For the past few months, the news coming out of Khartoum resembles the coverage from almost 20 years ago when war first broke out in Darfur. The predominant narrative continues to portray Sudan as “a country with a long history of war” as breaking news at the top of every hour. The experts analyze the continuities of Sudan’s many overlapping cycles of conflict. Hosted by competing broadcasters they try to bring the average viewer closer to unlocking the enigma of a country that has by all accounts failed to “develop.” Never mind the accuracy.
“Didn’t ‘we’ [Britain] leave them with a viable country, functional state and infrastructure. What more do they want and when will they take responsibility for their own shortcomings?” a British journalist asks on Twitter. Another replies by taking a dig at the entire continent: “Wherever there is trouble, trust it’s in Africa.” This lack of differentiation is still uncommon, Africa’s “politique du ventre” prevails despite the changes in discourse spearheaded by intellectual movements rooted in the global South.
Since the outbreak of hostilities in April, the public debate on Sudan’s misgivings continues to develop in a relevant albeit parochial direction; “My country gave and gave that country aid, still there’s nothing to show for it” another user tweets. Indeed, both the “expert” coverage and the debate it generates through social media mirrors Macbeth’s half-truth instrument of darkness: it is neither a simple fact nor a deliberate lie.
These conflicting narratives make situating Sudan in the global imagination a difficult task to undertake. Attempting to unpack the narratives that shape how Sudanese politics are perceived, how they are constructed, and by whom is no small feat. However, it is a necessary task as Sudan’s internal political process post-2018 revolution was structured and driven in part by these external imaginations of what the Sudanese needed to transition to democracy. Despite the challenge of reconstructing Sudan’s democratization narrative, it is illuminating to try to distill these accounts by asking why some events in the Sudanese political timeline—particularly in the aftermath of Al Bashir’s fall—gained more traction while others were buried or overlooked altogether, and at what cost?
Sudan’s return to international attention in recent years begins with the 2018 revolution. The story goes as follows: protests against the worsening economic conditions generated small-scale uprisings in the country’s urban peripheries, particularly in the historic working-class cities of Damazine and Atbara. These activities quickly spread to the capital where their scale and intensity eventually brought about the downfall of Al Bashir’s long-standing Islamist regime in April 2019. Perhaps the major event in the Sudanese timeline most covered by the international media was the sit-in at the military headquarters, an act of civil disobedience that eventually led to the signing of the Constitutional Declaration in August 2019, the initial step towards inducting nonaligned civilian actors into the political arena.
The civic process was inaugurated into the global imaginary through the image of Ala Salah, a young woman wearing a white Tob (Tob is the traditional female attire in Sudan, it consists of a simple, white, body-length piece of cloth draped over clothes for modesty), leading a protest perched on top of a car. Only a month later, in September 2019, following extensive negotiations between the leadership of the revolution and the military council, a transitional civilian government was sworn in. The new government was headed by a veteran international civil servant with expansive development knowledge and international networks. A year later in October 2020, the Juba Peace Agreement was signed in South Sudan to widespread local, regional, and international acclaim. The agreement captured local aspirations by representing the fundamental popular demand in the revolutionary manifesto upon which the subsequent constitutional declaration was drafted: the desperate need to end Sudan’s long history of wars.
A year later, in the early morning of Monday, October 25, 2021, the world woke up to the news of a coup in Khartoum launched by the military sovereign council, the transitional government’s legitimate governing partner. Then, 18 months later on April 14, 2023, war broke out in Khartoum quickly spreading across the country. Coverage outside of the capital remains as limited as ever, even in the wake of atrocities committed in west Darfur, reflecting the world’s failure to engage with Sudan beyond the story of a failed political process to bring about civilian rule.
The period between 2019 and 2023 culminated in major political breakthroughs as well as setbacks for Sudan. However, it must be noted that the official narrative concealed the influence of parallel events that may have contributed to the transition prevailing. This same narrative also facilitated the rise of new elites, who in turn drove the process further off its rails.
There has been a historical tendency to separate matters of the economy from the political process in analysis and reporting on Sudan (and in Africa more generally). Successive military coups, Bashir’s synthesis of Kakistocracy with Kleptocracy, as well as the setbacks of the post-revolutionary period tended to be seen and treated as an ailment of corrupt politics, big men with guns, failed institutions, or a mixture of all of the above. Meanwhile, the debate on revenue (referring here to the public expense budget) in relation to creating a state capable of delivering a viable social contract through which ordinary Sudanese can dictate the terms of citizenship remains either overlooked or treated as separate from economic concerns. The relativity of economic matters to political choice has been deliberately overlooked by experts and elites.
The multiple overlapping spheres of influence playing out in the Sudanese political landscape were evident in the competing narratives of how to achieve a “viable” transition. The internecine politics that came to define the relations between and across members of the Sudanese political establishment in the post-coup period came to reflect these divisions. To what degree did the actions of external actors reconfigure the political process in Sudan leading to the coup and the political and economic freefall that followed?
The two most important political processes that signaled the post-Bashir era were first, the swearing-in of a civilian transitional government in October 2019, followed by the signing of the Juba Peace agreement the following year. Civilian rule and the induction of rebel groups into constitutional governance through a peace agreement were seen as a turning point in Sudan’s otherwise militarized political history. The new government headed by an economist promised to fix the economy as a means of reconstituting Sudan’s corrupt polity.
Two parallel approaches were presented as the means to achieve this goal: the first was the garden-variety austerity measure of removing subsidies on wheat and fuel and floating the currency to cut back on state spending and bring inflation under control. The second process was the attempt to streamline the military’s parallel economy within the state under the single oversight of the Ministry of Finance. Sudan’s military runs a parallel economy to the official state one, by trading in illicit activities: gold exports, proceeds from oil, and political funds from the Gulf. It also gets a huge cut from the official budget.
The latter, in particular, was considered an ongoing source of despotism. Political financing to buy support or mitigate opposition was the preferred method of consolidating power for Bashir. The deeply flawed steering of the process by the military wing of the transitional government and later the outcome of the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement encapsulates the failure of the civilian technocratic government to disband the economic and political project of the Islamist military establishment.
To facilitate Sudan’s economic revival and political reform, a donor conference was convened by “Friends of Sudan” as early as June 2020, and support for the country’s transition was pledged through the sum of USD1.8 billion, although only one-quarter of which actually materialized. About USD700 million was approved for a cash transfer program targeting Sudan’s vulnerable families most affected by the removal of subsidies. This financial support, meager as it was, was tied to a strict set of political and economic conditions. Like a knot, each stage required costly concessions to reach the subsequent one. For instance, Sudan needed to restore its relationship with the international community to access its credit market for much-needed investment for development and political stability. Access to credit required debt re-servicing, or at least relief, which US imposed sanctions made impossible to access.
The attempt to unlock these barriers began with the establishment of the United Nations Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS) in June 2020. Its declared mandate was to assist with Sudan’s political transition to democratic rule through a nexus of activities, one being “the mobilization of economic…
