Mainstream Media Miss the Global Significance of Counterrevolution in Sudan
The Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group, has tightened its siege of the Sudanese city of El Fasher amid their civil war with the Sudanese Armed Forces. About 260,000 people are estimated to be trapped in the city in a siege that has lasted for over 550 days, leaving the city without access to food, water, internet, and health care. The city’s plight reflects the dire situation for tens of millions of Sudanese people throughout the country who are facing mass starvation, displacement and atrocities due to the warring counterrevolution forces, who began fighting in April 2023, further thwarting a pro-democracy movement.
In this exclusive interview for Truthout, Khalid Mustafa Medani discusses the Sudanese civil war, authoritarian rule, and its political economy. He talks about how international actors factor into the conflict while challenging the idea that Sudan is geopolitically peripheral. Further, he analyzes Sudan’s popular resistance and contextualizes them as examples of humanitarian and democratic transformation.
Medani is an associate professor of Political Science and Islamic Studies at McGill University. His research focuses on African politics, political Islam, and informal economies, with an emphasis on Sudan. He is the author of Black Markets and Militants: Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa and has advised organizations like the United Nations Development Programme and International Crisis Group. A former NBC News producer in Cairo and Khartoum, Medani is a frequent media commentator on conflict and revolution.
Daniel Falcone: Can you start by explaining the current situation in Sudan?
Khalid Mustafa Medani: It’s important to begin with the devastation of the war regarding Sudan. Since April 15, 2023, it has been disastrous on a humanitarian level with 13 million people internally displaced, hundreds of thousands killed, and targeted ethnic killings. It’s further important to highlight the complete destruction of the infrastructure, with hundreds of schools and 80 percent of hospitals in targeted areas forced to shut down.
Additionally, widespread diseases like cholera and other treatable diseases are devastating the country. Sexual violenceand sexual assault as a weapon of war are included in a wide range of human rights violations that impact civilians. They are primary targets on the part of the protagonists, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces(RSF).
How do informal economic networks currently shape the power dynamics between the SAF and the RSF and how do they both perpetuate the conflict in Sudan? How did we get to this place? What role have informal economic ties and linkages and resources played starting in 1989?
Recently, in a short piece about the authoritarian legacies that led to this war, I mention authoritarian legacies built on the basis of informal economic networks. This autocratic playbook was utilized in 1989 when an Islamist-backed military under the leadership of Omar al-Bashir took over with concrete policy replicated in other authoritarian settings.
It was called empowerment (Temkin, in Arabic) and publicly announced. It had four pillars that are important to emphasize. Two of those were essential to our understanding of informal economic networks but the two others were political and very familiar to people who study autocracy. The first pillar purged the bureaucracy of those not loyal to the Islamist movement. So over 600,000 were summarily dismissed from their jobs in the bureaucracy and military and replaced with loyalists that were part and parcel of the wider Islamist movement.
Here is where informal economic networks become very important. What we see here is the monopolization of informal financial networks. This is the first phase of the economy. At that point the regime and formal economy was in shambles, not just in terms of debt to international organizations like the IMF and World Bank, but in terms of corruption. This led to the downgrading of the formal economy, factories and agriculture. In the context of the erosion of the formal economy, informal finance played a large role, as military governments can monopolize remittances and informal financial networks. It financed a loyalty, or clientelist networks that made the government survive in the context of authoritarian rule for three decades.
Informal financial networks amounted to billions of dollars hoarded and monopolized investments in Islamic banking institutions at the same time weak military institutions in Africa and elsewhere (Middle East, Syria and Iraq) saw a rise in militias and paramilitary forces.
In the early 2000s the insurgency took over the global headlines. It was essentially put down through a counterinsurgency that was backed by the central government. The [government in Khartoum] established a military that formed an informal network of militias. They financed and organized, as one scholar put it very effectively, a financed counterinsurgency campaign on the cheap. Basically, paramilitary militias were created to put down the insurgency. This was very important for putting down dissent. When you have a national standing army short on legitimacy, unable to protect citizens and borders you saw a proliferation of the militias. Here, these informal networks of militias were crucial in putting down dissent and uprisings.
I want to highlight these pillars involving the legacy authoritarianism that led to this war: 1) The informal financial networks that monopolized order to finance loyalty of a select group of Islamist loyalists. 2) The purging of the bureaucracy in order to replace people with loyalists and 3) To expand informal paramilitary militias in order to put down counterinsurgency and dissent of a continuous cycle of popular protest.
What do the resistance committees represent today in the civil war? Have they progressed into providing a political alternative?
The resistance committees are notable for their pro-democracy and revolutionary potential. The reason they became so important in late 2018 was that they were organized informally. The reason for that was once again related to authoritarian legacies and authoritarian rule that all authoritarian governments coopt. Labor unions and civil society resisted corporatist authoritarianism. Younger people in Sudan came up with something ingenious. That was to form informal unions and informal professional associations regulated by the state and unmonitored. They were clandestine just like the terrorist organizations.
The positive aspect of social capital in informal networks can also be very important in mobilizing people for democracy. This we’ve seen throughout the North African and Arab region following revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Here, the resistance committee coordinates with informal professional associations through mass mobilization. It brought down the Islamist fundamentalist military regime in April of 2019 and then transformed in the context of the war. This is a war against civilians and against a truly pro-democracy revolution that encompassed millions of Sudanese for over two years across ethnic groups and different classes and regions in Sudan.
This is the primary reason the two protagonists conspired to wage a coup in October 2021 against this revolution and took over the state by military means. The resistance committees played an important role in the revolution, but they also opposed an existential threat to both protagonists. Their goal was to provide social services that were not available in the context of an expansive war economy. There are extrajudicial killings of young people working in emergency response rooms. Militias use food as a weapon as others have done in other contexts but also to make sure that they suppress this kind of resistance committee and their potential for revolutionary change. There are international calls to cut off aid to the informal economic networks and the gold smuggling that finances these wars as well as the informal weapons suppliesfueling the war. There is no future without these resistance committees.
How are the United Nations, African Union, and Western governments approaching Sudan historically or in comparison to other geopolitical conflicts?
It’s important to begin by framing Sudan as far from peripheral. There is, in some places, very little coverage of Sudan but that’s not the case in the Middle East or Europe. Sudan borders seven different countries, most importantly Libya. The United Arab Emirates, Israel, U.S., Saudi Arabia, Yemen, China, and Turkey, are all vying for a strategic and economic foothold in the Red Sea. Sudan is the fifth largest exporter of gold in Africa. It is smuggled to the Dubai markets in the United Arab Emirates and then processed to fuel global markets.
In effect, countries in the Red Sea interact based on a shifting of interests. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the U.S. all organize against Iran. Turkey and Iran back rival factions and China remains more neutral, although it expands its presence without direct confrontation.
The U.S. outsources its Middle East and Red Sea policy to regional allies, with Israel playing a key role, and especially in coordination with the UAE. Again, Sudan is too often misread as peripheral, when it’s part of a large geo-political web. This is why the Trump administration wanted to normalize Sudanese relations with Israel. The international community, especially the UN, is largely constrained as a result by the interests of Security Council members’ veto power.
Despite pledges from Europe and others, financial aid to Sudan has been minimal, and there’s a deep reluctance to deploy peacekeepers due to past failures like Somalia. This hesitation has contributed to the lack of recognition of the crisis in Sudan as genocide. While talks like those in Jeddah and Bahrain showed potential, they failed largely due to resistance from Islamist elements within Sudan’s military leadership.
Could you comment on the media culture regarding Sudan? How would you examine how data is utilized (propaganda or misused) and where can we find solid coverage?
I worked for NBC News and have experience with international outlets like CNN, PBS, BBC, Al Jazeera, etc. The war in Sudan is distorted in Western media. It is commonly represented as either inexplicable or inherently African, thus reinforcing racist narratives that dehumanize those affected and normalize endless conflict on the continent. This kind of “under the radar” framing would be unthinkable in coverage of wars in Ukraine or Gaza, where the geopolitical causes and human suffering are very seriously examined. We should never compare conflicts in terms of importance, instead, we need to emphasize the interconnectedness of these conflicts and the collective role of regional/global powers.
Talking with Sudanese, Sudanese American and Sudanese Canadian diaspora populations is vital. Sudanese women activists working on critical issues like sexual violence offer authentic, informed voices from within these communities and polls show that people are more interested in alternative voices and perspectives.