Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy. The Promise and Betrayal of a People’s Revolution
Willow Berridge, Justin Lynch, Raga Makawi and Alex De Waal. Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy. The Promise and Betrayal of a People’s Revolution. London: Hurst, 2022, 280 p., ISBN: 9781787385351
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1Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy examines the 2018-2019 revolution that led to the end of 30 years of military-Islamist rule under Omar Al-Bashir. Demonstrations started in December 2018 in Ad-Damazin and Atbara, “the historic center for labor activism in Sudan,” where protestors “initiated the practice of burning down the NCP [ruling National Congress Party] headquarters” (p. 10). The authors trace the roots of the 2019 revolution back to 2011, when the Sudan Professional Association brought together labor groups and a few opposition parties to create a single platform and protest for better wages in 2012 and against austerity measures in 2013. By 2018 the Sudan Professional Association had learned a few lessons from 2013. It rallied around a simple slogan that emerged from the demonstrations: “Tasgut, bas!” (Just fall!). Such generic slogans also papered over differences within the movement: it was easier to build consensus around less specific claims (p. 11). The book’s introduction sets the scene in the 2010s, more than a decade after Al-Bashir’s break with his former ideological mentor Hassan Al-Turabi, and as the gold mining boom gradually (and opaquely) replaced the oil revenues lost with South Sudan’s 2011 independence. The authors chronicle the 2018-2019 revolution and subsequent “transition”; they also replace these events within the longue durée of contentious politics and state formation in Sudan.
2The book is not an edited volume; while some chapters were drafted by a few authors, all authors have contributed to all chapters, resulting in a coherent book that shows how the 2018-2019 uprising both reproduced some of the pitfalls of independent Sudan’s previous revolutionary moments (1964 and 1985), but also introduced progressive innovations. The authors think together dynamics that have shaped Sudan’s politics and political economy, and which the 2019 revolution aimed at transcending. All chapters move back and forth between the center and the peripheries, describing how a common “political marketplace” emerged.
- 1 Alex De Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power, Cambri (...)
3The trajectory of the Sudanese state is key to Alex De Waal’s theory of political marketplaces. This notion, which was made popular by his 2015 book,1 is central in Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy – especially chapter 2, “Reaping the Whirldwind” (p. 37-78). The book deepens the analysis by historicizing the “marketization of Sudanese politics” (p. 51). If power is “a commodity that can be traded on a monetized basis,” (p. 44) it has not always been so. The marketization of Sudan’s politics reflects Sudan’s position in the world economy. With abundant land and workforce, Sudan was integrated into global markets through agricultural exports since colonial times, which created a few rents for political parties after independence. Industry developed in a few hubs before the whole economy was shaken by World Bank and IMF-imposed austerity measures, leaving Al-Bashir’s Inqaz (Salvation) regime increasingly dependent on oil (after 1999) and gold (after 2013).
4To explain the country’s current turmoil, Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy departs from the kind of “strategist” analyses that have attracted far too much scholarly attention. The book resorts instead to social history and shows how social movements, unions, and progressive groups have repeatedly mobilized and influenced successive regime transitions since Sudan’s independence in 1956. The fifth chapter (“More than History repeating itself”, p. 149-195) reads the 2018-2021 events through historical and comparative lenses, and offers a synthesis of other chapters.
5All revolutionary moments in independent Sudan eventually saw a coalition between “three highly socially interpenetrated sectors – the professional class, the army, and the sectarian parties” to insure “a conservative transition” (p. 170). This urban “community of the state” (a notion borrowed from Abdullahi Gallab, p. 14) is racialized and spatialized; its members reside in Khartoum’s central neighborhoods, including the former effendiya class that developed “an ethos of technocratic economic development and institution-building.” This well-mannered, small society includes military officers, Islamist apparatchiks, and elite diaspora families. When facing a crisis, the “community of the state” may work out a compromise: the army, the main political parties (including the leftists and the Islamists), and the merchants stick together to protect their interests and maintain a form of civic order in the capital. During Sudan’s many coups (attempted and successful), this community prevented armed conflicts from reaching the country’s center.
6The Sudanese 2018-2019 revolution differed from past political crises, revolutionary moments and uprisings in three main ways (p. 174). Firstly, more than previous uprisings, this revolution unsettled the old dichotomy between the center and the peripheries, without however sweeping aside the “structural problems of Sudan’s political economy,” (p. 4) which the current war reproduces and magnifies.
7Secondly, women activists succeeded in putting women’s rights and the fight against patriarchy on the revolution’s agenda. Women’s organisations were a vanguard of the “kaleidoscope of activist organizations” that signed the Declaration of Freedom and Change on January 1, 2019 (p. 21-22). Women in turn were targeted by repression (p. 93), especially during the June 3, 2019 massacre, when a sit-in in front of the military headquarters was dispersed in a bloodbath. The absence of women in the negotiation teams representing the Sudan Professionals Association and the Forces for Freedom and Change shows that “deep-seated socio-economic forces that condemn most Sudanese women to lives of poverty and precarity” (p. 102) were not addressed by the movement. The current war, in which women are purposely targeted and poorly represented in the factions’ commands, is not a win against patriarchy. But this does not detract from the fact that feminist issues were debated and addressed politically like never before.
8Thirdly, the 2018-2019 revolution mobilized about a delegitimization of the Islamist project. While in other countries, Islamists could present themselves as an alternative to military-autocratic rule, in Sudan, the regime was both military and Islamist (p. 185). Opposition to Islamist politics transcended regional differences. The security sector also took advantage of the Islamists’ loss of popularity by prosecuting only former NCP members. “In 2019, the RSF and the other Saudi-aligned generals drew on their position within the interim regime, control over the gold economy, and a massive public relations campaign aimed at establishing themselves as the guardians of the revolution, to escape justice.” (p. 191).
9International reaction to the Sudanese turmoil, and the way Sudanese elites enrolled international resources from abroad also differed from previous uprisings. In 2019, international involvement – i.e. the regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the African Union, the US, UK, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – “prioritized the urban, civic conflict and made the armed conflicts in the provinces into the secondary question, inverting the customary hierarchy” (p. 98). As a result, armed groups were left out of the negotiations behind the new constitutional declaration of August 2019 (p. 102), reproducing past exclusionary politics.
10Readers with a touch of cynicism may argue that squabbling generals actually “finished” Sudan’s nascent democracy. This reference work ends with the events following the October 2021 coup, but its conclusions also apply to the current war. The polite agreement underpinning the “community of the state” shattered after the war broke out in Khartoum on April 15, 2023. Its contours, together with the political marketplaces that sustain it, and maybe the entire Sudanese polity, are currently being redrawn through violence.
Notes
1 Alex De Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power, Cambridge, Polity, 2015.
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Référence électronique
Mehdi Labzaé, « Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy. The Promise and Betrayal of a People’s Revolution », Égypte Soudan mondes arabes [En ligne], 25 | 2024, mis en ligne le 10 janvier 2025, consulté le 14 juin 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/esma/3693 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/134aw
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