Assessing the Origins, Dynamics, and Future of Conflict in Sudan

The conflict in Sudan, which erupted in April 2023, primarily involves the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) under General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. While the fighting began in the country’s capital, Khartoum, it has since spread to other regions, including Darfur. 

The conflict has resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries, with estimates of 15,000 killed and more than 20,000 injured. The humanitarian crisis is dire, with millions facing severe food shortages. Around 25 million people are in need of assistance, 8.1 million are internally displaced, and 2.9 million people have crossed the border since April 2023. Recent discussions at the United Nations General Assembly highlighted the urgent need for international intervention and support. 

Meanwhile, the most recent clashes in Khartoum suggest a possible shift in the balance of power, as both sides continue to vie for control amid an increasingly fragmented landscape.

Co-hosting this episode is Just Security Executive Editor Matiangai Sirleaf. Matiangai is the Nathan Patz Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law.

Joining the show to discuss the conflict’s origins and its impact, and the international community’s response are Laura Beny, Nisrin Elamin, and Hamid Khalafallah. 

Laura is a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, Nisrin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and Hamid is a Researcher at the University of Manchester. 

Show Notes:  

• Laura Nyantung Beny
• Nisrin Elamin (@minlayla77)
• Hamid Khalafallah (@HamidMurtada)
• Matiangai V.S. Sirleaf (@matiangai)
• Paras Shah (@pshah518) 
• Just Security’s Sudan coverage
• Laura and Sondra Hale's book "Sudan's Killing Fields: Political Viilence and Fragmentation" 
• Nisrin's article with Sara Abbas, Rabab Elnaiem, and Abdelraouf Omer "In Sudan, the People’s Revolution Versus the Elite’s Counterrevolution" 
• Music: “Broken” by David Bullard from Uppbeat: https://uppbeat.io/t/david-bullard/broken (License code: OSC7K3LCPSGXISVI)

Transcript

Paras Shah: The conflict in Sudan, which erupted in April 2023, primarily involves the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, under General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. While the fighting began in the country’s capital, Khartoum, it has since spread to other regions, including Darfur. 

The conflict has resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries, with estimates of 15,000 killed and more than 20,000 injured. The humanitarian crisis is dire, with millions facing severe food shortages. Around 25 million people are in need of assistance, 8.1 million are internally displaced, and 2.9 million people have crossed the border since April 2023. Recent discussions at the U.N. General Assembly highlighted the urgent need for international intervention and support. 

Meanwhile, the most recent clashes in Khartoum suggest a possible shift in the balance of power, as both sides continue to vie for control amid an increasingly fragmented landscape.

This is the Just Security Podcast. I’m your host, Paras Shah. Co-hosting with me today is Just Security Executive Editor Matiangai Sirleaf. Matiangai is the Nathan Patz Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law.

Joining the show to discuss the conflict’s origins and its impact, and the international community’s response, are Laura Beny, Nisrin Elamin, and Hamid Khalafallah. 

Laura is a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, Nisrin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and Hamid is a researcher at the University of Manchester. 

Matiangai Sirleaf: First, I just want to say thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to chat with us today. Can you briefly introduce yourselves? We'll just go alphabetically, and I want to hear a little bit more about the work you do and your connection to Sudan. Laura, we'll start with you.

Laura Beny: Hi, I'm Laura Beny. I'm a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. I have taught at Michigan since 2003. I'm trained as an economist and a lawyer, and my work is in law and finance as well. I've also done writings on Sudan, less so recently, but more during the time of the conflict between South Sudan and the central government that led to the secession of Sudan in 2011. 

My personal connection with Sudan is, I was actually born in Khartoum. My father was from South Sudan. He was from a group, they’re in between Dinka and Nuer, they speak — the language is Nuer, closer to Nuer, and the culture is closer to Dinka, but the cultures are very similar. And he came to the United States in the 1960s on a fellowship after he finished at the University of Khartoum, and he met my mom in Indiana. She's American.

Matiangai: Thank you so much. And Nisrin?

Nisrin Elamin: Hi, my name is Nisrin Elamin. I am an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Toronto. I've been here for now two years. And my connection to Sudan is that my family's from there, from a part of Sudan called the Jazirah, which is just south of Khartoum. It's kind of the agricultural, well, one of the agricultural sort of centers of Sudan. And my mother is from the northern part of Sudan. And I've been doing my research, my PhD, my dissertation was on Saudi and Emirati land grabs in central Sudan, and kind of community organizing and resistance to land dispossession. And my work kind of situates these land grabs in a much longer history of kind of land dispossession, imperialism, slavery, et cetera. So that's — and I spent about a year and a half or so living in rural parts of Sudan, kind of farming with people, you know, and just experiencing some of the organized resistance and more informal forms of resistance to land dispossession between 2013 and around 2018. And I was in Sudan when the war broke out with my family, I was introducing my daughter to the family, and we were hoping to celebrate to be there. So, that's basically my connection to Sudan. 

And thank you for having us, thank you for covering this topic at a time when most of the media seems to not be interested.

Matiangai: Thank you. Thank you for sharing your time and your talents, and we’ll definitely be returning to sort of the salience that Sudan has, or doesn't hav,e in terms of the international agenda. Hamid, can you please introduce yourself?

Hamid Khalafallah: Yeah. My name is Hamid Khalafallah, and I am a Sudanese researcher and policy analyst. I'm currently doing a PhD at the University of Manchester in the U.K., where I'm studying grassroots movements and democratization processes, and trying to see how grassroots movements contribute to democratization processes. And my case study is Sudan. And before moving to the U.K. for my postgraduate degrees, I was working in Sudan with different national and international organizations on different governance and development issues. 

My whole life was the connection to Sudan, like born and bred in Sudan. I've worked in Sudan, and also, like Nisrin, I was in Sudan when the war erupted in April 2023. And thank you so much for having us and for organizing this conversation.

Matiangai: Thank you. You all bring such a wealth of experience and knowledge, both personal and professional, to this podcast. And so, before we delve into today's discussion about the current crisis in Sudan, I wanted to ask you to provide a little bit of historical background in terms of what our listeners might need to know in order to understand what's happening on the ground today. Nisrin, I wanted to begin with you. You co-authored a piece called “In Sudan, the People's Revolution Versus the Elite’s Counter-Revolution.” And I wanted you to just help our audience understand why you believe that particular framing of the conflict is important.

Nisrin: I think it's important to frame and kind of understand this war as a counter-revolutionary war and to kind of start the shorter history of this war during the December revolution of 2018-2019. So, in April of 2019, a powerful popular revolution ousted dictator Ahmad Al Bashir after 30 years in power and sort of converged or centralized in a massive, almost million-person sit in in front of the military headquarters in Khartoum. And that sit-in remained in place for about three months after he was removed by the military because people's demands exceeded calls for regime change and because military elites from within the Al Bashir inner circles — the same people who are now fighting over political and economic control of the country — had reclaimed power, calling themselves the transitional military council. 

And it's really during this period that the counter revolution began, I would say. The sit in was brutally broken up through a massacre perpetrated by those same military elites that killed over 120 people, and then a transitional government was formed that was kind of a power sharing agreement between the military council, the transitional military council, and civilian elites, where power was kind of always tilted in favor of the military elites. And the civilians were kind of hand-picked, many from the diaspora, who kind of turned outward during this transition, and who attempted to open Sudan up after decades of isolation due to Clinton-era sanctions that started in 1997, to international donor funding, and largely ignored the revolutionary demands that were coming from the revolutionaries in the streets and neighborhoods across the country, the people who are kind of the backbone of the revolution, consisting of neighborhood resistance committees — which I think Hamid will talk about later — which there are close to 8000 across the country. But they're essentially neighborhood consensus-based collectives that have been organizing around a number of issues for years, but also independent farmer and labor unions, professional associations, feminist organizations, youth and student formations, the kind of grassroots groups that have mostly resisted NGO-ization and kind of formal opposition party politics. 

And I just want to give an example of this, which is the Abraham Accords. It was a normalization with Israel agreement, which was signed by Sudan during this transition in exchange for being dropped from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and the promise of $1 billion in annual financing from the World Bank amidst opposition from the streets. There was also a peace agreement signed during this time in 2020 in South Sudan's capital Juba, which served as a kind of mechanism for absorbing opposition forces in order for state elites to maintain a monopoly on power and violence. And in the process, we saw leaders of opposition forces kind of join ranks with the same state elites they once fought. 

And then in October of 2021, the military elites that had formed the transitional government in partnership with civilian elites grab power in a coup, derailing the transitional process that was supposed to lead towards democratic elections and eventually civilian rule. And in the aftermath of that coup, we saw the U.N. facilitate peace talks led by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and the U.K. basically legitimize and prop up the coup leaders — Burhan, who's the head of the army, and Hemedti, who's the head of the Rapid Support Forces, the kind of two heads of the factions now fighting this war, both generals who are responsible for war crimes that span decades, right, long before even the Bashir regime. And these talks frame the two generals as potential reformists, rather than listening to the resistance committees who are calling for no negotiations, no legitimacy and no partnership with the military. And this lack of accountability and kind of Euro-American and Gulf diplomacy as a tool of empire, kind of prioritizing stability over revolutionary demands. is partly, I think, what paved the way for this war. 

So, all this to say that this is not a civil war. In my view, this is a counter revolutionary war against civilians of military elites who grab power in the coup against the entire civilian population of 48 million. And I also want to say that while the proxy war framing is compelling, it tends to obscure the roles Sudanese state and business elites have played for decades in kind of laying the foundations upon which this war is being waged, and it kind of minimizes their role in leading it. And so, I want to say, I think later, maybe we'll get into more of the historical roots of this war, but I think it's important to note that while the army might be the kind of lesser evil of the two in this current moment, it is not a revolutionary force. It is responsible for war crimes and atrocities that span decades, really, since independence. So, I think that's important.

And just to end, I want to say that we actually wrote this piece with hammer and hope, and there'll be a second part coming out in October to center and highlight the voices of Sudanese and South Sudanese activists who've been organizing against the state and other oppressive forces for years, if not decades. And so, that was also important for us to kind of be able to, yeah, center the voices of people who can frame this counter revolutionary kind of framing from their perspective of organizing over the last years.

Paras: Thanks so much for that overview, Nisrin. It's really helpful to understand the origins of the current conflict. And as you mentioned, it is helpful to zoom out and go back in time. Laura, I'm hoping you can provide a little bit more insight regarding how the civil wars that Sudan experienced from 1955 to 1972 and from 1983 to 2005 have led to the secession of South Sudan and to the current moment that we're seeing.

Laura: Yes. Thanks for the question. Yes. So, Sudan was a British and Egyptian colony until 1955 independence. When the colonial powers handed over government to the Sudanese, they largely excluded the southern Sudanese. In fact, when they ran the colony of Sudan, they separated the south and the north, and they treated the south more or less as a protectorate, and they did not allow northern Sudanese to go into southern Sudan. They Christianized, and they tried to develop southern Sudan along traditional African bases, whereas in the north, the north developed culturally and politically more along Arab and to some extent earlier, but much more significantly, later, along the Islamic lines. And so, you have the racial, the political, cultural distinctions between — this is a gross simplification, but you do have those distinctions between the northern and southern Sudan during colonization and after independence.

The first civil war took place between 1955 and 1972. Jaafar Nimeiri, actually, he was popular. He was the leader of Sudan at the time in 1972 when the peace agreement, Addis Ababa peace agreement, was signed between the warring parties of the south and the north. And that peace agreement, Addis Ababa peace agreement, actually granted South Sudan a degree of autonomy. And so, it was favored in the south because they were always struggling for greater autonomy and greater self-determination. But there was resentment in the north, because at the time that Nimeiri was allowing greater freedoms in South Sudan, he was stifling political expression and freedoms in north Sudan, and increasingly so, because he ultimately aligned himself with the Islamic fundamentalists. And so, the peace agreement became unpopular in the north by the traditional parties, not the ones not in the government, but the traditional parties, Umma and the DUP. 

Ultimately, the peace agreement fell apart. Sudan went back to war. North and South Sudan went back to war in 1983. The rebellion was led by John Garang of South Sudan, and he was, he ostensibly was fighting for a new Sudan, a Sudan where all ethnicities and races and gender would be equal in the nation state, and equal development of all regions, decentralization. That was a protracted war. It got very ugly. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed in 2005 and that was where — it was actually brokered by the Troika, which consists of the United Kingdom, Norway and the United States. They brokered the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which provided for a six-year interim period. During that period, the two parties, the government of South Sudan and the government of the north Sudan, would run the government together, the so-called government of national unity, Ganub, and they would share wealth. 

And the goal was, it was in the peace agreement, the goal was to make unity attractive, so that at the end of the six-year interim period, when an internationally supervised referendum was to be held, it would be attractive for southern Sudanese to vote to remain with the Sudan, to remain in a united Sudan. Only the southern Sudanese were permitted to vote in the referendum. So north Sudanese had no say as to whether the country would stay together, or the south would secede. And during that interim period, I believe, because of the nature of the regime, unity was not attractive southern Sudanese, and so they voted overwhelmingly —I've seen numbers ranging as high as 99% of southern Sudanese of voting age voted for secession, and so South Sudan was born as a new nation in 2011. 

How it relates to the current conflict in the Sudan? Well, a lot of the periphery conflicts still remain in North Sudan, Sudan that remains after the secession of Sudan. So, we have Darfur region. We have the Nuba mountains, southern Blue Nile. We have parts of eastern Sudan. As I said earlier, at the outset, these areas are also marginalized. They've been marginalized by the Sudanese state. They remain underdeveloped. They don't share power with the center equally, and so they have also aggrieved populations. And we can see, we can actually possibly see the further fragmentation. Just because South Sudan has broken away does not mean the problem goes, because the problem, as Nisrin suggested, is actually a problem of the state. It's the problem of the elite that have controlled the state since independence.

Matiangai: Yeah. Thank you so much for that, Laura. Really provocative thoughts here, and I know that Nisrin wants to react to some of the comments here. And Nisrin, as you were formulating your thoughts, I was hoping that you could also address, sort of, the ways in which the current humanitarian crises playing out in Sudan is sort of in spectacular and horrid fashion and devastating consequences, and to give a little bit more context, in addition to whatever historical remarks that you want to, but in particular to emphasize how the conflict is impacting people on the ground. Thanks.

Nisrin: Sure, yeah. If it's okay, I wanted to kind of go back to talk about some of the historical roots. So, I think it's important to kind of situate the current war within the much longer history of state violence. This war, as Laura has discussed, has colonial roots. It's shaped by our history of slavery, which expanded when Sudan was under Ottoman rule in the 19th century. And then in 1956, when Sudan became independent, the British basically handed us an economy kind of dependent on the extraction of cash crops, like cotton, and a political system, sorry, which was reconfigured to serve the interests of a Nubian and Arab-identified elite in Sudan's north and center. 

And both of these systems developed at the expense of the masses in the south and other marginalized regions, but also of a rural farming population who helped to kind of sustain this extractive economy. So, as an example, the British vacated 800 administrative seats right before independence, and these seats belong to civil servants, agricultural scheme managers, army and police officials, et cetera, of which Sudan's new ruling elite in the north and center allocated six to South Sudan, which is an area the size of Texas, with a population of over 2.5 million at the time. And that civilization process, as it was called, facilitated and kind of enshrined the systematic kind of marginalization of other regions as well, such as Darfur, eastern Sudan, parts of Kordofan, et cetera. 

And so, some of the initial forms of resistance against the post-colonial state actually came, unsurprisingly, from tenant farmers who organized to demand, among other things, a greater share of profits as world cotton prices went down. So as an example, a strike took place on a cotton scheme near Kosti shortly after independence, and the state responded with extreme violence, killing over 300 striking farmers. And a year earlier, Sudan's first civil war had broken out in 1955, as was mentioned, between southern Sudanese demanding political representation, equitable resource distribution and regional autonomy, and the central government, who had essentially subsumed the South as a quasi-internal colony. And so, in August of that year of 1955, South Sudanese members of the British-administered Sudan Defense Forces Equatorial Corps mutinied in a town called Torit. And this mutiny was partly inspired by the Sudanization process that I was just describing, led by Northern elites, but also by their repressive response to a labor protest following the abrupt dismissal of 300 southern workers from a textile factory, during which 14 protesters were killed by the army. And while this mutiny was brutally squashed, it laid the ground, basically, for southerners to take up arms against the central government.  

And the reason I linked these two, right, the massacre on this scheme near Kosti and the kind of outbreak of the civil war, is because striking farmers in Sudan’s center were essentially threatening kind of existing capitalist labor relations that were allowing ruling elites to extract maximum profits to kind of fund their repressive campaign against southern resistance fighters. 

And so, I think this is important. We can kind of draw a straight line from the outbreak of the first civil war in 1955 which, over the decades and in its two phases, killed over 2.5 million, mostly South Sudanese people and displaced 4 million from their lands to the current war that arrived in the capital Khartoum on April 15 of 2023. And since independence, really, but also certainly under the Nimeirian and Bashir regimes, we kind of saw the need to serve Sudanese in the interest by any means necessary manifest itself in the form of an ethnonationalist, monocultural, kind of right-wing, religious Islamist project being imposed on a multiracial, multilingual, multi-religious country in very violent ways. 

And we saw this play itself out in Darfur. Many of your listeners probably remember where a state-sanctioned campaign of genocidal violence led by the Janjaweed, which later became the Rapid Support Forces, was carried out beginning in 2003, killing hundreds of thousands, wiping out entire villages of non-Arab farming communities and displacing millions of civilians from resource-rich land which kind of continues to be exploited to fuel this war. So, I wanted to mention that because I think history allows us to kind of not exceptionalize the violence of this current war, and to recognize that the Sudanese state has always been extremely violent and extractive, and its violence has always targeted non-Arab communities more than Arab and Nubian communities.

And we see this even play itself out in this war, where you see kind of continuation of genocidal violence in Darfur and also the Nuba mountains, kind of intensification of ethnic cleansing that predates this war that is actually quite different from the violence that is happening in other parts of the country. So, what's unprecedented right now is more the scale, the geographic scale, or reach of this war, rather than the sort of intensive, you know, the violence itself. 

And so, just to bring it back to the humanitarian crisis, you know, we're seeing right now that over half the country is sort of at the brink of famine, in a country that could easily feed itself. Nineteen million children are out of school. Over 10 million people have been displaced by this war. Two million have crossed Sudan's seven borders. And yet, you know, for the most part, the world has ignored this crisis, right? We've only seen, I think, about maybe 30 percent of the three billion needed to launch a robust relief effort be received by the international community. And we also haven't seen any refugee visas, for example, be issued by countries in the same way that they had been for Ukrainian refugees, for example. We're even dealing with countries that are receiving European Union funding to kind of ramp up their border, sort of externalized borders. Security forces actually deport Sudanese refugees from places like Tunisia and Egypt back to the war zone. 

So, you know, as somebody who's — most of my family is still in Sudan. Part of what we're seeing is, there's been a complete collapse of the healthcare system, and there are acute food shortages because both warring factions are obstructing aid, which means that even the money that we send home isn't necessarily doing much anymore. And as we all know, if you look at the history of Sudan's long wars that have claimed millions of lives, hunger and disease are often much deadlier than bullets. And so it's, yeah, it's quite devastating to kind of watch what is happening and to feel like there's not so much we can do, which is why I'm a member of a collective here in Toronto called the Sudan Solidarity Collective, and we've been funding or supporting grassroots mutual aid networks on the ground called emergency response rooms, which maybe we'll talk a little bit more about later. But these are basically volunteers who are kind of at the front lines of the relief efforts on the ground, who are largely operating in the absence of a civilian state and in the absence of an international aid community, which, you know, they’re present, but not to the extent that you might expect given the kind of scale of the crisis.

Paras: Yeah. Thanks so much for those very important points, Nisrin, and as you highlight, really, the scale of the human tragedy here is so vast. Hamid, Nisrin and Laura have both mentioned the role of civilian resistance committees, and I'm hoping you could help us understand how they're organized and how they're working, and what the diaspora community is doing, and efforts outside of Sudan?

Hamid: Yeah, I think not only now after the war, but grassroots civilian groups in Sudan have been in a constant state of resistance since December 2018, when the revolution in Sudan started. And it's part of, you know, their narrative that we are in a continuous revolution. And this has always been the way they approach things and deal with things. So, since 2019 — actually, 2018 December, when the revolution started, and following political transition and so on, and then the military coup, and then the war and so on, so, the context has changed quite a bit ever since December 2018. And accordingly, these grassroots groups, namely the resistance committees, have been changing the roles that they play, you know, in response to the change in the context, so, from organizing protests and mobilizing citizens, managing service provisions in their neighborhoods at a time when the state was absent or when there was a shortage in specific goods and so on, to leading the COVID response, actually. And also, on top of that, you know, their main political role in terms of producing political charters and outlining their visions for governing Sudan and so on. 

So, they have been playing different roles, you know, throughout the past five, six years, you know, according to the context. And whenever things change, they play a different role. So, when the war broke out a year and a half ago, you know, they very quickly made this decision that we are going to survive together, or, if we are to survive this war, it has to be by surviving together, and that we have to help each other, you know, as communities and as, you know, civilian resistance groups and so on, by collaborating and working together. 

And obviously, this togetherness and this collective approach to survival in very, very difficult circumstances stems from the spirit of community that these grassroots groups have managed to build across communities ever since the revolution in 2018-2019. But I think it also comes from a realization that no one is coming to save us. And, you know, what Nisrin was just mentioning about, you know, the gap in humanitarian response and and so on. I think they very early on saw that, you know, no one is coming to save us, so we have to save ourselves. And I think that's where all the organizing happened.

And you know, these resistance committees very quickly, after the war erupted honestly, within hours, they very quickly changed gears and diverted their attention to leading the mutual aid efforts in the country, and obviously, you know, to try to make sure that, you know, to eliminate the element of targeting, and to make sure that they're much focused on what they're doing, because the situation is very difficult and the needs are massive and so on. They form these emergency response rooms which are leading the response to the ground. But there's so many mutual aid groups across communities across Sudan that are doing, you know, different things, but also similar to each other, with similar approaches and so on, all with the spirit of mutual aid. 

And yeah, although so many people have been seeing this as a diversion from the resistance committees, you know, resistance, political role or so on, I think that's not necessarily true, because the way they provide aid is very particular, where mutual aid is seen as an act of political participation, because it's, you know, inherently participatory, the way it's done. The entire community gets to decide what are their priorities, what type of, you know, humanitarian assistance do they need? Whenever they receive funding or support, everyone, you know, takes part in the accountability process and making sure that, you know, what is spent is accounted for. Everyone knows where every pay went and so on. So, it's a very participatory process that empowers communities and allows them to take control in terms of priorities and distribution of aid and so on. 

And also, I think in that context, mutual aid is seen as an act of resistance, because it obviously asserts agency and enables these communities to take matters in their own hands, and not to be solely dependent on, you know, the support of international aid agencies and so on, but also to live a different reality, where they're not necessarily 24/7 subject to the terms and whims of the warring factions, whether they are in a military-controlled area or a Rapid Support Forces-controlled area, or an area where there is active conflict, and, you know, they're caught in the crossfire. It gives them a bit of a space on the community level to try to live a different reality because, you know, this has continued for so long now. And you know, by being able to have this alternative reality where they, you know, exert the agency, they decide how they live and so on, indeed, they resist the context, and it gives them hope that there is an alternative, there could still be a future. 

And you know, the vast majority of the support that's going to these emergency response rooms and the other mutual aid initiatives in Sudan — yeah, I mean, that is not necessarily very well-studied, but I would say probably 80 percent of the support comes from the diaspora, Sudanese all over the world who've been organizing crowdfunding campaigns and raising funds to send it back to Sudan, because there isn't much coming from the aid system. And even whatever comes from the international aid agencies and so on — because most of the funding sits within the United Nation agencies who, you know, because of bureaucracy, because the way they do things and they're unable to, you know, be agile and responsive and so on — find it very difficult to channel funding into such grassroots initiatives and so on. So, most of the support comes from the diaspora who have been for the past, you know, year and a half. I know so many people who started, you know, working double shifts, just so that they can make more money, so that they can send it back to their families and communities on the ground, people who moved into, you know, a smaller apartment, so that they can save more money and send it back to people.

So, this is really where most of the support is coming from — from the diaspora who have been, you know, cutting here and there to send back to families who are still in Sudan because, I think although we speak a lot about the displacement, the external displacement and so on, and how people in, you know, new countries of displacement are struggling and so on, but I think we also forget that, you know, the vast majority of Sudanese people are still in Sudan and are still enduring these circumstances, and no one is necessarily supporting other than Sudanese diaspora. 

Matiangai: So, oh, my goodness, thank you for that. And I'm stuck with that, you know, “we are the ones that will save ourselves” line, because I think that it applies to so many things. And I think now maybe, Nisrin, I'll turn to you, because you had mentioned solidarity efforts earlier in your remarks. And so, I wanted to see if you can pick up on the remarks around solidarity efforts that perhaps you are involved in and what would you like to see in terms of increased solidarity efforts for Sudan, in addition to the amazing organizing that Sudanese have been organizing for themselves within Sudan and outside of Sudan.

Nisrin: Sure, yeah, I'll just briefly kind of follow up on what was already said. But you know, there are these mutual aid networks. There are hundreds of them across the country right now. The ones that we're most familiar with are the emergency response rooms that kind of emerged out of the resistance committee structure. Many of its members are leading them. 

And these are essentially young people who are volunteering at great risk to their own lives, right, because they're being targeted by both the RSF and the army wherever they're operating. They're driving ambulances. They're organizing communal kitchens, ad hoc emergency clinics, right, rape crisis centers. They're turning kind of defunct schools into shelters. They are organizing learning activities for the 19 million children that are out of school, and they're doing so with very little resources. I mean, even the support we provide — we've raised about maybe $300,000 over the last year — is really a drop in the bucket in terms of what is actually needed on the ground, but people make it work to the extent that they can. They allow this money to really stretch, because they're volunteers and because they kind of liaise with, you know, pharmacy and store owners to kind of source food. 

A lot of the money that we raise, you know, we give it to these emergency response rooms and basically tell them, do with it what you think is, you know, is most useful, right? And so, for example, in Darfur, there's a kind of localization hub, if you will, that takes the money that comes, you know, from external sources, and then they decide, in a sort of collective manner, how to allocate it across the five states of Darfur, which is a very large region, right, where there's a great, great need. And so, for us, I think one of the most important things as members of the diaspora is to provide the support without asking anything in return, really, and really trusting the people on the ground to know where it best needs to be used, right? And I think this, to some degree, also allows them to remain independent, right? I think there is sort of political potential within these groups. They do have, I mean, a lot of the resistance committee members have a kind of idea of what it would take to get us back towards, you know, sort of at least the path towards democratic elections. 

So, for me. I think one of the main messages that I want to kind of share with listeners is, if you can spare, you know, $10 a month, it will go a long way. Instead of giving it to say a U.N. agency, right, you can give it to the Sudan Solidarity Collective. You can just go to sudansolidarity.com and by giving us a monthly kind of donation, it allows us to sustain this work without having to kind of, yeah, and to give sort of support in a more sustained and regular way, because a lot of the communal kitchens and kind of mutual aid networks have also had to shut down in the last couple of months because there's been a lack of funding. And, you know, food prices have gone up. There's been a kind of deliberate, as I said, destruct obstruction of aid. 

And another key factor that I should mention, because we've also supported a farmers Union in the past is that when the agricultural heartland of Sudan, the Jazirah that, as Laura mentioned earlier, was one of the areas where the British and also the post-colonial government kind of put a lot of development aid into, and so there's a lot of infrastructure. A lot of that agricultural infrastructure has been attacked or under attack, come under attack after the RSF kind of took over that region, and they've prevented people from farming, which means that a sort of looming food crisis has intensified, right? Because people can't feed themselves anymore. And I think that is important is to figure out, you know, these farmers have been organizing. They have a union, and they're asking for support to continue planting and to kind of, and they're saying, you know, to the rest of the world, like, we can feed ourselves. We just need support. We need protection. And, you know, essentially, we can do this on our own. 

So, I think these are kind of some of the lessons that I'm seeing coming out of this, is that what the mutual aid networks and unions are offering us is a kind of decolonized model of what aid should look like, really, around the world. And it's kind of showing us that the current aid model doesn't work, that it's sort of obsolete, and that it also ends up, you know, a lot of the money gets kind of caught up in its bureaucracy instead of actually going to the people that need it. 

Matiangai: So, Nisrin, thanks so much for that. I mean, you mentioned the vast role that Sudanese diaspora has been playing and the failures sort of the international aid apparatus generally, and so Laura, I'm wondering whether you could comment on the role that you see the U.N. having, I guess historically and currently, in terms of conflict resolution?

Laura: I will say that it is my opinion that the international community has been overwhelmingly preoccupied with conflicts in Ukraine and in Israel-Palestine, that it is not given sufficient attention to the crisis in Sudan. And I'm not sure that I have much faith in the United Nations system to solve the crisis anyway, because they weren't able to solve the problem of Darfur. They weren't able, they still have been unable to solve the problem in South Sudan. There's the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Darfur, in South Sudan, and they have not been able to solve these more fundamental, deeply rooted questions of nation-building. 

And as Nisrin suggested, more of that should happen at the grassroots level. And so, I do agree with her that the traditional or the conventional aid bureaucracy and international intervention is — it can oftentimes add more fuel to the fire, because it does rely from — it is basically centered around state apparatus. International law, as you know, is the entity, the unit of observation for the United Nations system, is the state. And we've already just talked at length about the fundamental failures of the state, historically and continuing. So, I'm not sure that I put much stock in fact-finding missions reports, et cetera et cetera — sorry to be so negative about it. But as I study more about the history of United Nations interventions and engagement with crises, historical and contemporary, in Africa, I just don't think that the solutions will be coming from that direction. 

I do have more faith in more bilateral engagement, but bilateral engagement from friendly nations that have the interests of the people at heart, and not more larger geopolitical interests of, you know, the contending party, the contending states, United States, Russia, China, but more friendly interests to the extent that that could be identified. 

Paras Shah: I also wanted to talk about another organ of the United Nations, the Security Council, and it has passed a number of resolutions with respect to Sudan, including Security Council Resolution 2750 in September, that extended sanctions against Sudan for an additional year. Will it make a difference on the ground? 

Hamid: So, you know, Sudan has been under sanctions for almost three decades under the regime of Omar al-Bashir, and that did nothing but strengthen the regime of Omar al-Bashir, actually, and allow that regime to, you know, establish relations with, you know — if the U.S. and, you know, the U.K. and the E.U. are not talking to Bashir, he’d find new allies and talk to them and establish these new links. 

So, I think in that sense, sanctions are not necessarily useful. However, I think what's useful in the current context is targeted sanctions that target specific, you know — we have seen sanctions that were targeting economic institutions of the military and of the Rapid Support Forces. Some of these sanctions were, you know, rather useless, because they were targeting institutions that had no connections outside Sudan whatsoever, particularly on the SAF side, and it served nothing but obviously send a political message. But on the RSF side, obviously, a lot of their work and economy is tied with regional and international actors. So, in that sense, these targeted sanctions towards economic and military institutions, but also individuals. 

So, for instance, sanctions from the U.S. that targeted Abdelrahim Hamdan Dagalo, the brother of Hemedti, the leader of the Rapid Support Forces, have actually, you know, made Abdelrahim engage with the U.S., and he kept on calling officials, the U.S., and trying to get his name off the list. So, it kind of forced him, or encouraged him, if you will, to engage more openly with the U.S. 

But the problem is, these sanctions were rolled out in a vacuum. There wasn't a strategy, a comprehensive process where you would see how you can use the leverage that you would get from sanctions, because sanctions in themselves are not necessarily as useful, but they obviously generate some leverage that you could use into a political process, into a peace process, to end the war and so on. So having sanctions just for the sake of having sanctions, and to say that states or institutions are doing what they're supposed to do and so on, is useless. It has to be part of a comprehensive strategy so that whatever leverage comes from sanctions can be used meaningfully and constructively to end the war and bring peace. Otherwise, it's not really helpful.

Matiangai: Thanks. I actually just wanted to follow up with you, Hamid, if I could. Can you talk a little bit about whether there are states that are sort of making the situation worse on the ground in the conflict, and if you could just expand? 

Hamid: Yes, there are definitely many states that are making the, you know, situation worse on the ground. But obviously, you know, the United Arab Emirates, you know, wins the medal for that, and being the most destructive on the ground by supporting Rapid Support Forces.

Obviously, like, you know, as Nisrin mentioned earlier, the element of a proxy war, or the dimension of a proxy war in Sudan, is quite compelling, but it must be understood as, you know, one of the narratives and one of the things that are happening in Sudan. There is a dimension that is definitely of a proxy war, but there are so many other internal, you know, elements and dimensions to this ongoing war. Above all, it's a counterrevolutionary war, as Nisrin mentioned earlier. But obviously there's a fight over Sudan's resources, and that brings in many states who have different interests — gold, other minerals, land, agriculture, water, and so on. 

And there's so many states who are implicated in that. Like I mentioned, the Emirates is on top of the list. But there's also Egypt, Saudi, Russia, Turkey, Israel, and you know, the list goes on. And I think what all of these states have in common is obviously their fight over Sudan's resources, but is essentially that to continue having this exploitative and extractive relationship with Sudan's resources, they have no interest in seeing a democratic state in Sudan. What they would rather see is a weak but stable state that is governed by the military and that gives them the best, you know, access to Sudan's resources. And that's why there's so many states, you know, continuing to fuel the war in Sudan. We have, you know, documented flights going from Abu Dhabi to Darfur, providing support and weaponry to the Rapid Support Forces. And it's not, you know —‑ initially it was like, you know, an open secret, the U.A.E. support to Darfur, but now it's very much well documented with satellite imaging, flights tracker and so on. The U.A.E. keeps denying it and so on. But a weeks ago, there was, the head of an Emirati think tank was asked about the U.A.E. involvement in Sudan, and she very bluntly said, we have interests in Sudan, and we will do whatever it takes to protect our interests in Sudan, and that is, you know, killing the people of Sudan and extracting their resources. This is what they mean by doing whatever it takes. 

But like I said, there are also many other, you know, states implicated in that, and because of the geopolitics and because of, you know, very different interests that global powers have, like the U.S., the U.K., the E.U. and so on, no one is, you know, doing enough to exert pressure on these regional actors and states that are fueling the war in Sudan. For instance, the U.S. has outsourced most of its diplomacy and foreign intervention in the region to the U.A.E., and with the war and, you know, conflict on Gaza, happening now and so on, they can't necessarily get into a difficult place with the U.A.E. and so on. And in that sense, no one is holding the U.A.E. or other actors to account. 

Matiangai: Thanks for that. Nisrin, if I could just bring you in here just to weigh in briefly on whether there are other actors whose role may not be as visible, but should still be noted in terms of the current crisis in Sudan?

Nisrin: Yeah, sure. I mean, I think, you know, we've sort of heard of the kind of main actors. And I think one of the things that Hamid said, which I think is very important, is that we're really seeing the kind of international dimension of this counter revolutionary war through the involvement of the U.A.E. in particular, but also Egypt, you know, supporting the army, Iran now also supporting the army, et cetera. But there's really a kind of international effort to maintain kind of military rule in Sudan to protect, you know, these geopolitical interests. 

And, yeah, I think there's a couple of other, I guess, kind of regional actors. I would say that, you know, both Chad, for example, the president of Chad, has been collaborating with the U.A.E. to kind of allow weapons to flow in. There's a hospital that was built across the border inside Chad by the U.A.E. that is essentially operating as a front to, you know, for smuggling in aid. And, you know, shortly after the war began, the U.A.E. gave Chad, I think, a $1.5 billion loan to kind of, you know, essentially, yeah, cement this relationship, if you will. 

And curiously enough, even some of the other kind of East African countries like Kenya have, you know, they've welcomed Hemedti and are kind of accused of engaging in gold trade. Yeah. So, one of the things to just clarify is that the RSF derives much of its wealth from the kind of, you know, illicit gold trade, right? And so, a lot of it goes out, gets kind of washed on the markets of the U.A.E., and then goes out to other countries, like Russia. The Wagner Group has also had connections to the RSF. And then on the other side, you have the army, which, you know, before the war, controlled large sectors of Sudan's economy, like wheat, real estate, cement, et cetera, you know, through Gulf financing as well. 

And Burhan has kind of close ties to Egypt’s Sisi. Of course, Egypt has an interest in the kind of tensions around the Nile River basin and water, especially in relation to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance dam. And, you know, so you have, I think there's interest there. I mean, I studied the almost, I think, $27 billion investments of the Saudis and Emiratis in Sudanese land and infrastructure over the last maybe 20 years since South Sudan gained its independence, and sort of, there was a shift in the economy more towards minerals and agriculture. And you know, right before the war started, the Emirates bought signed a $6 billion port deal to kind of develop a port project along the Red Sea, some 200 kilometers north of the national port, which would undermine the national port and also kind of facilitate other agricultural investment projects. They were going to connect those projects through a private toll road to this port. So, I think we have to understand the investments these Gulf states have already made in Sudan as being part of the impetus for them to continue supporting the warring factions.

And then finally, I want to mention the E.U. because, you know, one thing that is perhaps lesser known is that the E.U. funded the RSF in 2014 through something called the Khartoum process, to the tune of about $200 million to essentially turn them into Europe's kind of external border guards, if you will, at the border between Libya and Sudan. Now again, they're giving North African countries money to kind of turn their, you know, Egyptian, Tunisian border guards into forces that are deporting Sudanese people. So, I mention that because I think, you know, we have to look at their role and call them out for that. There's also a Canadian PR firm based in Montreal that was representing the RSF right after the massacre happened of the sit-in in June of 2019, and they are really responsible for cementing the relationship between the RSF Russia and the U.A.E., and the U.A.E. has used its own funding to kind of get a lot of East African countries in the region on their side as well. 

So, I think that's something that we need to also be watching, is to look at how, yeah, like Hemedti and Al-Burhan are being received in those countries, who is backing who, as a result of the kind, of you, know loans and other kinds of you know financing that the U.A.E. is offering regional actors.

Paras: Hamid and Nisrin, thanks for that overview of the various international components of the conflict. Laura, I also wanted to talk about South Sudan and how it fits into this picture as well. 

Laura: Sure, just briefly, because I think there was a great overview of the international dimensions. And now that South Sudan is a fully independent country, it should also be considered in the international dimensions of the conflict.

For the most part, as far as I can tell, South Sudan has tried to maintain neutrality between the warring factions, the RSF and the SAF. If there is a bias, I would guess that the state of South Sudan government is probably leaning more favorable toward the SAF, the Sudanese government, because of the historical ties. They, you know, they were part of the government of national unity before secession, and so there are personal as well as you know, institutional ties between the Sudan Armed Forces and the government of South Sudan. 

But like I said, they've tried to maintain neutrality, and it's a very delicate — South Sudan itself is in a precarious situation because it also faces ethnic divisions, and it's a very fragile post conflict state itself. Actually, it's not even post conflict. It's in the middle of conflicts, and it relies, as I said earlier, on north Sudan, because it is a landlocked country, so it relies on north Sudan to get its oil to international markets, and to the extent that those pipelines are disturbed by the conflict, that has cut off a significant source of revenue for the government of Sudan. 

Economic instability obviously leads to political instability, and it makes the nation vulnerable to violent conflicts. And actually, speaking of that, there are aggrieved South Sudanese groups who have joined the Rapid Support Forces in fighting SAF. So, South Sudan is directly — if not directly, indirectly — involved already in the conflict in Sudan. And I worry that it could, you know, in the worst-case scenario, it could actually trigger armed conflict between Sudan and South Sudan themselves directly, because there are a number of areas on the border, including Abyei and Nuba Mountains, whose status is still up in the air. They were supposed to vote in their own quasi-referendum processes after the settlement, the peace settlement, but to date, their status has not been resolved, and it could spill over into an international conflict between South Sudan and Sudan.

Matiangai: So, a number of you mentioned in your remarks — and I don't want to lose this string — just the racial and religious othering and the way that it's informing both the current crisis, how it's informed it historically, and then also how it may be influencing, sort of, the international response and the priority — or lack of priority — given to Sudan. And so, I wanted to dedicate some time for us to just reflect on those threads and connect those threads. And so, Laura, let me turn to you to see if you would like to weigh in here.

Laura: Sure. So Nisrin and Hamid were mentioning the role of the Gulf states in Sudan, and it's actually not a new phenomenon. The Gulf states have been investing and heavily interested in Sudan for economic reasons going back probably to the 60s, but definitely from the 70s and 80s, and they are largely responsible for exporting their brand of Islamic fundamentalism to the Sudan. They cultivated the Islamist movements in North Sudan, the governmental Islamist movements. 

The racial dimension and the religious dimension have always been at the core of these conflicts in the Sudan, not just South Sudan, but also Sudan because, you know, there's a wealth — there are over, I believe there are 500 ethnic groups in the Sudan alone. And obviously not every ethnic group is Arab. And there is a, you know, a yearning for people to practice their own cultures. Most of North Sudan, I believe, is Muslim, so I don't think the religious element is as strong now as it was in between North and South. However, there's still a conflict under the surface, I believe, in North Sudan about the role of religion in the state, and, you know, the religious tolerance and acceptance of different brands of Islam. 

The RSF, the Rapid Support Forces, as I noted earlier, are largely recruited. They were created out of the militias. They are permutation of the militias that were created in the 80s to fight in the south and then carried over by Bashir. And now they've permutated into the — they were the Janjaweed, and now they are the Rapid Support Forces. They're recruited largely from Darfur and beyond Darfur, the Sahel region. 

There is brewing underneath those conflicts as well conflict for the identity of the Sahel region. And so, ethnicity does play a role, although some experts will deny the role of ethnicity and basically talk the conflict in Sudan up to a mere power struggle between these two competing factions. But if you look at the populations who have been disproportionately affected by this conflict in Sudan, it is actually the marginalized that are disproportionately affected — the Africans, the indigenous African groups in Darfur and in Kordofan, they have been disproportionately impacted. And I have heard some video testimony of victims in Darfur that specifically attest to the fact that they were singled out by RSF or even SAF for their ethnicity. They were singled out for violence because of their racial identities.

Nisrin: Yeah, I just, I think I wanted to just add to that, that I think it's important to not, kind of, I don't want listeners to come away thinking that we can pin the kind of violence that we're seeing right now that is a continuation of violence that precedes, preceded this particular war, entirely on, kind of, state elites. I think, you know, it's, yeah, I think it's just important to remember that the kind of project that we're talking about, this kind of ethnonationalists, these processes of kind of forced Arabization and forced Islamization, which, as Laura mentioned, the majority of people in north Sudan, or in Sudan now, are Muslim, but the brand of kind of Islamism, if you will, and the kind of the way it has, you know, is being used by the state — it has been quite violent, even in relation to Muslim communities.

 And so, I want to make sure that listeners know that this required, this whole project required buy-in from ordinary people as well, who kind of oiled the racist propaganda machine that legitimized and facilitated these processes. And so, you know, thousands of people, ordinary people, were absorbed into the security state as the regime's foot soldiers, Darfurians getting recruited as frontline soldiers to fight in the war against South Sudanese resistance fighters through the Popular Defense Forces, which is one of the primary instruments of the Islamist kind of political and popular mobilization, and also, kind of, dispossessed farmers and herders in central Sudan getting absorbed into the lower ranks of something called the NIS, which was the National Intelligence and Security Services. And they were known for kind of raids and violent crackdowns on protesters and dissidents. And these are just, I think, two examples of how ordinary Sudanese people themselves, neglected often and marginalized by the state, became kind of agents of its repressive counterinsurgency. So, I just wanted to kind of mention that. I think that's an important dimension as well — that we can't just pin this on the state.

Paras: Yeah. Thanks very much for that. And we're running short on time, but I did want to focus on looking forward and ahead. So, if each of you could comment on maybe the one or two trends that you're looking for or tracking as we look ahead? Hamid, let's start with you.

Hamid: Sure. So, one thing to keep an eye on as we go ahead. I think there have been, although it has been, like the international response to Sudan's war, recent war has been rather, you know, lackluster, there have been some initiatives to end the war between Jeddah, Geneva, Addis, Nairobi, different capitals around the world. 

But I think what is, what is problematic, is that, you know, the whole design and the approach to traditional peacemaking, where you bring the warring factions to agree on a peace deal, and then you think that is that, is rather problematic. But I think in this current Sudanese situation in particular, the conditions and the incentives to end the war on the ground are not there. So, chasing a ceasefire agreement is not going to end the fighting. It’s not going to deliver peace in any way. 

And as such, there is a pressing priority to explore civilian protection options, which the international community has been avoiding because it's expensive, essentially. And I think that's really problematic, and we need to speak about that more, and to think about the different civilian protection options that we have because, yeah, a ceasefire agreement is not achievable. It's not going to stop the killing on the ground, and it's not going to stop people from dying at the rate they’re dying at the moment. 

The other thing is that, you know the situation where international engagement, particularly on, you know, governments and states and multilateral institutions side, with crises in Sudan — and the way it is, you know, this problematic type of engagement, is not a new, also, phenomenon. It's a repetition of what has been happening at least in the very recent history after the revolution where, you know, as Nisrin mentioned earlier, they don't listen to the people on the ground who've been saying, don't trust the military. We don't want negotiations or partnership with military leaders and so on. And such things, you know, there are so many examples of where grassroots groups, civilian groups, have been asking for particular things, and the international community goes on and does the complete opposite, and then, you know, we end up in such similar situations. So, I think as we move forward, if we are really — if the international community, states, multilateral institutions — are really serious about pursuing an end to Sudan's war, they need to start listening to the people and to, you know, get solutions from the people and not repeat past mistakes.

Paras: Thanks. And Laura, do you have any thoughts on looking forward?

Laura: I'm interested in several things, but I guess two that stand out to me are, one is the role of South Sudan possibly broke — I mean, it would be the irony of all ironies, but if Sudan could play a larger role in bringing peace to Sudan, because we did fail, the two nations did fail in building a new Sudan. But this could be sort of a part two of that story, in a way, to the extent that South Sudan can help broker peace in Sudan. Because, I mean, arguably, of all the international players, South Sudanese are the most intimately familiar with the Sudan, having been part of the same nation, and many South Sudanese did live in Sudan during the war. They repatriated. Many repatriated after the peace agreement and secession. But there is an intimate familiarity and perhaps an understanding of the shared — the commonalities and the shared challenges of nation building. And of course, it could also maybe it could go the other way too, that, you know, that Sudanese can help Sudan broker peace. When I say that, I mean people to people at the grassroots level, because obviously the governments themselves are quite compromised. So, that's one thing that I think would be interesting.

And the second one would be — there are many more, including humanitarian concerns, but limited of time — the second one would be, I'm worried, and I think it should be watched closely. This goes to earlier question on the potential fragmentation, further fragmentation of the Sudan, because the bottom line is that it was the boundaries, like all of Africa — African nations were created by the colonial powers, and they are arbitrary, and they have put together people who historically did not necessarily live together in political formations and states, in particular, Darfur. 

Darfur was an independent sultanate for hundreds of years, until the early 20th century, actually. And I think there's always pressure brewing for Darfur, maybe that it might branch into a different state. In fact, the RSF, on my understanding, the RSF controls all of Darfur, except for the capital. And then further fragmentation can happen possibly in Kordofan, with the Nuba Mountains and other so-called peripheral areas of the Sudan. So, I think that's something to be watched too, the possible further fragmentation of the Sudan.

Paras: Thanks for that. And Nisrin? 

Nisrin: Yeah, I think maybe to end on a sort of more hopeful note than I've been able to convey so far. I think one of the things — certainly the mutual aid networks that we've been in touch with on the grounds have shown us is that people in Sudan are perfectly capable of running a country without a state on some level, right, like there are, you know, before the war, there were about 8,000 resistance committees across the country, not only in cities, but also in kind of more rural towns and who were organizing at the neighborhood level, taking care of people. 

And while they shouldn't have to do that, I do think it shows us something about the kind of violence of the post-colonial Sudanese state, and how it really needs to be dismantled. I think the revolution was starting to do that. And I think on the flip side, also to me, I don't think Sudan needs saving. I think we need the sort of negative external forms of intervention to stop, right? If the UAE were to stop arming the RSF tomorrow, things on the ground would look very different. And you know, if they would stop kind of exploiting our gold in exchange for weapons, and if the international community would leverage some of its power, you know, to perhaps stop arms sales to the UAE until they do that, right? I think that's maybe what would get us a little bit closer towards a resolution here. And they're not doing that. 

And so for me, I think I would eventually like to see sort of hands off Sudan. As Laura mentioned, the Gulf states have been involved in meddling in Sudanese politics since the 70s or even before, and we've always been sort of like the solution to their oil crises and whatever else they're dealing with right now that they're sort of looking more towards a post-oil economy. Sudan has become one of the ways that they're thinking of kind of, you know, they're using Sudan to rebrand themselves in that sense, right? And so, I think I want hands off Sudan, essentially, and I want us to put the power in the hands of the people and to let them, using their blueprints, really determine the future of Sudan. 

And one thing that's kind of, just as an example, curious to me is there is a U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan who apparently went to Port Sudan, to the airpor.t and never left the airport, right, met with military elites in at the airport. And my question is, why even have a special envoy if you're not able to actually go and talk to ordinary people? This is a war against civilians, and you should talk to the civilians on the ground and ask them what the solutions are. And that's not being done, right? We're continuing to sort of reproduce elite answers to questions that need to be answered by ordinary people on the ground who are carrying the burden of the relief effort right now.

Matiangai: I just wanted to thank you all for sharing your expertise with us today, and to help us and our audience to continue to keep eyes on Sudan. There are so many different crises that seem to be capturing the political attention and imagination of the world right now, and it's important for us to continue to surface the both the history of Sudan as well as the nature of the different dimensions of the current crises, and to thinking about what solidarity means for supporting people on the ground in this time. So, thank you for your time and your talents. It means more than you know.

Paras: Yeah, thank you so much to each of you, and we'll be tracking all these different dimensions of the conflict at Just Security. Thanks again.

Nisrin: Thank you for having us.

Hamid: Thank you.

Laura: Thank you, everyone.

Paras: This episode was co-hosted and produced by me, Paras Shah, and Matiangai Sirleaf with help from Clara Apt.

Special thanks to Laura Beny, Nisrin Elamin, and Hamid Khalafallah. You can read all of Just Security’s coverage of the conflict in Sudan on our website.

If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.