Source: The Conversation – France – By Robert Kluijver, Visiting researcher at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science, Leiden University
In 2019, a popular uprising in Sudan ended 30 years of Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist military dictatorship. Protesting masses brought down the regime and imposed a return to civilian rule. While a political settlement was being negotiated at the national level, local communities experimented with self-governance. But the armed forces seized power again, fell out among themselves, and plunged the country into war – producing one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent years.
What has become of the revolutionary impulse amid all this mayhem? What are the prospects for a return to civilian rule?
Despite the ongoing fighting, Sudanese civilians are starting to return home, pushed by dire conditions inside Sudanese displacement camps or driven back by hostility in neighbouring countries. Egyptian authorities have been expelling Sudanese refugees with or without papers.
Entrepreneur and women’s empowerment activist Randa Hamid describes a typical returnee’s experience: arriving at Port Sudan, the country’s only operational international airport, driving to a largely empty Khartoum, reduced to rubble and stripped of infrastructure, finding home and workplace thoroughly looted, and encountering local officials more interested in self-enrichment than in reconstruction. Sad, but safer than it has been the past years.
Since the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) reconquered Khartoum in March 2025, a degree of stability has returned to parts of the country. The SAF now controls central, northern and eastern Sudan while the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) hold the west; the south remains contested.
The SAF’s main political ally is the Muslim Brotherhood, whose networks provide fighting forces and governance experience to the military. Civilian positions are filled by old-regime figures: the corrupt oligarchy that provoked the revolution is reclaiming power uncontested.
Anniversary celebrations of the uprising last December were followed by the arrest of their organisers – while pro-democracy activists are hunted down by the SAF.
Current prospects for peace are bleak. The SAF is seeking total victory over the RSF rather than a negotiated settlement, presaging many more months or years of conflict. Any eventual deal between them would probably amount to Sudan’s division. Given the fragmented nature of both forces and ongoing contests over areas such as South Kordofan and Blue Nile, even that would be unstable.
From resistance to emergency response
The Sudanese resistance committees (RCs) that drove the revolution had formed as neighbourhood solidarity groups in the years before it.
IMF-mandated neoliberal policies under Omar al-Bashir had withdrawn the state from its social functions, forcing communities to rely on one another. Alongside trade unions and professional organisations, the RCs mobilised mass sit-ins that brought the regime down.
Crucially, they declined to join the transitional civilian-military coalition – the Forces for Freedom and Change – that governed briefly under former UN official Abdullah Hamdok. Their wariness of co-optation proved well founded when the military staged a coup in October 2021.
The committees instead maintained their horizontal, participatory approach, established a national charter and became incubators of cultural creativity, youth entrepreneurship and public life. With hindsight, the Sudanese revolution was an early instance of the Gen Z mobilisation now visible globally. It was remarkable for the full participation of women and the absence of the racism historically embedded in Sudanese public life.
When fighting erupted between the SAF and RSF in Khartoum in April 2023 and spread rapidly, the resistance committees became targets of both factions. Their members fled abroad if they could, to continue their civilian advocacy. Those who remained devoted themselves to setting up Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) – virtual spaces, typically messaging groups, through which communities share information, needs and resources.
Jasour Abu Algasim was involved in the revolutionary movement from its earliest days and helped establish an ERR in Khartoum. He noted that state collapse allowed resistance committees to play a stronger public role. When war came, they pivoted from society building to survival.
Mohamed Younis, Director in Sudan of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, points out that solidarity initiatives unconnected to any political agenda – communal kitchens, volunteer brigades repairing infrastructure, community evacuations – emerged in nearly every affected community.
While international agencies struggled with security and logistical obstacles, local solidarity groups became the primary collective survival mechanism. Attention from abroad, however, was focused on the ERRs, which were twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The aid dilemma
Donors frustrated by the difficulty of reaching those most in need have begun insisting that NGOs channel funds through the response rooms, viewing them as the most authentically democratic forces available. The logic is appealing, but Younis identifies the following unintended consequences.
Donor accountability requirements – detailed documentation of recipients, bio-data, dedicated administrative capacity – consume the very resources ERRs need for direct assistance. Both volunteers and communities face danger if such records fall into hostile hands. The ERR’s role shifts from autonomous community actor to service provider for foreign donors, typically via chains of international and local NGOs that each add their own requirements and consume a share of the budget.
This leaves no room for local strategic input. Communities are reduced to “beneficiaries” of programmes designed elsewhere. The vertical control mechanisms that donors and NGO partners impose skew the horizontal decision-making that characterises self-governing bodies. Internal accountability to volunteers and community members is replaced by external accountability to funders. Finally, this chain of command causes the response rooms to be perceived – by combatant factions and potentially by local populations – as instruments of foreign political agendas.
The result, notes Younis, is a perverse taxonomy of “good” and “bad” ERRs, distinguished not by service to communities but by compliance with donor requirements. Meanwhile the vast landscape of grassroots solidarity activity outside the ERR label goes unrecognised. “Decolonisation of aid” has therefore become a priority for the Sudanese civilian sector. Yet the trend toward increasing donor control over shrinking aid flows is likely to intensify rather than abate.
External factors
Sudan’s revolution alarmed the region’s autocracies much as the Arab Spring had eight years earlier. Containing democratic contagion remains a priority for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as more distant regional powers. They also support strongman rule to facilitate the control over Sudan’s mineral wealth – particularly gold – and its rich agricultural lands.
Western support for democratisation meanwhile has grown tepid. Multilateral bodies such as the African Union, the UN and the EU, unable to reach civilian forces inside Sudan, rely on exiled politicians and civil society leaders. The current coalition of civilian forces in exile, Sumoud (“steadfastness”), follows its predecessor Tagadum, which collapsed over the question of a government-in-exile.
Sarra Majdoub, a member of the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan, has witnessed successive civilian peace initiatives. She noted that efforts by exiled civil society leaders to reconnect with civilians inside the country are blocked by hostile authorities, unreliable communications, the dispersal of the population and material hardship.
Diasporic communities, by contrast, are readily mobilised online and end up occupying the entire bandwidth of “Sudanese civil society.” The question of how representative they are, or whether they can influence events on the ground, remains unresolved.
Civilian rule versus vertical governance
Sudan’s future will be determined by the clash between two colossal forces. On one hand, the military-landowning bloc, backed by regional powers and holding a monopoly on violence. It has ruled the country with few interruptions since independence in 1956. On the other, the mostly young Sudanese masses who tasted the promise that the revolution offered before the country was plunged back into war.
Hadia Hasaballah, a university professor in Omdurman who participated in the first wave of the uprising, now heads the women’s section of Sumoud. Rather than relying on existing political formations, she calls for the recognition of the youth-led mass movement in Sudan that embodies the values of the revolution: freedom, peace and justice. She is adamant that the regression to Islamist rule visible under the SAF – two women were sentenced to death by stoning in February 2026 – is no longer acceptable to Sudanese women, youth and minorities. They experienced the freedoms of the revolutionary period and will not simply relinquish them.
The Sudanese crisis reflects a wider tension in democratic politics between representational and participatory models. The resistance committees and emergency response rooms embody an emergent participatory politics being actively suppressed by actors with interests in vertical control.
Yet the Sudanese activists and analysts, on whose expertise this article draws, agree on one thing: the groundswell of young people of all backgrounds, united around freedom, peace and justice, constitutes a remarkable and durable foundation for genuine civilian rule. How they can wrest control from the military is, for now, nearly inconceivable – but eventually, they will.
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Robert Kluijver ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
– ref. The Sudanese revolution seven years on: undone but not defeated – https://theconversation.com/the-sudanese-revolution-seven-years-on-undone-but-not-defeated-278245
