“This war is not a civil war, it’s a counter-revolutionary war against civilians. It’s a war of military elites, the folks who grabbed power in a coup in 2021, against the entire civilian population of Sudan of 48 million.” – Nisrin Elamin

Weaving our Worlds has monthly study in struggle conversations and this month we focused on Sudan. We recently co-hosted an event with the Sudan Solidarity Collective and the speakers broke down for us what the world is missing about Sudan’s struggle, the long arc of imperialism and colonialism in Sudan, and how we can act in solidarity with the ongoing Sudanese revolution.

“The current war is a counterrevolutionary political and class struggle for authority and resources driven by the interests of global capital. These forces don’t mind replacing a totalitarian system, already rejected by the people, with a fake civil and democratic government adopting a neoliberal system controlled by elites, who will continue to rob and exploit Sudan’s human and natural resources. Land is at the center of this struggle.” – Abdelraouf Omer

Sudanese people are enduring – and resisting – the world’s largest displacement crisis and a man-made famine created by global military elites and this counter-revolutionary war.

“The revolution is a people’s revolution, and power is the power of a people… and the military to the barracks and the Janjaweed is to be dissolved.” – Sudan Resistance Committees, The Political Vision to End the War

Our list of 20 resources highlight the the historical and political context in Sudan and the resistance efforts on the ground.

  1. We ignore Sudan at our peril by Nesrine Malik, Guardian, May 2025

“The RSF originated in the west of the country, among the formalised remnants of Arab militia which in the early nineties, in partnership with the government, brutally suppressed rebellion by marginalised African tribes. The group is now repeating the ethnic warfare that the international criminal court determined constituted genocide at the time: targeting victims based on their ethnic profile, killing thousands from non-Arab communities, burning their infrastructure, and pushing hundreds of thousands of survivors into Chad in order to claim their land and prevent their return.” – Nesrine Malik

  1. Podcast: Breaking Down Sudan’s Struggle: What the World Is Missing, Movement Memos, Interview with Nisrin Elamin and Yusra Khogali, September 2024.

“This war 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 dependent on the extraction of cash crops like cotton and a political system 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 at the center who helped sustain this extractive export oriented economy.” – Nisrin Elamin

“An example of the counter-revolutionary moves that were made by civilian elites was them signing the Abraham Accords during the transition, which is a normalization with Israel agreement, which was signed by Sudan in exchange for being dropped from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and the promise of over $1 billion in annual financing from the World Bank amidst massive opposition from the streets. Essentially, giving into pressure from the U.S. instead of heeding the demands of the revolutionaries on the streets…And this lack of accountability and Euro-American and Gulf diplomacy as a tool of empire, prioritizing stability over revolutionary demands, in part to protect their own interests, their own economic and political interests, is partly what paved the way for this war.” – Nisrin Elamin

“Strategies of surviving militarized conflict, natural and climate disasters and widespread diseases that are coming out of this war can also help our organizing strategies to become more stronger, as well as drawing the links between how neocolonialism, racial capitalism, the military-industrial complex, extractivist forces and economies and the NGO-ization of resistance is being facilitated across different geographies.” – Yusra Khogali

“The resistance committees are grassroots civil society actors that are composed of neighborhood-wide organizing collectives that are being led by youth, women, and working-class people who have been resisting military rule in Sudan for decades. The iterations of the resistance committees that we see today began crystallizing in 2012, but have an extended history that dates back to the ’90s, and they have been the frontline resistance responding to the humanitarian crises in Sudan caused by IMF austerity measures, and they’ve been providing relief from natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic before the war broke out.” – Yusra Khogali

  1. Interview with Abdelraouf Omer: In Sudan, the People’s Revolution Versus the Elite’s Counterrevolution, Hammer and Hope, Summer 2024

“The December Revolution emerged in response to the accumulated impact of 30 years of the Salvation regime’s policies and arguably the decades of capitalist extractive policies that preceded it. Some of these policies, driven and recommended by the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, focused on liberalizing the economy and privatizing the public sector...The state armed militias to suppress different forms of popular and armed resistance. In Darfur, this led to what is now known as a genocide against non-Arab communities.” – Abdelraouf Omer

“The current war is a counterrevolutionary political and class struggle for authority and resources driven by the interests of global capital. These forces don’t mind replacing a totalitarian system, already rejected by the people, with a fake civil and democratic government adopting a neoliberal system controlled by elites, who will continue to rob and exploit Sudan’s human and natural resources. Land is at the center of this struggle. By land I mean soil but also water, livestock, forests, minerals, oil, and other resources that local, regional, and international elites have sought to control and exploit since ancient times.” – Abdelraouf Omer

[ Recommended related reading on land grabs in Sudan: Land and power grabs in Sudan ]

  1. It’s an open secret: the UAE is fuelling Sudan’s war—and there’ll be no peace until we call it out, Husam Mahjoub in Guardian, May 2024

“The United Arab Emirates is the foreign player most invested in the war. In fact, without its direct and all-around support, the RSF would not have been able to wage war to the same extent. Sudan is key to the UAE’s strategy in Africa and the Middle East. It is the primary importer of Sudan’s gold and has multibillion-dollar plans to develop ports along Sudan’s Red Sea coast.” – Husam Mahjoub

[ Recommended related reading on the UAE : The emerging sub-imperial role of the UAE in Africa ]

  1. Dispelling the “forgotten war” myth by Sudan Solidarity Collective, Briarpatch, October 2024

“The Canadian government has a long history of allowing Canadian companies to profit from and fuel the conflict in Sudan. For example, in 2019, Canadian lobby firm Dickens & Madson Inc. signed a US$6-million deal with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group at war with Sudan’s army.. In 2012, Canadian-owned firm Streit Security Vehicles was found to have sent 30 armoured vehicles to Sudan, breaching the UN arms embargo.. Another example is Lundin Oil (under the Lundin group), an oil and mining company that has been charged with aiding and abetting war crimes between 1999 and 2003… The RSF is also being armed by Israel, one of Canada’s closest allies.” – Sudan Solidarity Collective

  1. Interview with Tahani Ajak, Abdulrahman Ali, and Ra-ad Sahaba: The Ongoing Fight for Freedom, Peace, and Justice in Sudan, Hammer and Hope, Fall 2024

“When the revolution came in 2018, it embodied hope for me and for all Sudanese. It was preceded by student struggles when I was at university, struggles of resistance to military rule. The fight has always been about standing together in the face of injustice, so that we can build a new Sudan that accommodates everyone and establish a civil state in which the values ​​of freedom, peace, justice, and equality are achieved across the society. The December Revolution took place in order to rebuild the Sudanese state along different lines.The war that began on April 15, 2023, is a real threat to that project and represents a departure from the path of the revolution and its achievements.” – Tahani Ajak

“I think it’s important to say that those who believe in freedom as a right for every human being do not stop extending that right within their own communities, especially among vulnerable groups, such as refugees who need support and assistance. South Sudanese refugees are the biggest refugee group in Sudan. Refugees in Sudan live in almost catastrophic humanitarian conditions and are exposed to many rights violations, especially the youth, who are now subject to a ban on freedom of movement to and from the camps.” – Tahani Ajak

“Living most of my life under a totalitarian regime, I participated in the 2013 uprising. I was detained for about two months, and the experience sparked my interest in organizing. Whispers about the importance of neighborhood resistance committees resonated with me. I began participating in mutual aid and labor organizing activities within my neighborhood and the Bahri industrial zone. The 2018 revolution further solidified my commitment, when the youths chanted, “The revolution is a union and a neighborhood committee!” I became involved with the resistance committees of Shambat Al-Aradi, fighting against members of the Salvation regime. The Bahri industrial zone committees are built around advocating for the workers and businesses burdened by high taxes. By siding with the workers against the administrative unit, the committees gained the trust of the community.” – Abdulrahman Ali

“In terms of the resistance committees, the name might be somewhat recent, but it was not new to the Sudanese people to form such bodies to confront and challenge corrupt regimes. The Sudanese people have long created formations to organize and coordinate, including the Anti-Colonial Front, the National Liberation Movements, the Anti-May Regime Front, which brought down the military regime in 1985, and other revolutionary organizations throughout the history of the Sudanese state.” – Ra-ad Sahaba

“A resistance committee is a horizontally structured body with a fraternal and revolutionary nature, characterized by democracy and grassroots revolutionary discourse. It is distinguished by the spirit of collective work, with collective leadership. It is far from any political affiliation, though members may take part in political parties. Being politically committed to the pro-people stance is one of the conditions for maintaining membership. Anyone who deviates or retreats from the committee’s people-centered, anticolonial political stance, especially the nonviolent approach to resistance, is expelled. Each state has a coordinating body for all the resistance committees within it, and these coordinating bodies communicate across states.” – Ra-ad Sahaba

  1. Grassroots Aid Networks Are a Lifeline Amid Sudan’s Humanitarian Catastrophe by Hamid Khalafallah, Dawn, May 2024

“Like the local “resistance committees” that led the protests against Omar al-Bashir’s regime in 2019 and continued to organize against military rule before the war erupted, grassroots mutual aid groups have helped their communities get the assistance desperately needed. The main initiative on the ground is the “emergency response rooms,” or ERRs, often youth-led groups that emerged out of the resistance committees. They are informal networks of local actors working to help their communities survive, building on a long tradition of mutual aid in Sudan. They have developed adaptive approaches to overcome hurdles in the most heroic ways, delivering food and water, keeping hospitals running and sheltering displaced people.” – Hamid Khalafallah

  1. A mutual aid volunteer reflects on a year of war in Sudan by Hajooj Kuka, The New Humanitarian, April 2024

“The ERRs have been built with the same spirit and grassroots organising that toppled the regime of Omar al-Bashir, who ran one of the most notorious dictatorships in the world, holding onto power in Sudan for 30 years. ERRs work based on the concepts of the solidarity economy, on local parliaments, and on four pillars of good governance: accountability, transparency, participation, and equality. The ERR in Khartoum State – one of 18 states in Sudan and home to the capital – now runs 335 communal kitchens, over 40 health clinics, over 75 women cooperatives, and is looking into running alternative education in children centres.” – Hajooj Kuka

  1. We survive together’: The communal kitchens fighting famine in Khartoum by Rawh Nasir, The New Humanitarian, June 2024

“Mutual aid groups established themselves across Sudan after the war erupted. They drew members from a vibrant pro-democracy movement, and brought ideas rooted in a rich heritage of social solidarity, best represented in the tradition of nafeer (“a call to mobilise”). The Greater Khartoum kitchens follow two different models. Under the takaya system, religious and community leaders feed people on the streets, in houses, or under trees; but there are also more structured kitchens run in defined spaces by the emergency response rooms.” – Rawh Nasir

  1. “Strength in solidarity”: How mutual aid is helping women survive Sudan’s war by Malaz Emad, The New Humanitarian, January 2025

“The women’s groups are known as women’s response rooms, and form a key part of the broader neighbourhood-based and youth-driven solidarity networks called emergency response rooms… However, the volunteers said they face a dizzying number of challenges, from sexual violence perpetrated against them by RSF soldiers, to army-aligned authorities restricting their access to displacement camps where women are often most in need.” – Malaz Emad

  1. Bodies into Battlefields: Gender-Based Violence in Sudan by Nahid Widaatalla, Think Global Health, March 2024

“Amid Sudan’s deadly war, women face a triple threat of death, displacement, and gender-based assault. Nearly one year into its deadly war, Sudan faces the world’s highest rate of internal displacement, with more than 10 million people driven from their homes. Compounding the catastrophe is the terror of violence targeted at women, with estimates that 6.7 million Sudanese people, mostly women, are at risk of gender-based violence (GBV).The war in Sudan has transformed women’s bodies into battlefields, with GBV proving to be one of the most traumatizing war weapons used. For survivors, the scars of violence stay, and feelings of dehumanization and trauma can take a lifetime to cope with.” – Nahid Widaatalla

  1. Fragmented Futures in Sudan by Ola Hassanain, Funambulist, February 2022

“Why should we, as a Black geography, focus on these spaces specifically? Because we should be rallying around a multiplicity of living, not towards the singularity imagined by the civic society composed of the “citizen” and the “civilian” that makes it so easy to scrap us off of documents.” – Ola Hassanain

  1. Roundtable: The Future of the Resistance Committees in Sudan with Abdelsalam Mindas, Muzan Alneel, and Magdi el Gizouli, Spectre Journal, April 2022

“In their initial stages of emergence, the resistance committees of Khartoum’s impoverished working-class neighborhoods that were critical in the mobilization and sustenance of popular anger against Bashir’s regime mirrored the informality of their livelihoods. The committee in this context had an open-access character akin to ad hoc neighborhood football teams, constituted at the hour of play and reconstituted anew the next day as convenience dictates.” – Magdi el Gizouli

“What is most instructive for social movements worldwide are the various structures for resistance that exist in Sudan today, particularly those of the resistance committees… In recent months, several resistance committees have led the issuance of political charters based on widespread consultation of their neighborhoods, regions, and with other revolutionary bodies in their areas. The charters not only link the question of social and economic inequity, war and political repression, and the extractive colonial state and its post-colonial iterations, but they also chart out a bottom-up process of participatory democracy that contrasts sharply with the various power-from-above models championed by the military, by civilian elites and by western powers.” – Sara Abbas and Shireen Akram-Boshar

“Since the Sudanese revolution is a revolution of national liberation and since its slogan is clear, deeply-rooted, and moves towards dismantling the inherited colonial state structure, the hijacked elites intended to reduce it to and present it externally as a movement of resistance to totalitarian power. The hijacked elites also succeeded in depriving the mass movement and its organizations of revolutionary theory, by confiscating the masses’ ability to theorize and by demonizing the theorizing process and its analytical approach. They also used other methods to separate the mass movement from its own issues, to limit its political consciousness and to confine politics to the upper echelons and to “what is possible.”” – Abdelsalam Mindas

“This bottom-up organizing suggested in the revolutionary charter is a road map to forming the new government and regime, and presents the clearest steps towards realizing the “all power and wealth to the people” slogan. The biggest threat to it is the possibility of ignoring this question for the sake of more familiar elitist models, as seen currently in attempts of the elite and regional and international powers to select and appoint a government from the elites–however this has seen little success due to the commitment of the resistance to the “3 Nos” slogan: “no negotiation, no partnership, no legitimacy.” – Muzan Alneel

  1. Sudan’s army carries out ethnic killings in Gezira state by Matt Nashed, Al Jazeera, January 2025

“Civilians and rights groups have accused the RSF of frequently carrying out extrajudicial killings and acts of sexual violence, prompting many to welcome the army as “liberators” when they entered Wad Madani. However, reports soon emerged that army units were carrying out ethnic killings across the state. The RSF has typically recruited fighters from its core tribal base in western Sudan, and the army has regularly treated civilians from these regions as RSF collaborators or sympathisers, say local monitors and rights groups. The army’s ethnic profiling has led to a new cycle of mass killing across Gezira and the expulsion of vulnerable communities from their villages.” – Mat Nashed

  1. A Timeline of Key Political Events in Post-colonial Sudan

Compiled by Sara Abbas, Rabab Alnaiem and Nisrin Elamin. This timeline dates back to 1955, when on the eve of Sudan’s independence, a mutiny by the southern Sudanese soldiers of the Equatoria Corps takes place in and around Torit, in Equatoria state, Sudan, against the British administration and the neo-colonial and repressive policies of marginalization of elites towards the South. Since then, the timeline notes a series of imperialist interventions in Sudan, including US President Clinton imposing comprehensive sanctions on Sudan in 1997 and the 2015 EU-funded Khartoum Process to arm the RSF and militarize the border region between Sudan and Libya.

Additional Resources

  1. Short video: #NoToWar: Between Life and Death
  2. Sudan Resistance Committees – The Political Vision to End the War
  3. Webinar: Nisrin Elamin, Raga Makawi, and Hamid Khalafallah at Haymarket event
  4. Podcast: What is Happening in Sudan with Aida Abbashar
  5. Video: Sudan’s Counterrevolutionary War with Dr. Nisrin Elamin

Calls to Action from Sudanese Liberation organizations