily be deployed to control the migration routes. We are all complicit in one form or another if we think through our kind of citizenship routes, and so we need to keep that in mind.

AF: I want to open the floor to see if you had any last things that you wanted to end on. If you guys would like to add anything else before we finish?

AA: Yeah, if I may, I would also like, with highlighting, again, what is going on in Sudan, we need to focus our attention on what is happening in the neighboring countries where Sudanese had to seek refuge. 

And all the countries in the region probably are part of, of the 1961 organization, the African Union agreement for the rights of migrants and refugees. And of course, needless to say, at least some of them are also party to the 1951 convention relating to the rights of refugees, and many, many other instruments and conventions to protect the rights of of migrants and refugees, and they all agree on the principle of non-refoulement, meaning that you cannot bring people, deport people, let us say it that way, to countries where the country, the countries, when these countries are in turmoil, like in war, or they have, at least, in the international law there are grounds for when to seek asylum, when you go as a refugee to a country. 

And I think even though these countries open their borders for people, and some close their borders for people, but I think, again the same trend that the Sudanese issue is not taken seriously, it’s also happening to the migrant and refugee communities in the neighboring countries, where these people are refugees, they have the right to international protection, they have the right to be hosted in the neighboring countries, but then they are dealt with as foreigners, they are asked about their passport, they’re asked about the residency renewal, and even when they try to do that, they are met by so many challenges. 

So I think you’re, all the administrative processes in countries hosting Sudanese need to be really revisited. Also, for the role of activists, is very important to mitigate the anti-Sudanese refugees discourse that’s spreading at the moment in the region. So I think this is important also to be put on the agenda of solidarity and support to the Sudanese people. 

MS: Here, here. I think the only thing that I would say, in closing is, to those of you sitting in Europe, there are three things that you can do right off the bat, and that you should be doing consistently, if this concerns you. One, rethink how you analyze and view and hear reporting about conflicts in distant, racialized “Elsewheres”, especially Sudan, but generally. 

The entire idea that we have ancient tribal hatreds that drive these things, has never, it is a lazy optic, and it has never worked. Do not apply those perspectives. Think of places as thick, very complicated, modern histories with actors of at least the political acumen and complexity of your own states, in your own streets. 

Second, rethink your attitudes toward migration, this picks up on Amira’s excellent point. Stop securitizing migration, start supporting it, as long as it’s necessary to save lives. The securitization of the migration corridor that runs through Sudan has set us up for this problem. 

The alliances between Sudanese communities, what some people call diaspora communities, outside of the country, and the Resistance Committees and Emergency Committees inside, is the future. It is the only ground in which we see hope for a solution and it is the only thing keeping people alive. 

Third, and it’s a related point, rethink your world picture as a humanitarian map. Humanitarianism, that goes top-down and pipeline-in, is not the future. Begin to put pressure on the designers of humanitarian policies in your own countries. Many of them are hungry for this anyway, man. And your own governments to start to engage the grassroots activity of people like these Resistance Committees or Emergency Committees, and stop with the lazy alibis, that because they are not state actors, we can’t engage. That’s for people in Europe. Yeah. 

If you’re sitting in Cairo, if you’re sitting in the neighboring countries, what? Pay attention to the consistent, persistent, and pernicious racialization of Sudanese that Amira just mentioned. It is crucial that we resist that discourse. It’s part of how the securitization of communities becomes the main way we see them. 

But second, start to realize that your borders are the pathways for people to get out and put pressure on your governments to allow them to do so. And if you’re sitting in the kind of more complex world of international alliances, well, follow the money, follow the arms trades, make sure that you’re paying attention to why Sudan is part of a larger complex of regional securitization. And think of a way to resist that, that keeps the Sudanese Street and civilians in mind. That’s where I would finish it.