Madaniaao: Answering the Wrong Question of the Sudanese Revolution
Sudan’s revolution removed a dictator but left intact the deep structures of racialized hierarchy, militarism, and elite rule. Resistance committees built new forms of power, but without rupture, the old order reassembled itself.
Sudanese men burn tires during a demonstration commemorating the first anniversary of the deadly security force crackdown on protesters staging a sit-in outside the army headquarters in Khartoum on June 3, 2020. (Marwan Ali / AP Photo)
“The strange faces law” is a vague law that was enacted in 2024 by the de facto government of Sudan under the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). It formed part of the legislative arsenal of the state of exception created by the April 2023 conflict and aimed to restrict access to SAF-controlled areas in Northern, Eastern, and parts of Central Sudan by elements associated with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—the insurrectionary militia fighting the national army. The law’s main premise was that individuals whose facial features appeared unfamiliar or “strange” to the local populations in these regions would be subjected to additional scrutiny and filtered out for further investigations. In practice, the law was used to detain large numbers of people, primarily from Western Sudan and other areas with a high concentration of non-Arab ethnic groups (in contrast to those considered “Arab” from Northern riverine Sudan). In a country with over 500 ethnic groups and immense diversity, facial features became a tool for criminalizing people, highlighting the law’s discriminatory and divisive nature. This racialized logic, embedded in the military’s governance strategy, signals the deeper failure of Sudan’s post-revolutionary promise—a failure not merely of leadership but of imagination and political structure.
More troubling still, since the Sudanese army’s recent advancements in January 2025, reversing its unexplainable loss of control at the onset of the conflict in April 2023, the regained territories have witnessed summary executions and arbitrary detentions targeting the same ethnicities. These actions were carried out under various pretexts, such as alleged collaboration with the militia. Simultaneously, a massive wave of evictions for decades-old informal settlements has been taking place in the capital, primarily inhabited by the same targeted ethnic groups under the country’s stark overlap of ethnicity and class. These evictions were justified by claims of involvement in criminal activities—activities largely driven by the collapse of the state during two years of relentless conflict, the loss of income sources, and the erosion of basic means for survival. Tragically, these arbitrary and discriminatory acts have garnered significant popular support, even from former revolutionary actors.
Over the past two years of conflict, the normalization of violence and othering has been perpetuated not only by the historically right-wing, racist, and extremist factions of Sudanese politics, but also by supposedly progressive intellectuals and numerous revolutionary groups and individuals. Many of these actors have fervently supported the national army, endorsing its militaristic and zero-sum approaches. Nationalist sentiments backing the army quickly metamorphosed into a narrow ethno-regionalism championed by the hegemonic Northern riverine minority. This shift marginalized all those outside these ethno-regional lines, including Darfuri people—those who have already endured immense suffering at the hands of the militia.
Citing the militia and its foreign allies (primarily the United Arab Emirates) as existential threats to the Sudanese nation-state has been overstated. This narrative masks the reality that the ongoing conflict is fundamentally a power struggle between two armed factions, both intent on obstructing the revolutionary path to secure control over the country’s resources—chiefly gold. The extraction of gold has only intensified under both sides, with direct and indirect support from the UAE being channeled to the war-ring parties.
The conflict emerges in the aftermath of what was celebrated as a triumphant moment of the December revolution, the toppling of the 30-year dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir (1989–2019) and his Islamist regime notorious for its atrocities against the darker-skinned populations of South Sudanese and Darfuris. The resurgence of human rights violations is deeply shocking, raising questions about how this could happen after five glorious years of struggle for “freedom, peace, and justice.”
The answer to this question can be found in part in the powerful insights of the visionary Sudanese thinker Abdulla Bola. Bola contended that such violations against significant portions of the population were historically legitimized through a hierarchical framework of citizenship that predated al-Bashir’s rule. According to Bola, “the basic structures of human rights violations” are, in fact, “the mental, conceptual, social, cultural, psychological, and political structures that existed in our society before the Islamists seized power. These structures served as bases of support, reservoirs, and shelters for aggressive energy and fostered psychological conditions conducive to human rights violations.” Bola’s argument reframes state violence not as an aberration of the Bashir era, but as a deep continuity—one that the revolution failed to rupture and, in some cases, unwittingly reinforced. Seen in this light, the recent targeting of “strange faces,” the popular support for the army’s purges, and the exclusionary rhetoric of post-revolution elites are not betrayals of the revolutionary moment but expressions of the very structures it left intact.
Bola’s statement, written nearly two decades ago, has consistently proven to be accurate. Discrimination along religious, ethnic, and regional lines has shaped Sudan’s history, leading to significant events such as the secession of South Sudan and the genocide in Darfur. Today, this logic has evolved further, targeting those associated with the militia’s social constituency—nomadic Arab tribes extending across Western Sudan and interpenetrating borders that stretch through the Sahel region, up to Niger and beyond. These entrenched lines of division and othering, reinforced by decades of slavery and colonial divide-and-rule tactics, have long defined the sources of cultural, political, and economic hegemony in modern Sudan.
The reproduction of earlier hegemonic discourse after the December revolution—praised for its inclusivity, horizontality, and grassroots foundation—reveals a significant failure. Not only has it fallen short of dismantling the foundations of these hegemonic logics, but it has also created an opening for even more regressive forces to assume power. It is a trajectory that echoes the fate of other horizontalist revolutions in recent history—what Vincent Bevins has described as movements that, despite their heroism, often end up clearing the way for counterrevolution. In several of the cases he documents, the uprisings culminated in the return of pre-revolutionary elites or the rise of new authoritarian formations. In Sudan, the absence of ideological clarity and structural vision allowed a historical elite to regroup and reclaim power, even as revolutionary energies persisted on the street.
This tension—between revolutionary breakthrough and hegemonic restoration—shaped not only Sudan’s outcome but the very arc of its mobilization. The movement’s most radical forms of collective action, grounded in horizontality and local rootedness, gradually ran up against the limits of spontaneity and structural ambiguity. These are the same pitfalls that have confronted other uprisings across the region and the world—yet in Sudan, they played out with particular intensity and consequence.
The revolution?
On April 11, 2019, Sudan’s 30-year dictator Omar al-Bashir was toppled after five days of sit-in in front of the military headquarters, and nearly five months of consistent mobilization. The ongoing question has been whether this was a revolution, a reform movement, or a palace coup driven by popular pressure. Any attempt to provide a straightforward answer oversimplifies the complexities of these events, attributing an unrealistic level of planning, execution, and coherence to all those involved—whether working for or against the trajectory of the five years of prewar mobilization.
This chronological exploration of events aims to shed light on the dynamics that shaped these critical moments of dissent. Special focus is given to grassroots organizations—namely, the resistance committees (RCs), whose decisive role in accelerating and sustaining revolutionary momentum is carefully examined and traced.
When schoolchildren in Damazine and Atbara took to the streets in mid-December 2018 to protest rising bread prices, al-Bashir’s regime was already on the verge of collapse. Stripped of both the grandiose Islamist ideology, with its promises of earthly and heavenly salvation, and the petrodollars that had sustained the regime in the decade before South Sudan’s secession, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a solid support base.
With wars raging across the peripheries of Western and Southern Sudan, this support base had gradually shrunk over the years, reduced to a small segment of beneficiaries from the middle class. However, as petrol, cash, and bread lines grew longer, people across all ages and classes became desperate for an outlet for their frustrations.
The call for protests by the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA)—a body virtually unknown to most people at the time—found an unprecedented response, as unexpected masses poured into the center of Khartoum. Due to the capital’s security-conscious colonial planning, which favored repressive security forces, protests soon retreated to central neighborhoods such as Burri and Shambat. These areas, inhabited by old and closely related families, provided the foundation for localized and decentralized protest tactics, which ultimately led to the organic emergence of resistance committees (RCs). The predecessors of the resistance committees can be traced back to experiments with neighborhood-level organization that began as early as the limited mobilization following the Arab Spring in 2012 and the heavily suppressed protests of September 2013.
While the eloquent Facebook statements from the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA) offered broad guidelines for the protests, each RC executed its own localized plans. This decentralized approach gradually exhausted and disoriented the security forces. In parallel, social media footage documenting security forces violations amplified public outrage and accelerated the chain of events leading to the successful sit-in that ultimately ousted al-Bashir.
Subsequently, the movement’s central slogan, “Tasgot bas” (just fall), which was concise and decisive, was soon replaced by “Madaniaao” (civic), advocating for civilian rule over military governance. Notably, both slogans were deliberately short and conclusive, as they implicitly addressed the frequent question posed by allies of the former regime: “What is the alternative to al-Bashir’s regime?” These slogans reflected the movement’s ambiguous aspirations for change, fixated over the removal of the regime’s leadership rather than addressing its economic and social structures of hegemony. However, this narrow focus would later dilute—and even reverse—the revolutionary trajectory.
A stalled transition: August 2019 to October 2021
Despite widespread opposition among the masses to any agreement with the Transitional Military Council of al-Bashir—infamous for its brutal dismantling of the sit-in on June 3, 2019—few alternatives emerged. This left the movement with little choice but to support the civilian parties that claimed to represent it, largely due to their more established and institutionalized nature. This support culminated in the signing of the power-sharing agreement in August 2019, which set in motion the framework for the transitional period and eventual elections.
During the transitional period, the RCs became deeply involved in managing the daily affairs of their neighborhoods amid multiple supply crises. Their responsibilities ranged from distributing subsidized bread and cooking gas to overseeing petrol stations to prevent the smuggling of subsidized fuels. Their role in local governance also enhanced their power and legitimacy. Additionally, they continued to organize local protests, demanding justice for martyrs and addressing occasional human rights violations, particularly in Sudan’s peripheral regions.
The Sudanese case presents many parallels to Asef Bayat’s observations on the Arab Spring, where the heroic and self-sacrificing tactics of revolutionary movements were not complemented by an ideologically coherent vision for an alternative social and political reality, unlike the radical socialist or political Islamist movements of the 1970s. As the former’s emphasis was primarily placed on human rights, electoral democracy, and civic liberties, imaginaries for the radical dismantling of the political and economic power structures of the previous regime were notably absent.
Furthermore, unideological foundations were also advocated for in relation to the appointed transitional cabinet. The term “technocrat” emerged as the embodiment of competence and impartiality. In reality, however, it concealed the unchallenged acceptance of neoliberal logics that became the defining common sense. The absence of ideological contestation was not neutral—it became the mechanism through which elite and donor-class interests were reasserted, shielded by the language of managerial efficiency. The most celebrated technocrat of the time was the prime minister, an ex-UN official whose charisma facilitated the implementation of one of the fastest and harshest neoliberal reform packages. Ironically, these reforms echoed the same liberalizing policies that had sparked the protests in 2018 but were implemented with significantly less proportional popular resistance.
Claims of technocratic managerial impartiality, in the face of the hegemony of both neocolonial powers and the centers of power from the former regime, achieved little beyond emboldening the counterrevolution. This led to a stalemate in addressing the masses’ demands for judicial and social justice, as extrajudicial killings surged and the cost of living skyrocketed (inflation increased from 50 percent to 360 percent between 2019 and 2021). RCs and other revolutionaries found themselves in a constant struggle, navigating the delicate balance between holding their supposedly representative civilians accountable and avoiding their delegitimization.
The coup: October 2021 to April 2023
If there is one defining difference between the 2018 Sudanese revolution and both its local predecessors (1964 and 1958), as well as the Arab Spring, it is the sustained momentum that persisted nearly three years after its initial peak. To the surprise of the military factions, the failure of the transitional cabinet did not deter revolutionaries from continuing their unwavering demand for a civic government. When the military coup was announced at dawn on October 21, 2021, and despite a complete shutdown of both internet and cellular networks, massive waves of protesters spontaneously converged on their routes to the military headquarters.
Once again, the structures of the RCs demonstrated remarkable effectiveness during this phase in two key ways. First, their horizontal and leaderless organization allowed them to avoid the fate of political parties, labor unions, and cabinet officials, whose leadership was swiftly arrested. Second, their exceptional agility in communication and coordination enabled them to organize simultaneous yet decentralized mass marches, even amidst a total telecommunications blackout and the blockade of key bridges connecting the tripartite capital.
Following months of relentless defiance against unprecedented repression and the killing of protesters, the RCs came to recognize their success in neutralizing the coup. However, they also realized their unpreparedness to capitalize on this second opportunity of state destabilization and power vacuum. Consequently, for the first time calls emerged for the articulation of a detailed strategy for the way forward. This led to the launch of what became known as the “Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People’s Power.”
In parallel with the continuous weekly protests—daily in the most radical areas—the charter drafting process unfolded in the capital and across the country. Some of the most radical propositions emerged from remote places like Mairno in southeastern Sudan, a town unfamiliar to many urbanites until then. The originality of Mairno’s proposal lay in its ability to translate the horizontality of people’s power into actionable steps for seizing state authority. It proposed that RCs coordinate and oversee the process of electing representatives progressively—from administrative units to localities, towns, and ultimately the national level—culminating in the formation of a legislative council responsible for appointing the prime minister. This bottom-up approach stood in sharp contrast to the hierarchical, top-down structure of the transitional period.
These and other progressive visions were shaped by lessons from recent experiences and by leftist influences within the RCs. Notably, they addressed issues such as colonial land systems and neocolonial influence, as expressed in the “Committee for the Dismantling of Oppression and Dependence.”
However, while the drafting process provided a platform for grassroots debates on historically elitist topics, it also revealed the inadequacies in the RCs’ decision-making mechanisms and the ideological (or class-based) fissures within their ranks. When a unified draft was finally released in January 2023, more than 10 months after the effort began and three months before the junta’s war, the RCs had become polarized, fragmented, and increasingly isolated from other civic forces, as well as from broader neighborhood affairs. As a result, they lost much of their previously unquestioned popular support.
What remains?
Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of the conceptual basis of early modern revolutions, highlights the American concept of “public happiness.” Although this concept later degenerated into consumerist narratives of happiness, for revolutionary Americans, “public happiness” was deeply rooted in active participation in public life and governance. She references John Adams’s observation that people attended town assemblies and conventions not solely out of duty or self-interest but because they genuinely enjoyed engaging in discussions, deliberations, and decision-making. In essence, “public happiness” stems from the collective joy of civic engagement and the recognition that active participation in public life enriches both individuals and the community and serves as the bedrock of freedom.
Although particularly subjective and difficult to quantify, the experience of public happiness was unmistakable among the thousands of Sudanese revolutionaries, leaving indelible marks on the everyday life of Sudanese society. Emerging from 30 years of religious fanaticism, oppressive public order laws, and a highly censored cultural scene, the capital rapidly regained its distinctive voice. Public spaces were reclaimed for carnivalesque marches, vibrant murals and graffiti, political debates, active involvement in local affairs, and heroic expressions of solidarity across divisions of ethnicity, class, and gender. This resurgence was accompanied by a revival of the cultural scene, bringing Sudanese cinema back to international stages and fostering a fusion of local and global genres that gave rise to original Sudanese rap and reggae music.
On a more material level and following the collapse of state services and infrastructures at the onset of the ongoing war, the networks and organizational skills of the RCs were rapidly repurposed into life-saving initiatives. These included emergency rooms, collective kitchens, and displacement shelters, providing critical support to millions across the country. This once again underscored the resilience of these grassroots organizations and the effectiveness of their horizontal structures in mobilizing, resisting, and deeply engaging with the collective needs and struggles of their communities. But this tactical brilliance—while essential—remains politically vulnerable without a parallel strategy for contesting power.
If Arendt helps us name the affective power of civic participation, then Bue Rübner Hansen points us toward the structural terrain on which that power might be organized. This resilience highlights the urgent need to channel this tactical success—particularly in sustaining spaces for social reproduction and survival—into a revolutionary strategy. As Hansen insightfully argues, progressive strategies for social change, including democratization and communization, require a more deliberate focus on social reproduction. This is particularly relevant in the context of the accelerated shrinking of production spaces in industry and agriculture, which has rendered the majority of people into a surplus population (in relation to capital). Their redundancy to capital leaves them unable to fulfil the role historically associated with carrying forward the anticapitalist class struggle.
Such a revolutionary strategy can draw significant lessons from radical examples that Hansen believes have been wrongly dismissed by much of the Marxist tradition—especially those rooted in the survival practices of surplus populations. He emphasizes that “there is no structural reason—quite the contrary—that communisationists should not look to the practices of the Black Panthers, which started from the question of the armed and legal self-defense of a surplus population against the racist policing of its alternative forms of survival—its hustling and informal economies—and progressed to the implementation of survival programs that drew tens of thousands to the struggle and powerful municipal election campaigns in Oakland, California.”
Centring the social reproduction of surplus populations within a revolutionary strategy is a task of particular pertinence in the current Sudanese context. This surplus population spans the spectrum from paramilitarists—forced to take up arms as their only means of survival—to those displaced and dispossessed by their violence, now facing precarity and the loss of their livelihoods.
Despite the bleakness of the current conjuncture, characterized by generalized violence, the increasing self-reliance and organizational sophistication of organs of self-management stand as a powerful example of people power in action. This demonstrates the urgent need to articulate this practical success into a coherent revolutionary theory. Such a theory could hold the potential for achieving genuine democratization beyond liberal democracy—a system that is visibly eroding even in its most established Western forms. What remains, then, is not only the capacity to endure, but the traces of a different way of living and organizing—brief, partial, but real. In the absence of a formal political breakthrough, these fragments still mark the outlines of what was possible and what might still be reclaimed. Whether they remain isolated acts of resilience or come to shape a broader strategy will depend on the ability to name them, connect them, and act from them.
