As part of our ongoing series Colonial Histories, Radha D’Souza and Husam Osman Mahjoub will join us to discuss what the war in Sudan tell us about decolonization.

Drawing on Sudan’s colonial history, the conversation will explore patterns of colonial rule across Africa, Asia, and South America and the long shadows they cast over conflicts today. Central to the discussion is the argument that the war in Sudan is shaped by a process of incomplete decolonization. The talk will examine not only how old colonizers shaped the region, but how new aspiring powers are now reshaping it — with Sudan emerging as a testing ground for the UAE’s growing sub-imperial ambitions in Africa.

Radha D’Souza is Professor of International Law, Development and Conflict Studies at the University of Westminster. A lawyer, activist and scholar, her work blends law, history, comparative philosophy, development studies and geography to examine colonial continuities and global south perspectives. She has collaborated with labour and social justice movements on the effects of international economic policy and written on anti-colonial movements, colonialism and international law. Her books include What’s Wrong With Rights? and Contextualising Interstate Disputes Over Krishna Waters. With Sunera Thobani she co-authored Decolonizing Knowledge: Looking Back, Moving Forward. She also co-founded the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes, which staged a public trial of the East India Company at the Serpentine Gallery.

Husam Mahjoub is a writer, journalist, and telecom professional whose work bridges journalism, activism, and technology. He is a co-founder of Sudan Bukra TV Channel, an independent Sudanese media platform that has become a prominent voice for social and political awareness across Sudan and the region. Alongside his professional career in the telecom and ICT industry, Mahjoub engages deeply in public discourse through writing, research, and speaking on issues of politics, human rights, and international relations. His articles and analyses are known for their clarity and rigor, bringing context and insight to complex regional and global developments. Based in Austin, Texas, Mahjoub draws on his strong academic and professional grounding, holding master’s degrees from London Business School and the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as a Bachelor of Science from UAE University, to connect the worlds of technology, media, and social change. Through his media initiatives and public engagement, Mahjoub continues to contribute to a broader understanding of the forces shaping Sudan and its place in today’s interconnected world.

Transcript & Recording

Youtube link to the stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqummXAQ_Uw

RADHA D’SOUZA: Our conversation today will be on Sudan. And I was very keen to have this conversation on Sudan because there is very little that we know about Sudan. And what the media tells you is just really not even misinformation — it is a misrepresentation of the issues, as far as I understand. Of course, Husam will say more about that. And that is why we felt… and yet it’s a very important struggle today, in today’s world, and it’s a struggle that has a long history, and yet we know so little about it. So that’s why we chose this subject for today.

I am Radha D’Souza, and I am a professor of law, development and conflict studies at the University of Westminster. I’m also an activist and a writer and a scholar from India, and I’m founder of an art project called the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes, together with my comrade and colleague, Jonas Staal. So that is about me.

And Husam is a media person, totally. He’s a journalist, he’s an activist, and he is a technology professional. He’s co-founder of Sudan Bukra TV, which is an independent Sudanese media platform. And in recent times, it has become an important voice for the struggles that are happening in that country.

Mahjoub also engages in public discourses. He writes and he researches and speaks about politics, human rights, and international relations. Now he’s based in Austin, Texas, and he has degrees from London Business School and the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as a Bachelor of Science from UAE University. So he kind of straddles three worlds — of journalism, activism, and technology.

I was introduced to Husam by my friend and comrade, Muzan al-Nil, and we lost her very suddenly and very tragically. And we want to dedicate this conversation to her memory. Husam will say a little more about her.

And with those words — our topic, the subject title for today’s talk, is “What Sudan’s War Taught Us About the Unfinished Decolonization.” So, Husam, over to you.

HUSAM MAHJOUB: Thank you very much, Radha. Assalamu alaikum, everyone — good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Thank you for the introduction, thank you to the David Graeber Institute for the invitation, and thank you for the words shared about Muzan al-Nil.

The last interaction I had with Muzan was about two weeks before her sudden illness — the illness that led to her untimely departure. She messaged me to say that the David Graeber Institute had reached out to her to deliver a lecture on Sudan as part of this series on colonial histories. She felt I would be more suitable for the task, and asked if I was willing to take her place. I accepted immediately. I never said no to anything Muzan suggested.

That interaction reveals something essential about who Muzan was. After I agreed, she told me, with her usual directness, that she had informed the organizers we had disagreed on several points — though she was confident I would do a good job. I told her I believed our disagreements were fewer than what she thought. We began to argue that point. I shared a piece I had written that I felt addressed the very question she had raised. She then cited a recent event as proof that we did not see eye to eye. I told her about something I had said privately on the same matter — something I had also written publicly. She told me she completely agreed with my private comments, and felt I should have been just as direct in public. She cared deeply about the weight of public words. What I had published was considerably less harsh than what I had shared privately.

This exchange captures her philosophy precisely. The things Muzan held dearly until the last day of her short life were clear and present. She stood firmly with the masses and the marginalized, and every action was weighed against the impact on those without privilege. Her philosophy was captured in her Facebook cover slogan: “My political stance is that people should not be killed.” Radical. That sentence — so plain, so absolute, so simple — is radical, because the entire architecture of power we will discuss today is built on precisely the opposite premise.

That clarity and sincerity made me value every interaction I had with Muzan deeply. I often shared drafts of what I considered my most important writings, and she consistently offered sharp critiques, illuminating angles I had completely missed. So many things I have written exist because of Muzan — in response to a discussion, a disagreement, a question she posed. She became one of the internal voices I consult whenever I write. When I write, I ask myself often: what would Muzan think of this?

She left us very young. She passed away on April 15th, and she would have turned forty this June. Like many great revolutionaries who passed away before reaching forty — Frantz Fanon at thirty-six, Walter Rodney at thirty-eight, Che Guevara at thirty-nine, Patrice Lumumba at thirty-five, Thomas Sankara at thirty-seven, Malcolm X at thirty-nine, Fred Hampton at twenty-one, and Ghassan Kanafani at thirty-six — Muzan left a mark that will not be forgotten. I believe she will be remembered among them.

Another such figure, executed in July 1971 at forty-three by Sudan’s then-dictator, Gaafar Nimeiri, was Abd al-Khaliq Mahjoub, the secretary-general of the Sudanese Communist Party. After his execution, Muhammad al-Faituri — one of the most significant modern poets in Sudan, Africa, and the Arab world, born in El Geneina in Western Sudan near the borders with Chad, the site of some of the most devastating war crimes committed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) at the onset of this war in 2023 — wrote a poem for Abd al-Khaliq.

Al-Faituri’s own life crosses the colonial borders we will discuss today. He was born in Sudan, educated in Egypt, held at different times Sudanese and Libyan citizenships, and spent his last years in Morocco. He himself is an argument against the fiction of those borders. The poem mirrors both Muzan’s departure and the legacy of David Graeber, who, like Muzan, passed away suddenly, and whose work continues to reach people around the world.

Here is part of the English translation of al-Faituri’s poem:

Do not dig me a grave. I shall rest in every inch of this earth. I rest like water in the body of the Nile. I rest like the sun above my country’s fields. One like me does not dwell in a grave. Why do the petty tyrants believe, as their colors drain pale, that the death of a fighter is the death of the cause? Not afraid — for my voice is a gallows for all tyrants; and not repentant — for my soul is heavy with rage. Every tyrant is an idol, a wooden puppet.

Muzan would have recognized herself in those lines, and David Graeber would have recognized the argument that the cause outlasts the person who carries it — that those who believe the death of a fighter ends the struggle have fundamentally misunderstood what a struggle is.

One of the things that defined Muzan was her conviction that all of these struggles are connected. She did not treat Sudan as a local tragedy. She saw it as a node in a global system, and she believed understanding that system was the precondition for changing it.

A few weeks ago, I was talking with a Colombian colleague about the presidential elections in Colombia. The far-right candidate — the latest Trumpian figure in Latin American politics, who was almost unknown until recently — received around forty-four percent of the vote. The left-wing candidate, backed by the current president, received forty-one percent. One thing that struck my colleague was what people carried at the rallies. At right-wing rallies: the Colombian flag alongside the flags of the United States and Israel. At left-wing rallies: the Colombian flag alongside the flag of Palestine.

I told him Colombia’s election is directly connected to the war in Sudan. He was surprised. I explained: Colombian mercenaries — retired military personnel — have been recruited and deployed to fight in Sudan alongside the RSF, committing war crimes against Sudanese civilians. They flew thousands of miles to a country most of them had never heard of, armed and paid through the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which is Israel’s closest ally in the region and the chief backer of the RSF. The current Colombian president has publicly condemned these mercenaries. He has been equally vocal in his support for the Palestinian people against the genocide in Gaza. The results of the Colombian election therefore carry direct consequences for Sudanese lives.

These connections extend further. We talked about the war the United States and Israel launched on Iran, which follows the same architecture — powerful patrons, proxy strategies, the targeting of states that refuse to submit. And then Cuba, the next on the US target list, which survived six decades of a punishing American embargo and built from that survival a remarkable public health system. During COVID-19, Cuba developed its own vaccines. One was named Abdala — with an uncommon spelling, close to the Arabic, very popular name Abdullah (Abdullah, or Abdallah), which literally means “the servant of Allah,” the servant of God.

Abdala is the title of the first poem written by José Martí — Cuba’s national poet and revolutionary hero — in 1869, before he had turned sixteen. The poem tells the story of a young Black Muslim African hero from Nubia — the land that today spans Northern Sudan and Southern Egypt — who dedicates his life to fighting invaders and dies for his homeland’s liberation. Centuries apart, across continents, the same logic: people fighting to be free of those who come to take what is theirs.

Here is part of the English translation of the poem “Abdala”:

Mother, love for the homeland is not ridiculous love for the soil, nor for the grass beneath our feet. It is the invisible hatred for those who oppress her. It is the eternal resentment towards those who attack her. To die is nothing when one dies for the homeland one adores.

Cuba named the vaccine after a Nubian hero. Sudan’s gold moves through Dubai’s markets while Sudanese children starve. Colombian soldiers fight and kill in Darfur under Emirati command. The flags at Colombian rallies trace the global fault lines. This is the system, rather than a series of coincidences — and the system has a history.

A history of extraction

Sudan is an ancient land. Different peoples have lived there for thousands of years, but the modern Sudanese state, as we know it, begins in the year 1821, when Muhammad Ali Pasha — the Ottoman ruler of Egypt — invaded and occupied Sudan, bringing together different kingdoms, independent peoples, and areas without formal state structures under a single colonial administration.

The word “Sudan” itself comes from the Arabic bilad al-sudan, meaning “land of the blacks,” used by medieval Arab geographers to describe the entire belt of territory south of the Sahara, from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans. Sudan was, in that older sense, not a country but a description — a vast and diverse human world. Colonial rule compressed it into a bordered state.

Muhammad Ali and his force came to Sudan for three reasons. They wanted gold — Sudan had long been known for it. They wanted fighters — Sudanese soldiers were considered formidable, and some fought for Muhammad Ali’s son, Muhammad Sa’id, as far away as Mexico in the eighteen-sixties. And they wanted to secure the Nile, Egypt’s water lifeline. Gold, fighters, and the Nile: these three drivers have never stopped defining Sudan’s relationship to external powers, and they define it today.

The Sudanese did not accept this quietly. Under the leadership of Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi — a religious leader who unified tribes, communities, and other religious figures — the Mahdi’s revolution began in 1881. By 1885 they had defeated the Egyptian–Turkish–Ottoman forces and killed their British commander, the governor-general, General Charles Gordon — a figure of enormous symbolic importance to Britain, who had led British imperial armies in China and had a stint in India. Gordon’s death at Khartoum became a wound that Britain resolved to avenge.

That vengeance came in 1898, when Lord Kitchener’s forces confronted the Mahdist army at the Battle of Omdurman, known in Sudan as the Battle of Karari. This clash stands as a watershed moment in the history of global colonialism, serving as the first massive showcase of modern industrial slaughter. While it was not the absolute first time the Maxim gun was fired in anger, Omdurman ranks as one of the most historically significant and devastating early demonstrations of the true automatic machine gun in military history. The battle proved, with horrific clarity, how automatic weapons could utterly decimate a courageous but technologically outmatched army, permanently reshaping the nature of modern warfare. In a matter of hours, more than twelve thousand Sudanese fighters were massacred and over thirteen thousand were injured — a staggering loss compared to fewer than fifty fatalities and under four hundred wounded among the joint Anglo-Egyptian forces.

The following year, Britain and Egypt established the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, which would govern Sudan until independence in 1956. The condominium was formally a joint sovereignty. In practice, it was British rule, and it practiced every feature of colonialism with systematic precision.

One: economies redesigned for extraction, not development. The British made cotton king. The Gezira Scheme, launched in 1925, covered millions of acres of the most fertile land between the Blue and White Niles — the largest agricultural project in the colonial world at the time. It was designed entirely to supply British textile mills in Lancashire, not to feed the Sudanese people or build a Sudanese self-sufficient economy.

The transport network told the same story as the economy, because it was built for the same purposes. The first railway lines were laid by British military forces during the conquest itself — tracks put down to move armies, not people. As colonial rule consolidated, the lines extended into Kordofan to draw out gum arabic, and toward the cotton fields of Gezira to feed the mills of Britain. Every kilometer of track ran in the same direction: from the interior toward Port Sudan on the Red Sea, from Sudan’s resources toward global markets, from what the land produced toward what the metropole required. What the network never did was connect Sudan to itself. No line ran from Khartoum or the north to the south or Darfur. The peripheries — which is to say most of Sudan — were either extraction points or they were nothing at all.

The infrastructure was not designed to carry Sudanese goods to Sudanese markets, or to allow the different regions of this vast country to know each other economically or physically. It was designed to flush raw materials outward and channel finished goods back in. Connection would have been a threat to the logic that built the system.

When independence came in 1956, Sudan inherited this structure without modification: a monocrop economy whose prices were set in London; no industrial base capable of processing what the land produced; railways that pointed toward a port rather than toward the country’s own people. The colonizers left; the architecture remained. And for the majority of the Sudanese people, the post-colonial state offered essentially the same relationship the colonial one had — extraction without investment, presence without service, and authority without accountability.

The second feature is arbitrary borders as political weapons. The borders the British drew were among the most consequential colonial fictions on the continent. They bundled together diverse regions and peoples into a single administrative unit spanning an area larger than Western Europe. Nubian communities were split between Sudan and Egypt. Beja communities were divided between Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. Communities in Darfur had deep historical, cultural, and economic ties to Chad, Libya, and the Sahel countries. And the 2011 partition that created South Sudan — the Republic of South Sudan — was presented as a correction to this colonial error. It was drawn along oil geography, not any logic of community or justice, producing two weaker, more indebted, more conflict-prone states than the one that existed before.

The third colonial feature was divide, rank, and rule. Through the native administration system, and most consequentially through the Closed Districts Ordinance, British colonization sealed off the South from the North, treating them as separate civilizational units based on a rigidly enforced perception of the South as African, Christian, and animist, and the North as Arab and Muslim. In the north, they elevated communities within the triangular region centered around Khartoum into the administrative and military classes, while classifying the communities of the south, Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, and the east as peripheral and ungovernable. This hierarchy was manufactured, encoded into institutions, and then inherited. The men who command the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) today trace their roots overwhelmingly to the same northern and central geographic regions that the British systematically trained and elevated a century ago, perpetuating a deeply entrenched regional monopoly on state power.

The fourth colonial feature is land dispossession and forced labor. The Gezira Scheme required the compulsory acquisition of land from Sudanese farmers who had cultivated it for generations. They were permitted to remain, but bound to grow cotton under terms set by the colonial administration. The Turco-Egyptian period that preceded British rule was built substantially on slave raiding from Sudan’s southern and western peripheries — a practice the British formally abolished, but whose aftershocks continued to shape labor relations and community hierarchies throughout the twentieth century. Today, land is at the center of this war. Darfur’s conflict is, in significant part, a conflict over land rights never resolved after colonial dispossession. The RSF’s military campaign has been accompanied by systematic seizure of farmland from communities that identify as non-Arab.

The fifth colonial feature is cultural suppression and the manufacture of inferiority. The British imposed Arabic and English as the only languages of administration and education, while the hundreds of indigenous languages spoken across Sudan were excluded from schools and courts. Missionary education in the South created a generation educated entirely away from Arabic and Islamic culture, deepening the North–South divide the British had engineered administratively. The Gordon Memorial College — which later became the University of Khartoum, founded in Khartoum in 1902 — was explicitly designed to produce Sudanese administrators capable of serving the condominium, not of governing themselves.

Yet Sudan’s resistance was equally profound, sustained across generations by Sufi orders that maintained spiritual and communal life alongside modern vehicles of struggle like labor unions, farmers’ movements, student groups, and political parties. This formidable capacity for mass mobilization would reappear in 1964, when a popular uprising ended the Abboud military dictatorship; and again in 1985, when another uprising toppled Nimeiri’s rule; and once more in December 2018. Ultimately, Sudan has a longer unbroken tradition of popular revolt against authoritarian rule than almost any country in the region. That tradition remains deeply rooted in communities that were never fully absorbed into the colonial or post-colonial state, preserving an enduring organizational capacity to resist.

The sixth common feature of colonization is the collaborator class and the destruction of local governance. The British worked through the major Islamic religious orders and tribal leaders, offering them administrative roles, land grants, and political recognition in exchange for cooperation. The sectarian political parties that dominated post-independence politics — the Umma Party, linked to the Mahdi family, and the Democratic Unionist Party, linked to the Khatmiyya sect — were products of this collaboration. They were the inheritors of a colonial bargain. Their recurrent failure to govern in the interest of peripheral populations, the repeated military coups that followed, and the deepening marginalization of the South, Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, and the East are all direct consequences of placing a colonial state apparatus in the hands of the class that had administered it on the colonizers’ behalf.

The seventh and last common feature of colonization is formal independence without structural transformation. Independence in 1956 transferred power to a small elite without touching the colonial administrative borders, or the military apparatus, or the export-oriented infrastructure built by the British. The underlying machinery of the state remained entirely unchanged. Instead of achieving a true national liberation, the country experienced a mere reshuffling of who sat at the top of an extractive system. The post-colonial state became a prize to be captured by those closest to the center, functioning as an engine designed to pull wealth — whether through Gezira’s cotton, or Kordofan’s gum arabic, or Darfur’s livestock — out of the peripheries, while systematically denying those regions the services, development, rights, inclusion, and representation they demanded.

This matters for understanding the war, because the war emerged from a state that was built to serve external interests, inherited by elites who reproduced that logic inward, and never transformed to meet the needs of the majority of the Sudanese people. Outside of the capital, Khartoum, and a handful of other urban centers, there were essentially no public services, no economic opportunities, and no investment in the people who live there. The peripheries — Darfur and the Nuba Mountains, the Blue Nile, the East, South Sudan — experienced the post-colonial state primarily through its coercive functions: military conscription, taxation, and repression of any demand for inclusion.

The IMF structural adjustment programs of the nineteen-eighties deepened this dependency, dismantling the limited subsidies and public services that existed in exchange for loans that financed debt service rather than development. American sanctions imposed in the nineteen-nineties isolated Sudan from global financial systems for two decades, further stunting any possibility of industrial development or economic diversification. These were policy choices made by external actors whose primary interest was not the welfare of Sudanese people, but the management of Sudan’s relationships to the global economic order.

What the war has also forced people to see clearly — in ways that decades of post-colonial politics had obscured — is the arbitrary character of the borders themselves. When Sudanese people fled to Egypt, they found that communities on the Egyptian side of the border were essentially the same as those on the Sudanese side: the same languages, the same ethnic ties, the same histories — communities that colonial cartography had divided but had never made strangers. When they fled to Chad in the West, the same thing: the communities on both sides of the Sudan–Chad border were the same communities. The same was true on the borders with Ethiopia, with Eritrea, and with South Sudan. Refugees did not cross into foreign countries in any deep human sense. They crossed into the other half of communities that colonialism had split.

The neighboring countries face the same structural problems: state institutions built by colonizers to serve extraction; elites trained to administer that extraction, who reproduced it after independence; development concentrated in capitals while peripheries were deliberately neglected. The war revealed what the post-colonial state had spent decades obscuring — that for most people outside the capitals, the state had always been a fiction of governance and a reality of coercion. The current war is a continuation of this history, not a departure from it.

The revolution and the counter-revolution

To understand the war, we have to understand the revolution that preceded it, because the war is — in one of its most essential dimensions — a war against that revolution. The December 2018 revolution began in the cities and towns of Sudan’s marginalized peripheries before reaching the capital, Khartoum. The protests were sparked by rising bread prices and became a nationwide movement led by youth, women, professional bodies, political parties, and resistance committees — neighborhood-level structures that coordinated protests, provided mutual aid, circulated information, and maintained the movement under brutal repression. Women were at the center from the beginning — not in supporting roles, but as leaders and organizers.

The revolution’s demands were summed up in its slogan: “Freedom, Peace, and Justice.” Freedom meant an end to thirty years of Islamist authoritarian rule. Peace meant an end to the wars the regime had sustained in the South, Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, the Blue Nile, and the East by starving peripheral regions of resources and responding to their demands with violence. Justice meant accountability for the regime’s crimes and plunder. These three demands were inseparable; each implied the others.

In April 2019, Omar al-Bashir fell. The military — led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — assumed power through a transitional military council. The revolutionary forces refused to accept a military transition and maintained the pressure through continued protest and a general strike.

The transitional council committed a massacre on June 3, 2019, when the RSF and other security forces attacked a sit-in outside the military headquarters in Khartoum, killing more than one hundred people, throwing bodies into the Nile, and committing acts of sexual violence against protesters. However, the international community pushed for a negotiated arrangement: a sovereignty council combining military and civilian representation, with a civilian government led by Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, mandated to govern for thirty-nine months and prepare conditions for elections.

And here is a defining story worth recounting that perfectly captures Muzan al-Nil’s legacy and that historical moment. A video of her confronting Nabil Adib — a prominent lawyer, human rights defender, and veteran opposition figure against al-Bashir’s dictatorship — went viral across the country. Adib had been appointed to chair the national committee investigating the June 3rd massacre. When Muzan encountered him in a public café, she confronted him directly. While millions watched the footage, many mainstream politicians rushed to criticize Muzan, dismissing her as an impolite young woman who lacked the manners to speak to such a respected elder statesman. Yet Muzan was simply giving voice to what the revolutionaries already knew: the investigation committee was structured to protect, rather than indict, the military leaders who had ordered the slaughter and subsequently became partners in the transitional government setup. While civilian politicians understood this reality and chose compliance, Muzan used her unique privilege — sharing a physical space with an elite establishment figure — to state clearly what the masses were denied the opportunity to say.

External support sustained the counter-revolution. The UAE and Saudi Arabia together pledged three billion dollars in immediate economic support to the transitional military council within days of Omar al-Bashir’s fall in April 2019. This was a political payment, made before any civilian government existed, to the military actors who had just seized power. The message was unambiguous: the revolution may have removed Bashir, but the counter-revolution would not allow its demands to be met.

And the international community — the Western governments, the international financial institutions, the bodies that present themselves as guarantors of democratic transitions — did not respond by supporting the civilian government’s agenda. They responded by enforcing their own. The IMF and World Bank made clear that debt relief, which Sudan desperately needed after decades of sanctions and mismanagement, would come only in exchange for structural adjustment — the same package of liberalization, subsidy removal, and public-sector contraction that the Bretton Woods institutions had been imposing on African governments since the nineteen-eighties.

The civilian government was pressured to implement policies that directly contradicted the revolution’s demands. Fuel subsidy removal hit the poorest Sudanese hardest. Currency liberalization caused immediate inflation. Simultaneously, the United States was leveraging Sudan’s crippling debt and its desperate need for global normalization to force major geopolitical concessions. As a condition for removing Sudan from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, Washington pressured the transitional government to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the 2000 terrorist bombing of the USS Cole. With this leverage in place, the US further conditioned this relief on Sudan signing the Abraham Accords to normalize relations with Israel. The civilian transitional government was effectively being forced to join a regional framework whose primary beneficiaries were Israeli strategic interests, and whose political logic aligned directly with the UAE’s regional agenda. This explicit pressure was delivered on a compressed timeline, ignoring the fact that the Sudanese people had not revolted against thirty years of dictatorship in order to have Washington dictate their foreign policy and regional alignments.

On October 25, 2021, the SAF and RSF staged a joint coup, formally ending the democratic transition. Again, the so-called international community issued statements. No meaningful consequences followed for those who had destroyed Sudan’s democratic experiment.

The outbreak of the war in April 2023 was the violent culmination of decades of authoritarian rule, militarization, uneven development, the legacy of Darfur, and the ultimate fracturing of the transition. Throughout this crisis, ruling elites consistently prioritized their own survival over structural reform — a dynamic reinforced by foreign capitals, from Western governments content with superficial stability to Gulf states pursuing regional influence and economic access. At its core, the conflict remains a struggle over who controls the state apparatus and its resources, testing whether the democratic aspirations of the Sudanese people can triumph over armed elites.

In the months leading to the war, tensions between the SAF and the RSF escalated under a political framework nominally designed to restore civilian oversight following the October 2021 coup. The immediate catalyst was a bitter dispute over the timeline and command structure for integrating the RSF militia into the regular army. What was packaged as a technical disagreement masked an existential battle for ultimate command and state authority. When the RSF struck strategic sites across Khartoum on April 15, 2023, and the army retaliated with heavy airstrikes, the conflicting narratives over who fired first mattered little against the deeper truth: a catastrophic confrontation had become inevitable by design.

The liberal peace-building model

The so-called international community has been trying the same liberal peace-building model that it has applied across Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America for decades. It centers armed actors, because armed actors control territory, and controlling territory is what the international system — built on state sovereignty — recognizes as legitimate. Civilian populations who build horizontal structures of self-governance without capturing the state apparatus are not legible to the framework. Their demands — accountability, redistribution, genuine political transformation — require dismantling the structure that the framework is designed to preserve.

What the revolutionary forces built was remarkable precisely because it operated outside that framework. The emergency response rooms organized food distribution and medical support under aerial bombardment. The resistance committees maintained political organization through the coup and through the war. Women’s groups documented atrocities and sustained communication networks across displacement. Diaspora communities in Cairo, Kampala, Nairobi, N’Djamena, Addis Ababa, and beyond organized not as nationals abroad, but as communities with organic ties to those cities — ties that in many cases predated the colonial borders themselves.

The NGO ecosystem that emerged around Sudan’s crisis did not fill the gap left by the collapsed state institutions. In a sense, it reproduced their logic. The international humanitarian infrastructure was externally funded, externally accountable, and operated according to frameworks designed in Europe and the US. It employed local staff as implementing partners rather than building or supporting institutions from the ground up. Its accountability ran upward, to donors — not downward, to communities. The same neoliberal model that shaped IMF conditionalities shaped humanitarian architecture. Both assumed that the external actor knows best. Both treated local institutions as problems to manage rather than capacities to support. And both produced arrangements that served the needs of the framework rather than the people the framework claimed to serve.

When the war came, the emergency response rooms and resistance committees that Sudanese communities had built for themselves — horizontal, locally accountable, sustained by neighborhood solidarity rather than donor cycles — did far more to sustain civilian life than the international humanitarian apparatus. They were not formally funded. They were not recognized by the international frameworks as legitimate political actors. They were simply real — built by people who understood that waiting for external rescue was not a strategy.

It must be clearly stated that the international order did not fail Sudan. It worked exactly as it was designed to work. The purpose of the liberal peace-building model is not to deliver justice to populations who have been deprived of it. It is to stabilize conditions for the continuation of existing economic arrangements; to manage conflicts in ways that do not threaten the interests of powerful patron states; and to integrate transitional governments into the international financial and political architecture on terms set by that architecture, not by the people who made the revolution.

US President Donald Trump made this logic more visible and shameless than his predecessors, but he did not invent it. October 7th, and what followed in Gaza, made it more visible still. The same Western governments that invoked international humanitarian law as a framework for managing wars were simultaneously providing weapons, political cover, and diplomatic protection to campaigns of collective punishment against civilian populations. This was the system operating as designed, applying different rules to different populations based on their relationship to global power hierarchies and to the strategic interests of the states that fund and arm the international institutions claiming to adjudicate these crises.

This is the democratic practice that David Graeber’s work illuminates — not the democracy of elections and constitutions, but the democracy of people organizing their own survival and governance from below, refusing the logic that only those who hold weapons or international recognition are entitled to a seat at the table. The resistance committees are a form of political organization that emerges when the colonial and post-colonial state has failed so completely that people stop waiting for it and build something else instead.

The sub-imperial role of the UAE

And finally, a crucial facet of this war is the sub-imperial role of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). A sub-imperialist state is not a major global imperial power, yet it adopts imperialist practices within its own region, often in alignment with the interests of dominant global powers. The UAE is dependent on the United States for its security, its financial system, and its global legitimacy. Within that dependency, it operates as a regional power that extracts resources, builds military presence, manipulates political transitions, and sustains armed actors that serve its strategic interests in Africa and the Middle East.

Sudan is not the only laboratory for the UAE sub-imperial experiment. There is Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Tunisia, and many more — all have experienced versions of the same playbook. In Sudan specifically, the UAE’s role operates across three interlocking tracks: gold, military support, and political interference.

On gold: [inaudible], the RSF deepened its control over Sudan’s gold mining operations, particularly in Darfur. The gold moves through informal networks to Dubai, which has become the world’s primary hub for Sudanese conflict gold. Dubai imports more gold from some African countries than those countries officially export. The gold economy financed the RSF’s military capacity, rewarded commanders, and provided a revenue stream that made the RSF financially autonomous from any Sudanese political authority. Dubai’s gold market is the mechanism through which the RSF funded its war-making capacity, and it has continued to operate without interruption since April 2023. Not a single Emirati official has been sanctioned for it.

And here also, I have to mention that the European Union also funded the RSF, through the Khartoum Process, which was meant to counter what is called the “illegitimate” migration of African migrants through the Sahara to Europe, through the Middle East.

On military support: the evidence that the UAE has armed and supplied the RSF is no longer a matter of serious dispute. Multiple investigations — by Human Rights Watch, Reuters, the UN Panel of Experts, and journalists and organizations from multiple countries — have documented UAE-origin weapons in RSF hands; UAE military facilities used as transit points for Colombian mercenaries deployed alongside RSF forces; and supply chains running through eastern Libya, Puntland in Somalia, Chad, Somaliland, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, and many other countries. In October 2025, when the RSF completed its assault on El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, witnesses described white foreign fighters in military fatigues with insignia standing alongside RSF soldiers while mass killings were carried out against civilians, including people with disabilities. Human Rights Watch concluded these were most likely Colombian private military contractors deployed through an Abu Dhabi-based security company with direct links to the UAE’s presidential court.

On political interference: the UAE maintained simultaneous relationships with Burhan of the SAF and Hemedti of the RSF before the war, hedging between the two while using its financial leverage to ensure that neither the civilian government nor the revolutionary forces could consolidate power without Gulf approval. This stems from the UAE’s fear of democratic experiments in its periphery, treating them as existential threats to its own form of governance that could inspire the Emirati people to demand democratic changes at home. After the October 2021 coup, the UAE’s response was calls for restraint and dialogue — and the continuation of gold flows and political ties with both leaders.

When the war started in April 2023, the RSF was unusually well-equipped, coordinated, and resilient. That resilience came from years of preparation under the cover of a transitional process the international community treated as progress.

The response of Western governments to this evidence has been consistent. The United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the European Union member states have been aware of what the UAE is doing in Sudan. In their public statements, they have abstained from naming the UAE explicitly, preferring vague references to “external backers,” while maintaining their own relationships with Abu Dhabi as arms clients, investment partners, and participants in migration-control frameworks that depend on Gulf cooperation. The UK imposed visa restrictions on Sudanese students while simultaneously refusing to sanction Emirati officials responsible for sustaining the war that produced those refugees.

What does the UAE sub-imperial project look like beyond Sudan? It has invested close to sixty billion dollars in African countries over recent years, making it the fourth-largest foreign direct investor on the continent. DP World and AD Ports Group — which are Emirati companies — control, or have agreements to manage, ports along every coastline of Africa, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, to the Indian Ocean, to the Red Sea. These are not simply commercial investments, but rather strategic choke points that give the UAE leverage over African trade routes — combined with military basing rights, agricultural land acquisitions across Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Egypt, and elsewhere, and control over critical mineral supply chains as Africa transitions toward green energy.

The UAE imports ninety percent of its food. After the 2007 and 2008 global food price spike, COVID-19, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the UAE aggressively acquired agricultural land across Africa to address that vulnerability. These investments are often extractive: water-intensive crops grown for Emirati livestock; raw materials processed in the UAE and sold back to African countries at higher prices; land acquired in ways that displace local communities and deplete local resources. In Sudan and Somalia, the UAE and other Gulf states have influenced conflicts between farmers and herders by facilitating mass livestock export at the expense of local communities and ecosystems.

This is the third model of expansion in Africa, distinct from the Bretton Woods model and from the Sino-African — the Chinese — model. Unlike both of those, the UAE’s expansion is driven not by ideological projection or market-seeking, but by the UAE’s own internal vulnerabilities: food insecurity, dependence on skilled migrant labor, energy-transition pressure, and the strategic requirement to project enough regional power to maintain leverage with the global powers on which it depends. It is expansion born of insecurity, which makes it more volatile and more willing to sustain violence to protect its positions than a model driven by developmental logic.

Understanding this matters for anti-colonial struggle today, because it clarifies where to apply pressure and what to demand. The chain of accountability runs from the Janjaweed commanders carrying out ethnic cleansing in Darfur, to Hemedti who commands them, to the UAE officials who fund and arm and shield him, to the Western governments and financial institutions that maintain UAE relationships while managing Sudan’s crisis through frameworks designed to prevent accountability. Naming these actors is the absolute minimum requirement for any serious effort to stop the war.

It also means recognizing that the Sudanese people are not waiting for international rescue. They have built, under the worst conditions imaginable — aerial bombardment, famine, displacement affecting nearly thirteen million people, a death toll that has likely crossed one hundred and fifty thousand — horizontal structures of mutual aid, political organization, and democratic governance that are more legitimate than anything either warring party has produced. The resistance committees and emergency response rooms are not civil society in the liberal NGO sense. They are the embryo of a different kind of state — one built from below, by people who have lived through every version of the state built from above and found each version wanting.

The December Revolution exposed something that the colonial state had spent a century trying to conceal: that outside the capital and a handful of urban centers, the state had never delivered anything to most Sudanese people. No schools, no hospitals, no roads, no economic opportunity. The state had been present only as a coercive force — taxing, conscripting, suppressing. When it collapsed under the weight of the war, the communities that survived were the ones that had always survived without it: through mutual solidarity, through informal networks, through the kinds of horizontal institutions that colonial and post-colonial states had tried to prevent from consolidating — precisely because they represented a different relationship between people and power.

The question the Sudanese revolution poses to the international left is simple. Will you build the solidarity infrastructure that this struggle needs — naming the actors, sanctioning the mechanisms, supporting the Sudanese civilian forces that actually represent the revolution? Or will you reproduce the failure of the liberal peace-building model by treating the documented crimes of a wealthy patron state as a matter of competing claims requiring balanced treatment?

The answer requires no special knowledge of Sudan. It requires only the application of consistent principles: that arms dealers for ethnic cleansing should be sanctioned regardless of their investment portfolios; that gold markets laundering conflict resources should be shut down regardless of their importance to global finance; and that civilian forces who build democratic institutions under bombardment deserve more than a mention in a communiqué.

David Graeber spent his life arguing that the debts run the other way — that the people at the bottom of global hierarchies are not recipients of charity, but creditors of a system that has extracted their labor, their land, and their futures for centuries. Sudan has been paying that debt — in gold, in cotton, in fighters, in water, and now in blood — for two hundred years. The international order did not accidentally fail to notice. It was built to extract, and Sudan has been one of its extraction sites from the beginning.

This war began in 1821, when Muhammad Ali’s forces came for gold and fighters and the Nile. Every subsequent colonial arrangement has reproduced some version of that logic. The December Revolution demanded an end to that logic rather than reforming it. That is what makes it dangerous to the powers that benefit from it. And that is why it will not be defeated — even now, even under these conditions — because the Sudanese people have already demonstrated that they know the difference between the state they have been given and the one they are capable of building.

The cause outlasts the person who carries it. That is what al-Faituri wrote for Abd al-Khaliq Mahjoub. That is what the poem “Abdala” — written by a teenage Cuban revolutionary imagining Nubian resistance — says across nearly two centuries. That is what Muzan believed, and what her work demonstrates every time someone reads it. The petty tyrants are wooden puppets, and their colors are draining pale.

Thank you very much.

RADHA D’SOUZA: Wow. How can I thank you? This was an amazing tour de force — historical, contemporary, mapping all the actors on the scene. It was truly amazing, thank you very much.

Now I want to say to all our listeners: if you have questions, please post them in the chat, and we can ask Husam to answer your questions. Please do it in the chat, and we will pick it up. But while you are writing your questions in the chat, I just thought I would share some of my responses to Husam’s amazing talk.

I feel very inspired at the moment, Husam. I was thinking — I’m from India and you’re from Sudan, and we had the same British empire and the same sort of history. In about the eighteen-hundred-and-thirties — you know, the nineteenth century, the middle of the nineteenth century — this one… James… J.S. Mill, John Stuart Mill, who is a very well-known English liberal philosopher, supposed to be for freedom, whatever else — but he was an officer of the East India Company for thirty years. For thirty years he was an officer of the East India Company, and the East India Company ruled us — which is why we call it the Company Raj, because it was company rule at that time. And he wrote that India was the great experimental laboratory for the empire, and that the experiments that are conducted in India can be exported throughout the empire.

So when you were speaking, I was thinking of him, you know, and how literally techniques of imperial governance were exported around the world. I mean, the story that you tell can be said of Nigeria, of Kenya, of, you know, Asia and other places, Indonesia — you can just take it and it’s there. So it seems to me like there is a template. There is a template that empires use.

And today you have mentioned all the ingredients of that template. Agrarian domination across everywhere — that is a thing. Then British officials being moved around, from India to Sudan, from Sudan to somewhere else. And they moved around everywhere. So if you look at street names in many of our countries, they have the same officials. You will have a Wellington in New Zealand; you have a Wellington Road or Street in India, or whatever. So that was another thing.

What you said about gold, the Nile, and soldiers — I can say that about India, you know: gold; not the Nile, but from the Indus to the Ganges to the Kaveri, you know, all our rivers; and soldiers — India was a major supplier of soldiers across the British Empire.

Arbitrary borders, Husam — we still suffer, we still feel the pain of the partition. You know: Bengal partition, Punjab partition, you know, the Northeast, Kashmir — you name it. So there you go.

Divide, rank, and rule — oh, how familiar. The word “divide and rule” has become a phrase in English, and it’s a phrase that has come from colonial times. You know, they pitted Shias against Sunnis, Hindus against Muslims, you know, Northerners against Southerners, Dravidians against Aryans — you know, it just goes on.

Dispossession and forced labor — everywhere. Tell me any part of the third world where there is no dispossession and forced labor, you know. We supply the forced labor around the world. It came as slavery; then Britain said, “Oh, we have abolished slavery” — but we introduced indentured labor. And for a long time, there was a debate on whether indentured labor is slavery or not slavery. Now we have special economic zones, free trade zones, where the conditions are not any different. You know, and then of course you have, in the Gulf, you know, the kafala systems and the whole thing there.

And then you mentioned production of administrators — the entire educational system is designed to produce administrators. And even now, if you look at the World Bank, the IMF — you know, yes, the top leaders are all from the United States or from Europe; IMF is usually from Europe, World Bank is from the United States — they call that the gentleman’s agreement. But the lower-ranking staff, they all come from, you know, countries like ours, yours and mine.

Now you talk about the UAE, you know — the UAE, sometimes, now, increasingly, people are recognizing it as what many people have called “Eastern Israel.” It has become almost like an extension of Israel. And that then calls into question the whole Zionist project, what that means, and the whole UAE–Zionist alliance — which is, of course, a whole different, new issue.

And then you talked about, you know, the naming — the naming of perpetrators — and the continued resistance. And I think this we can see — this is the unseen bit. This is the part, the stories, that people like you have to tell, and people like me have to tell, because this is the story that nobody knows, and nobody will know unless people like us tell the story.

I hope you people are putting questions into the chat. And I hope… we are still waiting for it. So don’t let my commentary interrupt you.

But I was also thinking that all these elements you mentioned are also present now. This template — that’s why I’ve talked about this template — is not only historical, it is also contemporary. Yes. Because this template applies to Sudan, this template applies to South Asia, this template applies to, you know, Yemen — it applies to so many other countries, you know, the Sahel, you name it. This template is a universal template.

So I’m just wondering — I would like to ask you, while we wait for questions, but in the meantime: maybe I would like to ask you about the importance of understanding this template, and the importance of understanding the specifics of each country — like, you know, yours or mine or whatever — but also understanding the larger template that the empires have used in the past and are using now. I mean, this idea of proxy war is not at all new. But it’s not being used only in Sudan; there are many other countries which are similar. No empire has fought directly — they have always fought through proxies. And that proxy wars are part of the template: they fund the money, they give the arms, they give the expertise. And we are seeing that now in Iran, we are seeing it in Ukraine — it’s everywhere. In Yemen, the same UAE and Saudi tried it. So it’s everywhere.

And what are the elements — you know, how these wars are fought, and how these wars are understood — is something that really needs a lot more work, I would say, in highlighting. Because in popular conceptions, war is about two armies going and shooting each other. But modern wars are not about two armies — like in medieval times, they came to a field and then, you know, they had a war and they declared it with trumpets and whatever. It doesn’t happen like that. Today’s wars are economic, psychological — you know, and the whole thing of cognitive warfare, as they call it, is a huge part of this warfare. There’s propaganda, information warfare; it’s, you know, a multifaceted political warfare. Proxies and the arms and the weapons are only one part of that warfare.

And that is the thing that really worries me, and I wonder — if you have any thoughts on what can be done for us to, you know, deal with this, or make this aspect of international solidarity visible. But before you answer that question, Husam, I have a question from the audience, and I’ll read out the question to you.

RADHA D’SOUZA: “Do you think the UAE will have reduced ability to exercise imperialism after Iran’s strategic defeat of the US, Israel, and Gulf allies?” I think that’s very important. You can take it over.

HUSAM MAHJOUB: Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much, Arin. I’m afraid I will have to — we have a few minutes left. I have another commitment at, like, four minutes from now. But Radha, thank you very much for your commentary here.

I do this, and I like it, actually — when I try to see the common features of colonialism in Sudan and how they relate to other countries. And I’ve seen it across the board. But this needed many more hours to just explain how Sudan relates to other countries. That’s why I decided to give the details about Sudan, and then I’m sure anyone from any other country can relate and see how these manifest in their own history. But what you have explained — how each of these common features apply to the case of India — is true; this is true for Kenya, Nigeria, Latin American countries — it’s the same.

So, trying to answer briefly — and that’s why I think understanding the template is important, because… I spent a few minutes talking about the context, talking about the conversation I had with my Colombian colleague, because I think one of the most important things that we have seen in the aftermath of October 7th is: everything is connected. And this is the main thing that we have to do. All these struggles are connected. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. And when I go out and march for Palestinian rights — in fact, I marched for the rights of the Sudanese people, and I marched for the rights of the Dalit in India, and for the African Americans in the United States, and for the indigenous people in Latin America.

RADHA D’SOUZA: Maybe we just focus on Arin Wright’s question. Since you’re running out of time…

HUSAM MAHJOUB: Yeah, I see. Well, that’s a possibility — that the UAE sees reduced ability after the war in Iran. But I also think — and actually we’ve seen some evidence for this — this actually proves the UAE’s vision: that because it lives in this very volatile geopolitical region, Iran and Saudi Arabia will always be there, and the UAE sees them as its main strategic threats. So the UAE sees Africa as a way out of this geopolitical location that it has been in. And we’ve seen evidence for this: two or three weeks after the bombing of — after the war started, the Israeli and American war started on Iran — when Iran was bombarding back, the UAE cargo flights continued from Fujairah Airport (which was under Iranian bombardment), carrying weapons to the Central African Republic, opening a new logistical road, or route, from the UAE to the Central African Republic, then to Darfur in Sudan.

I think the UAE’s ability is not yet diminished in conducting the war, or the sub-imperialist project that it has in Africa. There are so many reasons to think that, well, actually this will reinforce it. And of course, one thing about the UAE: it’s a dictatorship, it’s a monarchy that really doesn’t care about — I mean, it’s a one-person rule. So they don’t really… they have an enormous amount of money, and they are not accountable. The president, MBZ — Mohamed bin Zayed — is not accountable to anyone in the country. He has unlimited funds to continue his projects. So that’s why we should not, at any point, relax from opposing the UAE project. I can answer another question.

RADHA D’SOUZA: Yes. There is one more question, from Barış Eser. It says: “Thank you, Husam. Especially since 2011, we have seen bloody counter-revolutions, with Western complicity, suppressing democratic revolutions. What is the task of Western anti-imperialists?”

HUSAM MAHJOUB: Thank you very much for this question. It’s understanding that the West’s rhetoric about democracy and transitions and human rights is flawed. And again, I see everything after October 7th as a manifestation of this. We should realize this. And we should…

So, after 2011, the West basically outsourced the policies in the region — in the Middle East and Africa — to its allies: the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel, of course. And this is where, mainly, the United States felt that — of course, Britain and France lost the strategic war, or their position, in the African continent. America also saw itself losing that battle to the Chinese and Russians, and instead resorted to this sub-imperial project, where it gave the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel, of course — it gave them the license to do what they wanted, to protect their own strategic interests.

And that’s why, in the West, anti-imperialists should see this again as part of their struggle — what the UAE and the sub-imperialists do. So we’ve seen the UAE, we’ve seen Saudi Arabia, Qatar, we’ve seen Israel — what they do in the internal politics of these Western countries. They are corrupting the political systems of these Western countries, the so-called democracies in the West. And so, people in the West, anti-imperialists, should see this as part of the struggles for their own democracies and all freedoms. I mean, again, the main point, the main message is: everything is connected. Maybe if you don’t see yet how any issue anywhere in the world is connected to your own issues — dig a little bit deeper, and you will find the connection, and then this will kind of tell you how to resist, or give you ways of resisting.

RADHA D’SOUZA: Yeah. I mean, thank you for that, because we are seeing now these connections. We are seeing, on the one hand, how the Dubai ruling elite is embedded in the Epstein class — you know, we saw various things on that. We are also seeing that when people stand up and oppose the imperialist policies of their own governments, the repression comes on them as well. We are seeing how Palestinian protests are being suppressed, the ICE protests in the US. So this façade of democracy comes off very quickly once you start questioning your own government. And that would be the role of — I would say, you know — people living in Western countries: to challenge their own governments, and to find connections, democratic connections, between people. Thank you.

HUSAM MAHJOUB: Thank you.

RADHA D’SOUZA: A very big thank you to you, Husam. This was very inspiring. And I’m sure our audience found it very inspiring as well.

HUSAM MAHJOUB: No, thank you. Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Radha. Thank you so much. Thank you to the David Graeber Institute. Thank you for giving me this opportunity, and for caring about Sudan and wanting to know more about it. Thank you so much. It was a privilege and an honor to be with you today.

RADHA D’SOUZA: Likewise — it was a great privilege for us to have you. Thank you.

HUSAM MAHJOUB: Thank you. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.