According to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), more than 8.6 million people have been displaced by the war in Sudan, including over 2 million people who have fled to neighbouring countries such as Chad, South Sudan, and Central African Republic.

Countless civilians have been killed and wounded since April 2023, when fighting broke out between two rival factions of the armed forces, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and a powerful paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The RSF was previously known as the Janjaweed, a militia that was used by the Sudanese ruling elite in its notorious war in the Darfur region in the early 2000s. Beginning in 2013, the Sudanese Army regularised the Janjaweed, converting them into the RSF, which operated as a semi-autonomous component of the SAF.

However, the power relationship between these two anti-democratic formations exploded into armed conflict.

The main victims of this struggle have been the ordinary Sudanese people, particularly the popular resistance committees that had grown out of the movement against the Omar al-Bashir dictatorship. The resistance committees, leading a non-violent mass movement had forced a democratic opening.

To gain insights into the current situation, Red Ant spoke with Saskia Jaschek, who is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. Her research focuses on social movement and protest research. Her main research interests include political subjectivation, political emotions, narratives and identities of social movements, dynamics of street protests, and practices of resistance. Saskia’s PhD project engages with Sudan’s revolutionary movement and their resistance to a military coup d’état.

See the interview below or click here: https://youtu.be/hARf2lf9CM4