by Alden Young
After almost two years of fighting, which has resulted in the world’s largest displacement crisis, Sudan is coming apart as a unified nation. What caused this gloomy assessment? A press conference in Nairobi in March where the RSF, a paramilitary organization once known as the Janjaweed or “devils on horseback,”—the group responsible for ethnic cleansing and genocide in Darfur—announced it was forming a new government to represent the territory that it controls, mostly in western Sudan.
Longtime Sudan observers couldn’t have been more surprised. The RSF primarily come from the Rizeigat, a trans-Sahelian alliance of Arab pastoralists, who had been locked in conflict with many African farmers in western Sudan for decades. Their partners in the newly proposed government are the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement/ Army-North Al-Hilu (SPLM/A-N Al-Hilu), which represents the Nuba people—none other than the RSF’s former foes. Hence, the surprise. What drove such an unexpected alliance? Both rebel groups, the Arabs and the Africans, saw themselves as the al-Muhamashīn, or the marginalized; in effect a united countryside had risen up against the wealthy elites of urban Sudan. In the discourse of Hemedti and his followers, the people of Sudan’s peripheries had been forced to fight one another for decades, while those in the capital became rich as a result of their labor. By pillaging the capital and much of Sudan, they had perverted the concept of a “New Sudan,” developed by local democracy advocates who, earlier, championed a secular Sudan, inclusive of all peoples regardless of race, ethnicity or religion as the answer to marginalization.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. South Sudanese subverted the idea of a “New Sudan,” as well, when they pressed for South Sudan’s independence in 2011. Secessionism, however, didn’t solve the quest for political recognition and self-determination of marginalized groups, many of whom were left behind in the rump state of Sudan. Also, after South Sudan became embroiled in civil war beginning in 2013, the promise of political inclusion began to vanish.
Consequentially today, Sudan is ravaged by violent populists who have plunged the country into civil war. The only way to prevent further conflict is to embrace a peoples-centered Pan-Africanism: empowering local communities to exercise self-determination should become the basis for regional unity. This path forward will cease the proliferation of marginalization that has propelled Sudan’s many bloody wars.
The RSF soldiers of Muhammad Hamdan Daglo, often known as Hemedti, Arabic slang for “my protector,” have actualized their violent ambitions to make Sudan a republic of the marginalized by pillaging Sudan’s cities and setting ablaze much of its farmland. In one of the most widely reported early instances of the Rapid Support Forces turning their weapons on the relatively privileged civilians of Khartoum, RSF fighters were heard shouting, “You used to chant the whole country is Darfur. Now we brought Darfur to you, to Khartoum.” The chant, “We are all Darfur,” originally meant as a promise of solidarity by the residents of prosperous Khartoum with the conflict-plagued peripheries of Sudan, was repurposed by the RSF into a threat. The threat, or the promise, inherent in this chant was that two decades of insurgent warfare against the government and counterinsurgent warfare by the government, which brought about mass atrocities in Sudan’s peripheries, was finally coming home to its relatively affluent capital. The result has been two years of fierce fighting that has killed more than 150,000 people and displaced, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, more than twelve million people.
Recent wars, armed conflicts, and the revision of borders in Sudan’s neighbors like Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia, the Central African Republic, Chad and Libya might give credence to the idea that northeast Africa is particularly conflict prone, uniquely home to failed states. In 1982, Robert H. Jackson and Carl Rosberg, in “Why Africa’s Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood” (World Politics), argued that one of the reasons that African states were so unstable was that there was a mismatch between their juridical recognition through international law and society and their lack of practical control over their own territory. Often this was a colonial legacy, the result of arbitrarily drawn borders by foreign powers made without regard to physical or demographic boundaries. It was also a result of the surprising strength of the post-Second World War international system, enshrined in organizations like the United Nations and, in Africa, the Organization of African Unity. This system and its organizations fostered the norm that national borders should not be rewritten by force. For Jackson and Rosberg this created the historic anomaly that “the survival of Africa’s existing states is largely an international achievement,” rather than the result of constant warfare. In sociology and political science based on the European experience, the expectation is that warfighting is what defines the natural boundaries of the state, not fluffy notions like international law or organizations.
In 1991, the United States responded to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait by leading an international coalition, which reaffirmed the principle that international borders (and borders drawn by international organizations rather than regions or nations) could not be altered by force. George H. W. Bush gave a speech to a joint session of Congress in which he reaffirmed that a new world order was coming into view, “a world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic mission of its founders.” Article two of the United Nations Charter, answers the question of what this historic mission was: it states that, “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” Today, the 1990s appear like the high-water mark of the synthesis between national sovereignty and globalization. Commerce and the friendly relation between states could be guaranteed through the legitimacy of the United Nations underwritten by US power. This made the UN system of stable borders a reality.
Watching today’s American President Donald Trump assert the United States’ right to acquire Greenland, the Panama Canal, Gaza and perhaps Canada by hook or by crook, one might be forgiven for forgetting that George H. W. Bush and Donald J. Trump came to power representing the same political party. While Bush affirmed the U.N. Charter by insisting that borders should not be altered by force, Trump openly declares that the United States should be a territorially expansionist power. All of this occurs as Trump and large parts of the international community shrug as Russia and Israel formally annex territories conquered through war. The post-Second World War consensus that it was necessary to respect both the right of national self-determination and the principle of territorial integrity has come undone.
While Bush affirmed the U.N. Charter by insisting that borders should not be altered by force, Trump openly declares that the United States should be a territorially expansionist power.
For students of African politics, this undoing is not entirely unex-pected. For much of the world, the 1990s were a moment of relative stability, a decade marked by the supremacy of “the rules-based order” or “the unipolar moment” of American power. In East Africa, however, this was a decade of new experiments in statecraft that often went sidewise. These experiments were products of necessity, often marked by tragedy, particularly massive explosions of violence such as the Ethiopian Civil War or the Rwandan Genocide. The political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, reflecting on the crisis of the postcolonial state in Africa in “Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History, writes, “it is not just any state that is collapsing; it is specifically what remains of the colonial state in Africa that is collapsing.” Mamdani meant that the violence that swept across East Africa from the 1970s until the end of the Cold War in 1991 was not senseless violence, but rather the breakdown of state structures inherited from colonial institutions.
Amid the state collapses that accompanied the end of the Cold War, the Derg regime in Ethiopia, Siad Barre’s state in Somalia, the rise of an Islamic State in Sudan and the genocide in Rwanda, a new generation of East African leaders like Yoweri Museveni, Isais Afewerki, Meles Zenawi, Paul Kagame and John Garang asked if true liberation might require the rejection of the borders inherited from colonialism. In their place, they advocated for the adoption of “natural” borders, which would respect Africa’s cultural map. Colonial borders bred conflict, because they forced antagonistic nations to live within the same states. In the process, each nation was denied their right of national self-determination. As Kal Raustiala has noted, this meant putting aside the long-standing principle of international relations in Africa, that paramount principle of territorial integrity, in favor of a focus on the self-determination of nations, defined as collectives of people. For example, the radical members of the Ethiopian Student Movement reimagined the Ethiopian state as an empire made up of many nationalities, each of which had the right to self-determination. Therefore, in order to express each component’s right to self-determination, the state could only be held together legitimately through ethnic federalism. When Eritrean leaders, in 1991, declared that they had the right to independence, Ethiopia, now a federal state, which recognized that each of its component nations had the right to secede, decided that it could not stop them. In a similar vein, South Sudanese activists framed a united Sudan as a project of Arab chauvinism, a form of non-European imperialism. Meanwhile, in Somalia, politicians spoke of a greater Somalia, but at the same time the Somali state itself fractured.
Colonial borders bred conflict, because they forced antagonistic nations to live within the same states.
Secessionism was an early manifestation of a people-centric self-determination within the framework of Pan-Africanism. The willingness to set aside the legacy of colonial borders and colonial institutions in order to imagine a new future for the African continent had been institutionalized in the 1994 Pan-African Congress in Kampala. However, while secessionism began as a program of self-determination, oriented around people, the Tanzanian scholar Issa Shivji in “Pan-Africanism or Imperialism? Unity and Struggle towards a New Democratic Africa,” notes that, by the early 2000s, secessionism had become hostage to statism; the proliferation of new states, led to a proliferation of new elites, and these new elites inevitably fell into conflict with one another. By the mid-1990s, the new generation of African leaders, who emerged as a cohort to challenge colonial legacies, were leading states that were actively fighting with one another, such as Ethiopia and Eritrea or the violence within Somalia.
For the Sudanese political activist and intellectual Muhammad Abu-al-Qasim Hajj Hamad, one answer to the return of violent conflict in the 1990s between and within the states of the Horn of Africa was a “Confederation of the Horn of Africa.” At the heart of this perhaps far-fetched idea was an effort to recognize that politically salient identities stretched across the borders of the Horn of Africa’s new states even after secession. Simply redrawing colonial borders, however, was not a solu-tion. In his 1996 book al-Sūdān, al-maʾziq al-tārīkhī wa-āfāq al-mustaqbal (al-Ṭabʻah 2), Hajj Hamad writes about one of Africa’s newest states at the time, Eritrea . . . “if we wanted to define Eritrean identity—including its extensions—so it is larger than the geographic borders of Eritrea, it extends to Sudan, and Ethiopia, and Djibouti, i.e. the characteristics of the Eritrean entity represent shared divisions between these people and countries.” Hajj Hamad went on to argue that contrary to the idea that secessionism would lessen violent conflicts over political identities, to accommodate a force like Eritrean nationalism, Eritrea had to be part of “. . . a cohesive and integrated framework with the countries surrounding it.” Secessionism leading to nationalism that emphasized the autonomy of each state was doomed to foster conflict according to Hajj Hamad. Because Hajj Hamad believed that it would be impossible to settle upon boundaries that accurately captured the aspirations of people for self-determination. Instead, the only solution was to create multi-national entities that would allow each nation to feel secure in its own ambitions.
For scholars like Hajj Hamad or Issa Shivji, the path forward was an International Relations of Pan-Africanism, one that was capable of being both people-centered, and therefore sensitive to their national aspirations, but also able to recognize overlapping claims of self-determination without framing them as exclusive. Hajj Hamad said that the goal of a project like the Confederation of the Horn of Africa was not replace colonial borders but to:
. . . eliminate (the binary) conflicting racial and religious divisions, as conflicts between the South of Sudan and its North (African/Arab—Christian/Muslim) or in Eritrea (Muslim/Christian) or in Ethiopia (Amhara—Oromo—Tigriniya) or in Djibouti (Afar—Aesa) in order for all to live together included in one entity carrying the charac-teristics of all and not elevating one side above another as rulers in the contemporary country structures, indeed there will not be a South and North Sudan, or a struggle between Christians and Muslims, or struggle of Amharas and Oromos, so the entity will contain all of them . . .
The challenge for scholars like Hajj Hamad was how to create political institutions that recognized but did not ossify the political identities inherited from the colonial experience. Hajj Hamad imagined that a Kushitic identity might be formed, which would embrace the diversity found within the Horn of Africa or an African Sufism might arise capable of reconciling the continent’s Islamic and African heritages. For Hajj Hamad, the new identities had to be capacious enough to recognize what Mahmood Mamdani argues is the porous nature of all African political boundaries. The shortcomings of seeking to organize African politics around nation-states is that in practice nations are less than and more than the states that represent them.
The problem of creating states that capture African people’s desire for representation continues to haunt political transitions until now. A year apart in 2018 and 2019, the Horn of Africa’s two largest states Ethiopia and Sudan underwent political transitions. In Ethiopia, a char-ismatic young leader Abiy Ahmed became Prime Minister and promised to liberalize the country’s politics and economy. Meanwhile, in 2019, the thirty-year rule of the Sudanese dictator, Omar Al-Bashir, ended. In both countries a chaotic transition began, transitions which ultimately devolved into violent conflicts. Conflicts that were shaped by the resurfacing of the binaries that Hajj Hamad had warned thirty years earlier would continue to haunt the Horn of Africa even after the emergence of new states like Eritrea, South Sudan, and Somaliland. Secessionism could not resolve the overflowing of political identities beyond state boundaries or sever the complex webs of interconnections and interdependencies that tied the region together. Instead, Sudan and South Sudan both devolved into separate civil wars, and Eritrea became militarily involved in Ethiopia’s Tigray War. In both cases one of the precipitating factors was the presence of an unresolved ethnic homeland on the border, in the case of South Sudan/Sudan the Ngok Dinka and the Misseriya and in the case of Eritrea/Ethiopia the Tigrinya homeland. The politics of these transborder communities became the excuse for war. The emergence of new states did not settle conflicts, it simply made them more complex. For scholars like Hajj Hamad and Issa Shivji this was an obvious outcome. After all, they believe that a Pan-Africanism that was people-oriented, required international relations that recognize people possess political identities at different and overlapping levels from the tribe, or ethnic group, to the state and region, and even transregionally. For Hajj Hamad and Issa Shivji, the reification of the state above the other layers of politics left states brittle and isolated, unable to meet the needs of their people for political recognition.
Yet, given the failure of secessionism and state-led movements to build African Unity or to achieve democratic self-determination, what might be done? Here, it is necessary to return to the innovations born out of crisis. By 2019 Sudan, was deeply embroiled in political and economic turmoil. Nearly thirty years of military rule and attempts to enforce a rigid interpretation of Islamic morality on the country had resulted in endless conflict in Sudan’s peripheries, a proliferation of armed militia and para-military movements, and the secession, in 2011, of a third of the country. While Sudan is rich in oil, gold, and other valuable minerals, the economy remained in free-fall. Mass demonstrations broke out across the country in 2018 partially inspired by a lack of basic necessities such as bread, medicine, and even Sudanese pounds. In April 2019, Omar el-Bashir, the long-time dictator fell. Yet, the country’s politics were still controlled by its security sector and the various pro and anti-government militias that jockeyed for power. International mediators have tended to focus on insuring peace deals with the armed groups and those political actors who have formal titles and international connections, yet those actors have lost legitimacy with the masses of Sudanese particularly in the face of popular movements, which have sprung up demanding accountability and insisting that political power needs to flow to the people mobilized in the streets.
Neighborhood resistance committees and emergency response rooms sprang up to fill the void that was created as the Sudanese state devolved into little more than a rapacious protection racket. The neighborhood resistance committees emerged out of the daily confrontations with the Sudanese security state in 2019, as activists were forced to organize locally in order to protect their communities from predation. This meant defending their neighborhoods from government paramilitary forces hoping to collect illegal taxes or providing basic services like medical care and food pantries. They grew out of an alliance that built up over time between under-employed students and university graduates and the hustlers, street vendors and peddlers that increasingly dominated Sudan’s urban and peri-urban neighborhoods. Describing why they were able to shake up Sudan’s ossified political structures, Magdi el-Gizouli writes that the neighborhood (or resistance) committee, “combines the emancipatory potential of a popular movement with a radically democratic structure.” Starting at the neighborhood level, these committees join forces with one another to create a counter-public. As the military and its political parties tried to regain control of Sudan’s politics, these committees organized constant protests which slowed down the acceptance of international financial institutions such as the World Bank, IMF or USAID’s restructuring of the Sudanese economy and contested the Sudanese security services assertion of immunity for crimes committed against the Sudanese people. One of their core demands has been transparency. To the frustration of US officials, they have rejected the idea of closed-door negotiations, and they frequently ostracize those members who agree to negotiate with the military, international donors, or even the technocratic government without inviting the public to witness.
Neighborhood resistance committees and emergency response rooms sprang up to fill the void that was created as the Sudanese state devolved into little more than a rapacious protection racket.
Perhaps the most revolutionary act of the resistance committees has come in their attempts to put forth a new national charter for Sudan and, in the process, re-imagine how the Sudanese nation might conceptualize itself. The Revolutionary Charter For Establishing People’s Power calls for Sudan to “adopt a decentralized system of governance during the transitional period to guarantee broad powers to the various states of Sudan.” According to the charter, local government then needs to be restructured. In Sudan, particularly, the economically productive countryside has been ruled by militias, which tax the production of commodities. The resistance committees imagine that both the rural and urban areas will be governed by their own democratic governments. These locally-based committees, when brought together, become the basis of what Shivji called a people’s Pan-Africanism.
This People’s Pan-Africanism has never been more vital, because the alternative in the Horn of Africa is only further fracturing. In Sudan, it looks like Darfur may secede or become mired in endless conflict as the war which began in 2023 turns the sons of the West and the sons of the Nile into competing identities. Because large parts of Western Sudan are now governed by the RSF outside of the control of the SAF, these two identities which used to be mere descriptors are becoming antagonistic political identities. The RSF’s plans for secession would only deepen the division, but it is unlikely to resolve the conflict, as being a Westerner or a son of the Nile is likely to be one of many identities that an individual possesses. The emergence of stable nation-states is unlikely to occur as a result of further fracturing. Similarly Eritrea and Ethiopia appear on the verge of war once again, and South Sudan is also teetering on the brink of renewed civil war.
In the place of secessionism, what is required is a politics that can democratically aggregate from the local to the national and beyond to the regional. But this politics must be able to build on the plurality of communities’ identities without falling prey to the temptation to create poisonous binaries. This requires building from the perspective of the people not the state, and also embracing new categories of international politics from the local, such as pastoral communities, or unions of street vendors, to the transnational such as tribal confederations like the Sahelian Arab Rizeigat or mobile merchant diasporas—All of these are identities that the discipline of international relations has long ignored when thinking about self-determination and its relationship to the state. Yet, ignoring these identities, which frequently overflow state-boundaries, has left the Horn of Africa embroiled in endless conflict. The dynamics we witness in the Horn of Africa exist across the world from Israel/Palestine to the former republics of the Soviet Union to Eastern Congo and go a long way towards explaining why peace and stability remain so elusive.