The War About Everything in Sudan, by Eisa Dafallah, Moe Kandaka, Khaled Al-Waleed Abdulrahman, Mahasin Dahab and Rahiem Shadad – 16 August 2025

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.

Except where noted otherwise, original writing and translations produced by the Left Renewal Blog Collective are published under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Republished and translated material remains subject to the licence and terms of its original publication.