Women hold a banner reading in Arabic “Sudanese Feminist Union—No to war, we will not be ruled by a partnership of blood,” in Khartoum on December 19, 2022, protesting the agreement signed by military and civilian leaders, which critics dismissed as vague. (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
In Sudan, the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces entered its third year in April 2025. The conflict—which has triggered the world’s worst displacement crisis, nearly 13 million people—has its roots in the failed political transition following the overthrow of long-time dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Marya Hannun, MERIP’s managing editor, interviewed Raga Makawi, a Sudanese editor and researcher studying the intersections of revolution, materiality and identity in post Bashir Sudan, to discuss the longer history of feminist and gender-based organizing in the country, how gender was mobilized within the revolution and what the ongoing war has meant for women. Their conversation took place on May 30, 2025 and has been edited for length and clarity.
Marya Hannun: To start can you tell me a bit about your background—whether in researching women’s movements, feminist politics or your experience thinking about gender in Sudan?
Raga Makawi: I grew up in Sudan in the 1990s, right after the Islamist regime under Omar al-Bashir came to power. People of my generation came to, politically and socially, when the regime was at its height, so there was a clamp down, both ideological and physical: Government policies restricted women’s presence in public spaces, and the violence meted out by the state against the public prompted women’s further isolation. It was a double effect that undid decades of women’s political participation and mobilization in Sudan. Sudan has a long history of resistance and social mobilization that always included women: on the worker front, on the union front, in anti-colonial movements. The 1990s reversed much of that legacy. But the regime didn’t leave a void—it built an alternative women’s project. The idea was to present a gender project for the Sudanese nation that consolidated a uniform image of a proper Sudani woman, as pious, her contribution recognized and glorified as long as it can be harnessed in the service of a collective nationalist identity. State gender and social control policies—like the Public Order Act of 1992 developed to police women’s dress and behavior—were one of the state’s structural approaches to manage the women’s question in the Bashir era. This was part of a longer state project to force a single national identity in a country that is incredibly diverse—ethnically, religiously, and linguistically. If you didn’t meet it, you were treated as an outsider to be punished. The consequences of that were quite severe and problematic.
Marya: What did that mean for Sudan’s women’s movement and its ability to make political claims?
A clear example is the family law. It’s a rigid and problematic law that is biased in favor of male authority. It reinforces guardianship. Parts of the family law have been on the table for reform since the 1990s, yet there’s been little to no change in over three decades. The only logic to this is that women don’t have the political leverage to compel the state to act, nor do they have the social or economic leverage to influence society towards change. Nation states are not in the business of giving people rights. That’s not how it works. But even at heightened moments of social upheaval—Sudan has had three revolutions, and these revolutions did create some sort of social and political progress—the women’s agenda was never a substantial part of it, even though women’s representation in organizational resistance has been prominent. It begs the question: what are Sudanese women working towards, and why have we failed to compel the state or the political establishment to take women’s demands more seriously?
Marya: What role did international organizations play in shaping the women’s rights agenda during this period?
Raga: In the 1980s, Sudan (like many states in the global South) was subject to liberalization through its encounter with international financial institutions, like the IMF, who made economic policies and loans conditional on political and economic liberalization: With IMF conditionalities came a new civil society, heavily funded by international donors. It led to a situation of more civil society, but less representation—compared to the sort of grass roots civil society, which is something that had existed throughout Sudan’s history. I’m thinking here of the Jamiat Ahliyah, which were communal projects, where people self-funded and were self-reliant in investing in community initiatives they deemed necessary with very little intervention either from the outside or from the state. This ensured values that universal systems claim to espouse but fail to demonstrate such as accountability, transparency and resilience. Even Sudan’s only women’s university, the Ahfad Women’s University had roots as a community project to educate women. With liberalization, the focus shifted firmly to a western idea of a women’s empowerment agenda, which enforced the vertical elevation of women through professionalization towards upward social mobility. This resulted in a small circle of elite women. They became professionalized in the technocracy of humanitarian or universal rights language and politics, which is very sanitized. It doesn’t really deal with the people or with the politics of everyday life in Sudan. If you do a survey of civil society work from the 80s on, there’s very little engagement with socioeconomic issues. Civil society and the women rights agenda had little to no politics in its post 1980s iteration.
By the 2000s, Liberal Peace became the dominant framework. Funding poured into projects aligned with the Women, Peace and Security agenda (as set forth by the 2000 UN security council resolution). The irony is for all the talk on women, peace and security, at the first test, which is this current war in Sudan, if you map the terrain, you find very little presence of all these institutions and processes that were invested in for decades. Ultimately these systems isolated the general public from their own control over whatever peace is and civil society’s interventions in it. Worse still they created parallel and siloed political tracks for groups depending on their geographical and ethnic background. Peace in Darfur, as it was in South Sudan, assumes an approach and process as well as tools and a language that is separate from mainstream politics. Peace fragmented the Sudanese polity at the level of regions and communities, weakening the national sense of identity. Yet, when it all unraveled, when the real conflict happened, everything we’ve been told was set up to stop a moment like this is nowhere to be found. And it’s the everyday, average Sudani people, who were marginalized from civil society, who are now left to deal with the consequences.
Marya: I have more questions about the present war, but I first wanted to pick up on on your earlier description of women’s roles in multiple revolutions in Sudan, and how you both see women as very active political participants, and, at the same time, how the women’s movement’s claims have been marginalized within broader movements. How did this play out in the revolution that began in December of 2018 and that, in many ways, prefigured the current war?
As a result, when the revolution happened what we saw is people refusing to allow the traditional systems or approaches to represent them, and this included women. They didn’t fall in line to allow leaders of political parties to speak on their behalf and decide what a political roadmap would be. It was great, but it was also confusing. We were at a very sensitive juncture after Bashir fell, where the focus was on a time-bound model transition. But people didn’t necessarily view the transition as the panacea to Sudan’s crisis. They didn’t want to end up being stuck in another project that takes 30 years to unravel. So, they found themselves resisting Bashir’s system after he fell, which included a cabal of civic actors tied to the militarized state project. Sudan’s most foregrounded political slogan continues to be #JustFall, which denotes the persistence of the crisis regardless of the leadership. It is against the establishment, which is the political elite both civil and military.
Women were very central and prominent in pushing back against the prescribed process towards change or transition, not only in the sense that they were present with their bodies and with their voices and with their ideas, but their struggle was multi-pronged in the sense that they fought the system—the security state that tried to silence them—but they also sometimes fought their fellow protesters, those who didn’t think that women should protest to begin with, or who believed women should protest, but only in a very particular way. Women were told directly and indirectly that their presence in streets was supposed to reinforce the main movement’s agenda, which was a change in the regime, or “democracy,” but not to make political demands that reflected their specific needs: protection laws, gender sensitive policies that promote equality in the workplace or in the household. We also have the term kandaka. It’s associated with the Sudanese woman protester, but Sudani women don’t call themselves that. It’s a term bestowed by Sudani men on women whose politics remain within the confines of what is approved of socially. I for one am not a kandaka. Sudanese women who deviate from the main political line and start to ask for other kinds of rights are not kandakas. The slogan, “the public is private,” emerged from this tension. It was women’s way of rejecting the prioritization of so-called public political demands over other issues. Women said: our democracy begins with our right to exist without violence. These “private” issues are public, and they are political.
Marya: Can you speak more about how gender dynamics played out within the revolution’s resistance committees and the tensions that emerged around women’s political participation during the transition?
Raga: The transition at the state level took place in parallel to the ongoing social and political revolutionary mobilization on the ground, which was much more progressive and politically viable. In the case of this particular revolution, because it came, as I said before, after 30 years of restrictive Islamic rule, the sudden openings of all these spaces occupied by both men and women did create a lot of tensions. But I still think the Sudanese people were able to manage it well. What it means to transition towards a democracy, what it means to govern ourselves through a civic framework, what it means to be a civil society… Sudanese people learned this on the ground through interaction and experience between 2019 until the coup in 2021. Of course, contestation is going to come out of this.
At some point, because the resistance committees were the central mechanism through which these new civic formations were being negotiated, Sudanese women realized they needed to secure their membership within them, so a call was published to formally join the committees: #khoshi_al_lajana. The initiative encouraged women to register as members in their neighborhood resistance committees. There was recognition that it wasn’t enough to protest every day. Protesting was a form of political expression, but becoming a member in the resistance committees safeguards one’s political identity and their right to a say in where these new political formations are heading. In a country where, historically, it was only the elite who were able to shape policy or political action—to have the general public organizing politically in these grassroots bodies en masse, that’s a really impressive form of right to politics that we’ve not seen in decades. It was a resistance against the authoritarian project in Sudan but also the authoritarian project globally that favors controlled representation through voting and traditional electoral politics.
Marya: How did these two planes, the more formal or state-level transition and the popular mobilizations, intersect or diverge when it comes to women’s political claim making?
Raga: I can answer that question by referring to two examples of women’s mobilizing that existed in parallel and within different political processes. In March of 2019, women protestors called for a women’s march. The call was in itself emblematic of the accumulation of collective mobilizations at the level of the resistance committees, where women had been associating amongst themselves and developing new ideas as to what women’s rights are and what a grassroots women’s movement is. During the transitional process, some revolutionary manifestos and constitutional documents that had been produced became written into popular law, and women wanted to emulate the process through institutionalizing their political rights into the emergent discourse. They developed a manifesto explaining their demands: universal health care, improved maternal care, equal pay and addressing the violence of guardianship systems to women and children. The transitional government had by then been in power for months already, and there was an expectation that they would push policies that considered women’s urgent needs. The march that was organized around International Women’s Day was a show of feminist power in the streets. They were signaling to the revolution that we might walk with you every day; we might protest with you every day towards a grand democratic project, but within that, we carve a space for ourselves to reinforce that women’s rights need to be a priority.
The second mobilization, Campaign 50 percent, was about representation at the state level—the international community’s preferred model of political action. Unlike with the previous example, this form of organizing for rights, as expressed by one member of the campaign who I spoke with, was extremely successful. We both found it absurdly funny. According to her, the campaign from the get go received so much traction and funding as well as political backing that was lacking elsewhere. She felt that overnight, they went from being activists to bona fide civil society members because they chose to do politics through representation. Some of the women involved in Campaign 50 were also members of grassroots bodies whose activism extended to equally if not more important issues that failed to gain as much traction because they were not of interest to the international community. The issue here is that not all political agendas were created equal. Yes, representation is important, but a lot has to happen on the ground level for representation to actually make sense.
This is one of the under-acknowledged reasons why the 2021 coup that brought an end to the transition was successful. Because the transitional government lost its connection to the popular movement. It replaced popular backing with international interests and legitimacy. No amount of money that comes from the West, or meetings in external metropoles, is going to stop state violence or bring about social change, only a grass roots based political project with the organizational means and institutional investment can provide long lasting change in Sudan.
Marya: The failure to build a check on this violence has manifested in what has been variously described as a “counterrevolutionary war,” a “proxy war” or “the general’s war.” How has this affected women’s political mobilization as you see it? And maybe that raises a question too about which women.
When it comes to women, the long history of dispossession, whether financial, legal or economic, created more vulnerabilities. When I was leaving Sudan after the war started, I met a lot of women who had to stay because the male guardians in the family would not give them the permission to leave or because they don’t have the means to exit. Access and exit are two major issues for disempowered women wherever they are in Sudan. Those who were prevented from exiting also suffer limited access to life saving needs. Insecurity limits their mobility in general. They can’t access markets to secure their daily food intake, travel to escape conflict or move within or across cities to seek medical help. Even at the level of the household, as people huddle in a few displaced locations, women have to share limited infrastructure with men, which in turn affects their ability to care for themselves and their bodies. One woman told me the worst days were when she got her period. She could only use the bathroom once and late at night. Water is scarce, and she was constantly exposed to the male gaze without the necessary amenities to care for her bodily hygiene. Similar stories are coming out of Gaza. There are these everyday challenges. Then there is also the gendered violence of the war itself, for example, the RSF’s use of rape as a weapon of war.
Marya: Last year, we published a piece by Nada Ali about Khartoum’s women-led street vendor collectives and how they have had to navigate the gendered violence of war, which connects with what you’re saying here. In her piece she describes the sexual violence and deprivation that women face, but also how women, specifically and as women, have mobilized a politics of care through their networks. And in some cases, the women she writes about really managed to push back against the international efforts to control women and how they use resources. In the absence of any analysis, there’s something really significant about the work being done by women who have no choice but to stay, and this speaks to the point you have been making throughout the conversation about the importance of these kind of social and political formations that exist beyond the state and international community.
Raga: I do know that a lot of Sudanese women activists are taking on so much work to try and protect, secure and provide for women in need. And this is obviously done through extended kinship systems but also through political networks that have emerged out of the revolution. I’ll quote Arendt and say that politics happen everywhere, in every interaction. Every human interaction is a political interaction. It doesn’t just happen at the state level—even though both the mainstream war discourse and the anti-war discourse, on some level, want us to believe that war and peace are happening at the level of the state or state politics only. I think in every interaction across Sudan, in every place, in every neighborhood, in every state, women who are neighbors or working on the street or huddled together waiting the conflict out, they don’t have to give each other anything, just by being together, just by communicating their fears, their ideas…I mean, every action and act is gendered politics. What will emerge from that in terms of charting a future for Sudan post war, perhaps this requires a little bit more reflection. But I think at every moment, Sudanese women are helping each other in different ways, even with the very little resources that they have.
