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Blurbs
“The civil war in Sudan that has claimed the lives of thousands and has displaced millions reveals a story of capitalist accumulation, dispossession, imperialism, class struggle and broader regional dynamics. Dominant accounts often posit binary readings and lay blame between warring factions. Mohamed Khougali’s critical intervention forces the reader to look beyond these reductive approaches and offers an analysis that includes political-economy, history and psychoanalysis. Offering a dialectical account of Sudan, Khougali connects the current juncture and its attendant crises to a broader totality. The result is a rare work that is at once theoretically rigorous and politically urgent. At a moment of profound upheaval, this book stands as an important intervention in the ongoing struggle for liberation in Sudan and beyond.”
-Momodou Taal, editor, Vox Ummah.
Mohamed Khougali has offered us a rare and important gift by writing this book at a time when reductive binaries and ahistorical frameworks dominate the ways Sudan is portrayed and understood. It is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the current counterrevolutionary war from a historically situated, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist perspective. Through its careful examination of Sudan’s past, the book serves as an antidote to the distorted and revisionist histories that have been weaponized by Sudanese elites and their international partners to facilitate the continued exploitation of the country’s vast natural resources, labor, (including military labor), and strategic geopolitical position.
The book’s unique structure allows Khougali to cover an impressive breadth of themes within just 137 pages, without sacrificing nuance or historical depth. The scope of the analysis makes it difficult to distill the book’s contributions into a single argument or set of themes. Rather than attempting such a reduction, I offer a brief summary of its major sections and arguments:
In Part I, Khougali traces the history of the Sudanese left and its place in Sudanese politics, without romanticizing it. Part II, draws on psychoanalytic theory and case studies to contextualize the 2018-19 phase of the revolution while analysing some of the class contradictions that emerged among those who participated. In Part III, Khougali situates Sudan within a broader racial capitalist framework to explain the emergence of the Janjaweed/RSF. Writing against analyses that reduce Sudan’s conflicts to tribal warfare and religious sectarianism, he argues that “financialization policies transformed the state into a catalyst for new class formations by delegating monies to an emerging capitalist class and further dispossessing workers, in a new racial regime” (103). This is an important intervention that recenters Sudan’s capitalist class as the main actor in shaping the conditions and contradictions underlying the current struggle for Sudan. Another critical intervention is Khougali's focus on Darfur and the history of western Sudan as foundational to our understanding of the current moment, and as necessary to confronting the ways Khartoum has been centered and reproduced at the expense of the rest of the country. Together, these interventions offer a powerful historical, psychoanalytic, and political-economic framework for understanding contemporary Sudan and for imagining a future driven by popular aspirations and desires rather than elite interests.
- Nisrin Elamin, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, African Studies Program, University of Toronto.