Sudan’s Revolutionary Ghosts, by Magdi El-Gizouli – 12 August 2026

From Equator

How Sudan’s violent integration into global capitalism led to civil war

It is hard to think of another contemporary conflict that has been as thoroughly depoliticised as the civil war in Sudan. The ‘Sudan industry’ – a particular subculture of spooks and mediocre diplomats, humanitarians and development professionals, academics and adventurous journalists – adopted a posture of benevolent neutrality at the outset of the conflict, and have since then done little but sloganeer for “humanitarian aid”. They have been at pains to not take sides in what the more sophisticated analysts among them describe as “two armed formations”, and the cruder reduce to a personality clash between rapacious generals.

Anne Applebaum returned from a brief tour of the country in 2024 to assure readers of The Atlantic that the battle between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) was a transactional, lawless free-for-all, without any ideological underpinning or political endgame – “the most nihilistic conflict on Earth”. Hundreds of democracy activists had sacrificed their lives, and hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed, but “the artillery fire, the burned television station, the melted refinery, the rapes and the murders, the children in the hospital – all of that had led to nothing, built nothing”.

At the other end of the spectrum are the moralisers, of which there are naturally many. Drawing on the lessons of “history”, they have denounced the “Arab” elite of the Nile Valley, who from the dawn of time have apparently oppressed just about everybody else between the Red Sea and Lake Chad, and from Aswan Dam all the way upriver to Lake Ukerewe – a vast array of tribes and communities lumped together as “Africans”. (The terms merit quotation marks because they essentialise what are political identities.) I was personally struck by the schadenfreude expressed by so many Western scholars who had lived in Khartoum, off the hospitality of its “Arab” elite, during the formative phase of their careers.

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Magdi El-Gizouli is a scholar of the Sudan whose interests include political economy, intellectual history and popular culture. He has written regularly for the Sudanese press for decades – once for the newspapers Al-Ayam, Al-Midan and The Citizen, and now for the weekly magazine Atar.

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