Marketing War. Interview with Magdi el Gizouli – 30 September 2023

From Phenomenal World

Sudan’s ongoing war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has killed thousands and displaced millions. The current crisis follows years of political upheaval across the country. In late 2018 and 2019, mass protests calling for democratic rule led to the collapse of the President al-Bashir’s thirty-year regime. By the summer of 2019, different factions of a military-civilian interim government had agreed to embark on a transition to democracy, but in October 2021, the commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces—with the aid of the Rapid Support Forces—took control of the nation in a military coup. Since April, a conflict between the two generals and former allies has descended into what many observers have called a civil war.

Magdi el Gizouli is a scholar of the Sudan whose main interests involve political economy and intellectual history. He writes for the Rift Valley Institute and his blog Still Sudan. In the following interview, Magdi el Gizouli discusses the ongoing war and the long history of “accumulation by militia” in Sudan. Looking back at the country’s role in the war in Yemen and the policies of the transitional government, he links Sudan’s militarization to its place on the periphery of the global economy.

Adam Benjamin: What are the origins of your scholarship on Sudan?

Magdi el Gizouli: Intellectually, I belong to the tradition of the Sudanese communist movement. Most of what the Communist Party produced in the 1960s and ‘70s was about ways of explaining Sudan’s political evolution. There were many politically minded pamphlets and books, with a predominance of historical narration, things that sound very biographical, autobiographical, and heavily contested.

There’s a large body of work on political economy that came from a sort of academic left in Sudan in the 1970s and ‘80s, though some of these authors were not necessarily aligned with the Communist Party. That sequence of work stopped somewhere in the late ‘80s. Since then, there has been very little investigation, for instance, of the emergence of oil in Sudan, the types of insurgencies that evolved in the last twenty or twenty-five years. The whole Marxist approach to the world became a sort of memory in Sudan’s intellectual history. My own interests come from trying to understand how the current situation came about, including the predicament of people like myself who are spread around the world, in cycles of migration and expatriate labor. I also sought to understand the longevity of President al-Bashir, who ruled from 1989 to 2019. I’m still baffled by how he was one of the longest rulers in Sudan since the exit of the Turkish Ottomans. Now, I’m interested in the aftermath we’re living through.

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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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