Political Elites, Civil Society and the Future of Sudan

This event has been co-organised by the LSE Middle East Centre and the LSE Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa.

The ongoing conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is creating a humanitarian tragedy. The World Food Program has estimated that 95% of the Sudanese population can no longer afford one meal a day. Over 10 million people have been displaced, and observers are warning of a new genocide in Darfur. The capital city, Khartoum remains the site of protracted conflict, with its population having fled into rural areas and neighbouring countries. Despite these unfolding tragedies, international media coverage remains minimal. 

International efforts to address the conflict have been ineffectual, with donor, regional and multilateral actors all repeatedly trying to prop up elite bargains at the expense of engaging those on the ground such as the neighbourhood resistance groups, who have quickly transformed themselves from revolutionary activists into humanitarian relief coordinators. 

This panel will seek to explore the crisis through the prism of ‘disconnection’, exploring the various disconnects and discordances that have formed between Sudanese popular groups, state institutions and international institutions. Stopping the violence and addressing Sudan’s trauma will ultimately require domestic and international actors to align formal policy-making processes with popular realities on the ground. Speakers will explore this notion of disconnection and consider how the sudden displacement of the Sudanese elite from its capital city might re-orient Sudanese politics in future. The panel will finally discuss how such disconnections might be repaired.

Meet the speakers

Mai Hassan is Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her work examines topics that span across authoritarian regimes, bureaucracy and public administration, and contentious politics. Her first book, Regime Threats and State Solutions: Bureaucratic Loyalty and Embeddedness in Kenya, was selected as a Best Book of 2020 by Foreign Affairs, won the American Political Science Association’s 2021 Robert A Dahl Award, and was the recipient of the African Studies Association 2021 Bethwell A. Ogot Award. Hassan also writes for public audiences on the politics of her native Sudan. Before joining MIT, Hassan was as Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. She is currently writing a new book on mobilization under autocracy. 

Kholood Khair is a Sudanese political analyst and the founding director of Confluence Advisory, a "think-and-do" tank based in Khartoum. She is also a radio broadcaster, hosting and co-producing a weekly radio program, Spotlight 249, that is Sudan's first English-language political discussion and debate show aimed at Sudanese youth. Khair has over a decade of experience in research, aid programming and policy in Sudan and across the Horn of Africa. She has written for Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera English, The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy and other international outlets and organizations, and has been quoted widely as a political analyst in the media, including in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC and NPR.

Laura Mann is Associate Professor in International Development in the Department of International Development, LSE and a research affiliate of the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa. Laura is a sociologist whose research focuses on the political economy of development, knowledge and technology. Her regional focus is East Africa (Sudan, Kenya and Rwanda) but she has also worked on collaborative research on ICTs and BPO in Asia and has conducted fieldwork in North America as part of a project on digitisation within global agriculture. Before joining the LSE, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford and at the African Studies Centre in Leiden. She is on the Editorial Working Group of the Review of African Political Economy.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #LSEMiddleEast