Sudan’s lost revolution

Little is left in the global memory of the 2018 Sudanese revolution, which brought an end to three decades of Omar al-Bashir’s militarised Islamic regime. Instead, while its crisis is often overlooked in a world of growing war and turmoil, Sudan has again become known as one of the deadliest cases of conflict in recent history. In this depiction, a cornucopia of war and humanitarian responses are often presented without context; the tallies of the hungry and the dead laid against a political void.

There are victims and culprits, but their stories are not told as part of the history and political life of Sudan. At the centre of this history is a political economy of violence and bargaining among Sudan’s war-making elites and the Sudanese people’s struggle against this system.

Fighting over the spoils

In April 2023, Sudan’s top two generals fell out over the division of state’s spoils. Both presided over military institutions that once shared the monopoly in violence. They are now fighting each other for total control.

Previously, the Sudanese army had for decades sponsored armed groups to fight its internal rebellions – an outsourcing of violence that would eventually foster the institutionalisation of the Rapid Defence Forces (RSF), a militia-turned-paramilitary force sanctioned to quell political dissent. The 2018 revolution was in part a rejection of this ‘militia co-governance’ – the people combined protests against poverty and lack of services with demands for political change.

For at least the past decade, the RSF was a leading stakeholder in Sudan’s economic affairs – managing contentious land relations to facilitate unfettered extraction while organising and overseeing the state’s rentier and capitalist schemes. The RSF carried out the regime’s predatory goals through excessive violence where army and state bureaucracy failed, especially and infamously in Darfur. Communities’ organised attempts to protect their rights were mercilessly vanquished. Unconstitutional violence, sanctioned by the state, became the modus operandi.

Sudan’s failure to transition to a democracy after the 2018 revolution, despite external interventions and internal mobilisation, and the subsequent collapse into an all-out war, was due not only to the sinister structural political economy of violence but also how the response to it has often been de-politicised. Ousted prime minister Abdalla Hamdouk, revered by the international community as the panacea to Sudans woes, has often appeared to disconnect ‘democracy’ from ‘peace’. ‘We are after all a civilian faction, matters of armament are of no consequences to us,’ he said recently.

The war in Sudan should be understood not as a rupture that has interrupted or undone the claimed transition of the preceding four years, but a continuation of a violent policy of governance by other means.

An undemocratic transition

Following the fall of Bashir’s regime, the elite political class with both its modern and traditional forces sought out the shortest route to address the crisis of transition. In 2019 an internationally backed power-sharing agreement produced a cabal of civilians, military and armed parastatals and security actors conjoined in a governance project at odds with the social movement’s demands for democratisation. The brief transition period from when the civilians cosmetically adorned the halls of government in August 2019 until their ousting through a military coup in October 2021 featured numerous policy acts of political violence against the public in the name of ‘transition to a democracy’.

An austerity package conjoined with debt re-servicing policy of economic reform pushed an already struggling population over the poverty threshold. The promise of social welfare programmes never materialised, leaving millions in limbo. A 2020 study by the teachers’ union of Sudan’s largest civil servant sector found that a teacher’s salary covered only 13 per cent of household expenses. The civilian government’s preference for a transitional alliance in which they assumed a technocratic/ expert’s role did little to address the political question at the heart of the historical redistribution crisis. Meanwhile, the military and its clique of armed partners continued to control the bank and with it the levers of the Sudanese economy. Contrary to popular belief, the transition period featured more state repression and widespread killing of unarmed civilians protesting against worsening economic conditions.

In the meantime, between 2019 and 2023, the grassroots Sudanese revolutionary movement organising from below embarked on a four-year political project to situate and contextualise the issue of state violence as antithesis to democracy. It did so at two levels.

First, by promoting a shift from protesting to organising around socioeconomic rights and the political means to achieve them. The grassroots structures that emerged were adaptable and decentralised enough to promote countrywide participation inconceivable before. Second, after the 2021 coup, another yet marked moment of political violence made possible by the violent policies of the transitional period, the resistance committees sought to collectively theorise their political vision in a ‘People’s Power Charter’. Beyond the act of documenting Sudan’s political discourse from the view of those most affected, collective participation in its drafting as well as its theorisation of governance as a fundamentally political question meant that the movement had already warned of the prospect of war and national disintegration without radical, systemic change.

The war signals the failure of Sudan’s liberal civic project. Its chapter came to an end with an acute crisis of the state and the old regime. It is now in a new transition to communal violence. Read in the evolving context of unresolved political crises, the current violence is a continuation of the system of elite dominance by ‘any means necessary’. The revolution’s vision on the other hand, while dismissed and repressed, attempted to address the underlying cause of Sudan’s failure to democratise. Its political discourse is paramount in ending the war and laying a permanent path to peace.

This article first appeared in Issue #245 Beyond the Ballots. Subscribe today to support independent socialist media and get your copy hot off the press!