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Magdi el Gizouli argues that the new prison complexes in Sudan’s major towns are part of the legal scaffolding of the privatisation and austerity assault which continues to punish insolvency with imprisonment. Gizouli sees the massive rates of imprisonment as manifestations of social conflict, the hunger, the hustling, the jockeying, the wheeling and dealing of Sudan today.

On 3 June 2019 there was a massacre of protestors camped around the headquarters of the Sudan Armed Forces in Khartoum - the protestors were attempting to reinvent politics for a world to come.  Magdi el Gizouli and Edward Thomas write about the dynamics of the Sudanese revolution and the need to delve beyond the asphalt of cities and towns.

Examining the recent and brutal attempts to suppress the Sudanese revolution, Magdi el Gizouli looks at the efforts by the regime and its various factions to seize the initiative from the streets. In recent months the ruthless figure of Mohamed Hamdan Daglo (aka Himeidti), the leader of the infamous Rapid Support Forces, has moved into the centre of Sudanese politics. However, will the ‘neighbourhood committees’ be able to translate their revolutionary zeal into mass political action that can unite rural and urban discontent and challenge the regimes hold on power?

For roape.net Magdi el Gizouli provides a detailed account of the revolutionary crisis in Sudan. Events started on 18 and 19 December last year in the small city of Atbara, but soon spread across the country. However, the forces of counter-revolution in the country are formidable. Importers, wholesale merchants, bankers, military and security officers, large landowners, sharia scholars and preachers embedded in Islamic banks, all have stakes in maintaining in the current regime. Magdi el Gizouli argues that to dismantle their powers and to fulfil the promise of the Atbara moment requires a revolution in Leninist terms. The country and its peoples have been subject to deep and dramatic socio-economic changes of which the current wave of protest is a symptom, it is so far unclear whether the leadership of the protest movement can turn elemental anger into systemic agency.

On 22 June ROAPE hosted a webinar on Sudan’s revolutionary upheavels. There was a wide-ranging discussion on the revolutionary struggles in the country, and the current efforts of the transitional government. The full video of the e-meeting is now available.

ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig looks at a year that has seen two astonishing uprisings in Africa, and protest movements that have rippled across the globe. The first, in Sudan, started in the small city of Atbara in December last year. The second major event of the year was the climate strikes around the world. Though these protests were smaller in Africa, the continent remains deeply affected by the consequences of human-made climate change. Zeilig asks what a radical journal and website like ROAPE can do?

To discuss the extraordinary events in Sudan and Algeria that have shaken these countries – and the continent – to the core in recent months, roape.net has asked some of our contributors to debate the significance and meaning of these revolutions. Both countries are confronted by a challenge: are the movements pacified in the interests of the local and global ruling classes or do the revolutionary movements successfully take-on and overturn these deep-rooted and brutal states. The contributions below look at the challenges faced by these revolutions  and the possibilities of creating lasting and fundamental transformation.

Concluding her discussion on the revolts in Sudan and Algeria, Emma Wilde Botta argues that we are seeing a new surge of global revolt against authoritarianism and austerity. Revolutionaries are grappling with questions of strategy and organization as the forces of conservation come into conflict with the forces of transformation.

Sudanese activists in Europe continue to build solidarity for the revolutionary struggle that has, since mid-December, spread across Sudan. What are the dynamics of the uprising, and what is the role of the diaspora? For roape.net, Joe Hayns translates and introduces an interview with Mohamed El-Nour, an activist with the ‘Sudanese Revolutionaries and their Supporters in Marseille’ collective.