The war in Sudan is often flattened with numbers, shorthand and labels that suggest it’s both too much and too petty to resolve. Even the biggest recent international media effort to draw attention to it – a 10,000-word Atlantic cover story – called it “the war about nothing”, using both warlords and civilians as mere narrative devices in an argument for the liberal world order. Five Sudanese contributors to issue 209 of ‘The Continent’ offer a corrective: stories from the ground — their own and others’ — that invite us to see the contours of Sudan, while tackling the unenviable task of explaining what the war is about.
Eisa Dafallah is a Sudanese journalist. “Moe Kandaka” lives in a country close to Sudan and is writing under a pseudonym for security reasons. “Khaled Al-Waleed Abdulrahman” is still in Sudan and also writing under a pseudonym for security reasons. Mahasin Dahab is a feminist and decolonial researcher supporting humanitarian responses to the war in Sudan. Rahiem Shadad is a Sudanese cultural researcher and curator based in Nairobi.
These articles first appeared in ‘The Continent’ – Issue 209.
More content from this blog
- Political Amnesia on Venezuela: Re-Writing the Bolivarian Revolution, by James Bloodworth – 8 January 2026
- What US Funding Cuts Mean for Fight Against Rising NCD Burden. Interview with Katie Dain – 20 February 2025
- The Haredi Zionist Who Advocated Radical Openness, by Tom Pessah – 27 September 2023
- In Latin America, Backers of Leftist Dictatorships Look the Other Way, by Michael Deibert – 12 January 2022
- What It Means to “Speak Out” about Atrocities, by Keith Kahn-Harris – 23 June 2025