Is the Sudan war really ‘about nothing’?
There's no such thing as a war about nothing. And Sudan's war is about everything
An American journalist recently stirred controversy with a cover story in The Atlantic magazine framing the war in Sudan as “about nothing”. In the piece, the conflict’s drivers are deemed so inconsequential that Sudan becomes a backdrop for a tangential argument:
“The end of the liberal world order is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in conference rooms and university lecture halls in places like Washington and Brussels. But in al-Ahamdda, this theoretical idea has become reality. The liberal world order has already ended in Sudan, and there isn’t anything to replace it.”
We asked Sudanese people to explain what the war is about.
In response, journalists and researchers pitched reported analyses; community organisers and ordinary citizens sent in personal essays. One submission was a report, rich in detail, that stretched to nine pages long.
What emerges is clear: there is no such thing as a war about nothing.
Sudan’s conflict is in fact no longer a single war, but a series of fragmented contests over just about everything – gold, identity, agricultural land, social philosophies, you name it.
Here are those perspectives, edited for brevity and clarity.
Thank you so much for your valuable work, and for this important initiative. Where can one find the above-mentioned perspectives?
I too was irked by the article but was grateful the Sudan is finally getting some traction in a high profile publication