CIRS Monthly Dialogue: Asian Migration in a Global Context
2026-02-09 18:00 - 19:00 (Asia/Qatar)
This public panel brings together scholars to examine how migration categories are produced, governed, and contested within Asia and across transnational flows from the Global South to the Global North. Moving beyond fixed labels such as migrant, refugee, skilled worker, or trafficking victim, the discussion explores how state policies, visa regimes, and labor markets shape mobility in practice.

On February 9th, the Center for International and Regional Studies CIRS hosted a public panel featuring scholars from the workshop Rethinking Migration Categories from the Global South. The discussion brought together three panelists, Brenda Yeoh, Payal Banerjee, and Bina Fernandez, to examine how migration regimes classify, control, and at times constrain those who move across borders, with particular attention to perspectives from the Global South.

Brenda Yeoh opened by mapping the dominance of temporary migration regimes across Asia, where pathways to permanent residency or citizenship remain structurally inaccessible for low skilled workers. She critiqued Western centric paradigms in migration studies, highlighting how mechanisms like enclavisation and enclosure, the spatial segregation of migrants and the use of borders as instruments of discipline, function to contain rather than include. Her central provocation was this: how do states design systems explicitly not to integrate migrants, and how should scholars study migration not as states define it, but as migrants actually experience it?

Payal Banerjee drew on her research into Indian IT workers in the United States to examine the mechanics of status dependence, the way a migrant’s legal and economic existence becomes tethered to a single employer. This produces structural vulnerability, including precarious legal standing, limited labor mobility, and chronic anxiety. She connected these individual experiences to broader global asymmetries, arguing that employer sponsored visa regimes are not incidental but deliberate, and that the Indian tech sector’s deep reliance on Western markets reflects wider patterns in which Global South economies remain structurally dependent on Global North capital and labor demand.

Bina Fernandez challenged Eurocentric framings by repositioning Australia within the Asia Pacific region and introducing the concept of “uninvited migrants and settlers” to foreground colonial histories. She critiqued Australia’s offshore detention regime as a calculated deterrence strategy while also noting more hopeful developments, such as the Australia Tuvalu bilateral agreement offering climate linked mobility pathways. She identified three migration regimes deserving particular critical attention: forced deportation regimes, climate and disaster induced displacement, and statelessness.

The panel’s discussion surfaced several cross cutting themes. Participants examined how migration governance increasingly treats human movement as a problem to be managed, with administrative categories serving as tools of state control that generate waiting, anxiety, and unequal power. The rise of AI, biometrics, and surveillance technologies was described as double edged, enhancing border enforcement while also enabling migrants to build digital networks and transnational communities. Panelists also interrogated the politics of labeling itself, noting that categories like “refugee” or “skilled worker” carry colonial and racial histories, and that the global skills hierarchy reframes exclusion through the language of merit. Finally, feminist perspectives on social reproduction highlighted how migrant domestic workers effectively labor for two households simultaneously, with migration redistributing care work globally along gendered and racialized lines.

Article by Maryam Daud, CIRS administrative Assistant and Haala Qamar CIRS Student Assistant

Speakers:

Brenda S.A. Yeoh FBA is Distinguished Professor, National University of Singapore (NUS) and Migration and Mobilities Cluster, at NUS’ Asia Research Institute. She was awarded the Vautrin Lud Prize for outstanding achievements in Geography in 2021 for her contributions to migration and transnationalism studies. Her research interests in Asian migrations span themes including social reproduction and care migration; skilled migration and cosmopolitanism; and marriage migrants and cultural politics.

Bina Fernandez is Professor in Development Studies at the University of Melbourne. She obtained PhD and MPhil degrees at the University of Oxford and has held academic positions at the University of Leeds, the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, the University of Oxford and the University of Oxford-Brookes. Bina’s research focuses on migration and social policy, analysed through the feminist lens of social reproduction. For over a decade, she has conducted multi-sited research on Ethiopian migrant domestic workers in the Middle East; key themes have been the conditions of work, the care needs of migrants, migrant mothers and their children at risk of statelessness. She has also undertaken research on Ethiopian refugees in Kenya and Australia. Current research on ‘Diaspora Humanitarians’ investigates the regenerative contributions of Australia-based migrant and refugee diasporas to the social reproduction of their homeland communities during times of crisis.

Payal Banerjee is Professor of Sociology at Smith College, USA. Her research focuses on the political economies of migration, globalization, and the role of policies in structuring labor incorporation, migrant categories, and status displacement. Banerjee’s work on Indian IT workers in the US has appeared in International Migration, Critical Sociology, Race, Gender, and Class, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Irish Journal of Anthropology, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Social & Public Policy Review, Man in India, and in several edited volumes. Banerjee’s publications on Chinese minorities in India have appeared in Security and Peace, China Report, Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, Huaqiao Huaren Lishi Yanjiu (Overseas Chinese History Studies, in Mandarin), and in the book Doing Time with Nehru. As a Borders Studies Group member, she co-published India China: Rethinking Borders and Security. Banerjee served as a research fellow at the BRICS Policy Center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and, taught at the Graduate Program in International Affairs, The New School in New York City, and in India at Sikkim University in Gangtok and at FLAME in Pune, as visiting faculty.

Moderator:

Waleed Ziad is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University in Qatar. His research interests lie at the intersection of social history, religious studies, and anthropology. Professor Ziad’s scholarship examines the historical and philosophical foundations of Muslim revivalism and mysticism in South and Central Asia and Iran. In this endeavor, he has conducted extensive fieldwork in over 140 towns across Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan. He is the author of Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints Beyond the Oxus and Indus (Harvard Press, 2021), which won the prestigious Albert Hourani Prize given by the Middle East Studies Association of North America as well as the American Institute for Pakistan Studies 2022 Book Prize. His most recent book In the Treasure Room of the Sakra King: Votive Coinage from Gandharan Shrines (American Numismatic Society, 2022) builds on his long-standing research into numismatics and material culture of the Indo-Iranian borderlands. His forthcoming book, Sufi Masters of the Afghan Empire: Bibi Sahiba and Her Sacred Networks (Harvard Press), is a continuation of his core research on the development of Sufi networks, spanning modern-day Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, India, China, and Russia. He has also written extensively on historical and ideological trends in the Muslim world, his work appearing in The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Christian Science Monitor, and The Hill.

CIRS Monthly Dialogue: What Arab Authoritarianism Tells Us About the World
2026-03-09 17:30 - 19:00
rEGISTER nOW

This panel highlights contributions in the new Handbook on Authoritarianism in the Arab World, forthcoming open access from Bloomsbury Politics. The Handbook highlights the specificities of authoritarianism in the Arab world while placing the region in the context of global trends. The panel will feature Dana Al Kurd (Associate Professor at University of Richmond) Yasmeen Mekawy (Assistant Professor at Northwestern Qatar), Alexei Abrahams (Assistant Professor at HBKU), and Abdullah Al Arian (Associate Professor at GU-Q), moderated by Diana Buttu, to discuss trends in research on authoritarianism, emotions in the Arab Spring uprisings, and digital authoritarianism.

Moderator:

Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer specializing in international law and human rights, returns to GU-Q as a Practitioner-in-Residence for the academic year. She will teach Palestine and the Law and Negotiation and Organizational Conflict, offering students a practitioner’s lens on diplomacy, accountability, and resistance. A former legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team and fellow at Stanford and Harvard, she is a frequent commentator on Palestine and international law in global media.

Speakers:

Dana El Kurd is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Richmond, in Richmond, Virginia, USA. She specializes in Palestinian and Arab politics, particularly on topics related to mobilization, public opinion, and international intervention. Her first book, titled Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine, was published in January 2020 with Oxford University Press. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Global Studies Quarterly, PS: Political Science & Politics, and Democratization, as well as media outlets such as The Nation, Foreign Policy, Jewish Currents, Financial Times, and more. El Kurd is a senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington, and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Palestine Studies as well as the Board of Directors of Jewish Currents.

Alexei Abrahams is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, Qatar. His research examines information manipulation and cybersecurity using big data and social science methods, with a current focus on designing digital observatories to assess the health of media ecosystems. His work has appeared in journals including Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Political Science Research & Methods, and International Journal of Communication, and has informed reporting in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Reuters, and CBC News.Previously, he served as Digital Lead for the Canadian Media Ecosystems Observatory at McGill University and held research fellowships at Harvard, the University of Toronto, Princeton University, and UC San Diego. He earned his PhD in Economics from Brown University and frequently consults for the World Bank.

Yasmeen Mekawy is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in Qatar. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago, specializing in the comparative politics of the Middle East and North Africa. Her research and teaching focus on social movements and revolution, digital media and popular culture, and the politics of emotion. She examines how emotions mobilize and demobilize collective action, and how affect circulates through social media and cultural forms. Her work has been published in Mediterranean Politics. She is currently working on her book project on the role of affect and emotion in the making and unmaking of Egypt’s 2011 revolution. affect circulates through social media and cultural forms. Her work has been published in Mediterranean Politics. She is currently working on her book project on the role of affect and emotion in the making and unmaking of Egypt’s 2011 revolution.

Abdullah Al-Arian is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University in Qatar wherehe specializes in the modern Middle East and the study of Islamic social movements. He is theauthor of Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt, editor of Football inthe Middle East: State, Society, and the Beautiful Game and co-editor of the forthcoming GlobalHistories and Practices of Islamophobia. He is also editor of the Critical Currents in Islam pageon the Jadaliyya e-zine.

CIRS Book Talk: Halfway to Freedom: The Struggles and Strivings of African American in Washington, DC by Maurice Jackson
2026-04-13 13:00 - 14:00
In Conversation with Professor Maurice Jackson

The book, set to be published next year, traces the struggles of African Americans for equality and human rights from 1780 to 2020. Through the history of Washington DC, it shows how Black lived experiences, political mobilization, and resistance mirror broader national struggles. By centering the city as both a symbolic and material site of power, the book tells the history of the United States through Black Washingtonians.

Maurice Jackson teaches in the History and African American Studies Departments and is Affiliated Professor of Music (Jazz) at Georgetown University. Before coming to academe, he worked as a longshoreman, shipyard rigger, construction worker and community organizer. He is author of Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism, co-editor of African-Americans and the Haitian Revolution, of Quakers and their Allies in the Abolitionist Cause,1754-1808 and DC Jazz: Stories of Jazz Music in Washington, DC. Jackson wrote the liner notes to the 2 jazz CDs by Charlie Haden and Hank Jones, Steal Away: Spirituals, Folks Songs and Hymns and Come Sunday. He has recently lectured in France, Turkey, Italy, Puerto Rico, and Qatar. He served on Georgetown University Slavery Working Group. A 2009 inductee into the Washington, D.C. Hall of Fame he was appointed by the Mayor and the DC Council as Inaugural Chair of the DC Commission on African American Affairs (2013-16) and presented “An Analysis: African American Employment, Population & Housing Trends in Washington, D.C.” to the Mayor and elected leaders of the D.C. government in 2017. He is completing work on Halfway to Freedom: The Struggles and Strivings of African American in Washington, DC to be published by Duke University Press. His next books will be We Knew No Other Way: The Many-Sided Struggle for Freedom and Black Radicalism: A Very Short Introduction.

(Re)Collecting Sudan: Art and Culture Archives Workshop II
2026-04-15 08:00 - 17:00
On September 21, 2025, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) hosted its second workshop for the “(Re)Collecting Sudan: Art and Culture Archives” research initiative. ​This workshop served as a platform for project contributors to engage in detailed discussions and receive constructive feedback on their submitted papers.

To ensure a thorough review process and provide robust feedback for all submissions, the workshop was organized into five thematically focused sessions. These sessions included Historical Archives, Digital Archives, Art Archives, Lyrical Archives, and Archives of Exile. This strategic segmentation allowed for in-depth engagement with each paper, ensuring that discussions were contextualized within their specific scholarly domains and fostering specialized insights.

The “Historical Archives” section initiated the discussions, featuring two prominent papers. Eiman Hussein, Talal Afifi, and Erica Carter’s paper “Experiencing Hussein Shariffe: Encounters with the Archives—A Collective Auto-Ethnography,” offered a unique, shared exploration of historical interactions. This was followed by Ahmad Sikainga’s “The Archives of Leisure and Popular Culture in Colonial and Post-Colonial Khartoum,” which meticulously examined the cultural nuances preserved within these historical records.

Transitioning to contemporary approaches, the “Digital Archives” session showcased three insightful papers. Amna Elidrissy, Zainab Gaafar, and Helen Mallinson co-authored “Live Museums: An Ecosystem for Safeguarding Heritage,” highlighting innovative digital platforms for cultural preservation. Larissa-Diana Fuhrmann and Aya Hassan then explored modern archiving in “Instagram as Archive: Sudanese Artists and Political Memory,” demonstrating the role of social media in capturing historical narratives. The session concluded with Marilyn Deegan, Wahbi Abdalfattah Abdalrahman, and Locale’s “Sudan Memory: Building and Narrating the Digital Archive,” detailing efforts in constructing comprehensive digital repositories.

Further expanding the scope, the “Art Archives” session addressed the intersection of art and historical documentation through two compelling papers. Reem Aljeally and Katarzyna Grabska’s “Accidental Archiving? Questioning Curation and Research as Forms of Archiving in the Midst of Political Violence and War in Sudan” critically examined spontaneous archiving practices during conflict. Rahiem Shadad then presented “What Can We Learn from Sudan’s Collective Image-Making History?” emphasizing the value of visual cultural heritage.

The “Lyrical Archives” session highlighted the power of oral and poetic traditions, featuring Qutouf Elobaid’s “Songs of the Barracks: Sudanese Poetic Archives of the 2018 December Revolution,” and Ruba El Melik and Reem Abbas’s “Women Archiving Sudan: How Women Use Fashion, Songs, and Poetry to Preserve History,” both illustrating the profound role of lyrical expression in documenting historical events.

The workshop concluded with the “Archives of Exile” session, which explored the preservation of cultural memory in diaspora. Bentley Brown’s paper, “Despite the Distance Between Us: Attempts to Preserve Cultural Memory through Filmmaking-in-Exile,” showcased cinematic endeavors to bridge geographical divides. Finally, Anna Reumert’s “An Archive of Exile: Sudanese Migrant Labor and Political Solidarity in Lebanon” shed light on the archival significance of migrant experiences and collective action.

The final revised drafts will be collected by CIRS with an aim of publishing either an edited volume or a special issue of a journal in the future.

To view the working group agenda, click here

Read more about this research initiative

Participants and Discussants:

Wahbi Abdulrahman, Nile Valley University, Sudan

Rund Alarabi, The Städelschule (Hochschule für Bildende Künste), Germany

Muez Ali, Earthna: Center for a Sustainable Future at Qatar Foundation

Reem Aljeally, The Muse Multi Studios

Zahra Babar, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Misba Bhatti, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Bentley Brown, American University of Sharjah

Erica Carter, King’s College

Marilyn Deegan, King’s College

Amna Elidrissy, Safeguarding Sudan’s Living Heritage (SSLH)

Ruba El Melik, Independent Researcher

Qutouf Elobaid, Locale

Nafisa Eltahir, Locale

Larissa-Diana Fuhrmann, Peace Research Institute Frankfurt

Katarzyna Grabska, University of Geneva

Suha Hasan, Mawane

Aya Hassan, Georgetown University in Qatar

Noor Hussain, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Eiman Hussein, King’s College

Ala Kheir, Independent Researcher

Helen Mallinson, Safeguarding Sudan’s Living Heritage (SSLH)

Suzi Mirgani, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Anna Simone Ruemert, The New School, US

Rahiem Shadad, Downtown Gallery

Aala Sharfi, Locale

Omnia Shawkat, Andariya

Haneen Sidhahmed, Sudan Tapes Archive

Ahmad Sikainga, Ohio State University

Sabreen Taha, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Article by CIRS Research Analyst Misba Bhatti

Political Economy of Development in Sudan: A Historical View of Economic Relations, Trade, and Informality Workshop I
2026-04-19 13:30 - 2026-04-20 13:00
On April 19–20, 2026, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) held a hybrid research meeting under its project, “Political Economy of Development in Sudan: A Historical View of Economic Relations, Trade, and Informality.” The aim of the meeting was to discuss and provide in-depth feedback on the draft abstracts submitted by participants for the project.

The discussion was initiated by Ahmed Kodouda, who traced Sudan’s chronic underdevelopment from the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899-1956) through the April 2023 civil war. He stated that developmental failures stemmed from a self-reinforcing cycle of extractive colonial institutions and elite capture reproduced across successive regimes. The colonial political economy concentrated wealth in the Nile corridor and cultivated a narrow northern elite that inherited and deepened these structures after independence. Successive military regimes entrenched center-periphery inequalities, while organized labor, the primary counter-force, was systematically dismantled. The Islamist-neoliberal era of the al-Bashir government further commodified the state through oil rents and patronage networks, ultimately spawning the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which collapsed the center from within in 2023. His study highlights how path-dependent institutional legacies, elite manipulation of political order, the suppression of developmental alternatives, and the militarization of economic resources collectively made Sudan’s trajectory of state collapse not merely predictable, but historically inevitable.

In the next session, Hamid Ali examined how successive economic reform strategies in Sudan, spanning state-led development, neoliberal liberalization, and post-secession stabilization, interacted with institutional weakness and political conflict to shape long-term economic outcomes. He highlighted three distinct phases: the failure of ambitious post-independence planning due to weak administrative capacity; the partial gains of 1990s market liberalization that produced macroeconomic stabilization without structural transformation; and the post-2011 “reform-instability trap,” where austerity deepened social pressures and ultimately contributed to state collapse. His study examines three core hypotheses linking weak institutions, political exclusion, and resource dependency to poor growth outcomes, and proposes that reforms divorced from institutional development and political legitimacy are inherently unsustainable.

Alden Young then reviewed the relationship between long-distance trade and state formation in the Nile Valley from the founding of the Funj Sultanate in 1504 through the Ottoman-Egyptian conquest of 1820–1824. Challenging the tendency to treat the precolonial era as static, his study defines an “early modern period” in northeast African history, beginning with the dissolution of the Treaty of Baqt and the rise of the Funj, characterized by dynamic, shifting trade orientations across the Sahel, Red Sea, and Ethiopian highlands rather than the traditional north-south Nile axis. The paper focuses on how the trade patterns and state-formation dynamics of this era established enduring geopolitical templates that continued to shape colonial and postcolonial Sudan. Furthermore, it foregrounds that colonial inheritances are not the sole determinants of Sudan’s contemporary condition, and that understanding its early modern period is essential for rethinking the deeper structural roots of the country’s persistent instability.

Next, Mazin Abdullah examined Sudan’s post-independence economic policy from 1956 to 1972, arguing that its developmental failures cannot be reduced to ideological vacillation or misguided import-substitution strategies alone. Instead, it advances a dual analytical framework centered on path dependence and economic performativity. Sudan’s exclusion from the Sterling Area after 1947 created a chronic hard-currency crisis that compelled planners to maximize agricultural exports, while a deeply internalized “hydraulic civilization” mindset led them to equate national prosperity with Nile-corridor irrigation. His paper focuses on how these two forces converged to produce economic policies, including the Ten-Year Development Plan, sweeping nationalizations in 1970, and the Unregistered Land Act, that actively rendered Sudan’s peripheral regions economically invisible, concentrating investment in Khartoum and the riverain core. In doing so, it highlights how colonial monetary inheritance and planners’ cognitive frameworks jointly cemented the structural patterns of spatial inequality and peripheral marginalization that continue to define Sudan’s crises today.

Munzoul Assal shifted the discussion towards the evolving role of the Sudanese diaspora and refugee populations in Sudan’s development by situating remittances within a broader framework of transnational practices that includes knowledge transfer, charitable giving, and political engagement. He argued that remittances, while providing critical household-level stability, can simultaneously create welfare dependency and erode state responsibility for social services. His paper focuses on how successive macro-crises, including civil wars, South Sudan’s secession, and the April 2023 war, have reconfigured migration patterns, diaspora composition, and cross-border resource flows. Drawing on secondary remittance data, policy documents, and interviews with migrants and refugees, and positioning itself at the intersection of migration-development theory, forced migration studies, diaspora transnationalism, and Sudan’s political economy, the work maps the institutional frameworks and political arrangements that determine whether diaspora and refugee engagement produce genuine developmental transformation or merely sustain coping mechanisms in a fragile state.

CJ Pine investigated the illicit financing strategies of Darfurian armed groups from 2006 to 2025, drawing primarily on the underutilized annual reports of the UN Panel of Experts established under the 1591 sanctions regime. He argued that debates over sanctions on Sudan, whether led by the U.S. or UN, have insufficiently engaged with how armed groups’ informal economies are both deeply entrenched in local structures and highly adaptable to external pressure. Recurring financing mechanisms identified include cross-border contraband, gold mining, criminal extortion, and vehicle checkpoint robberies. His work focuses on tracing whether armed groups have maintained consistent or shifting financing strategies over time, how government actions, such as fuel restrictions and expanded black markets, and the Security Council have failed to systematically respond to the Panel’s findings. The study highlights that durable peace requires combining external leverage with economic inclusion frameworks that address the structural drivers sustaining Darfur’s conflict economies.

In the next session, Nirsin Elamin examined the political economy of agriculture in central Sudan, using the Gezira region as its primary lens to trace how colonial land tenure systems and labor regimes have been continuously reproduced, rather than dismantled, by successive post-independence governments. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in villages along the Blue Nile between 2013 and 2018, she argued that large-scale land investments, neoliberal privatization, and crony capitalism under the al-Bashir regime systematically dispossessed smallholder farmers and herders, generating a surplus, flexible, and gendered labor force absorbed into extractive industries and the security state. Her paper focuses on the roles of local capital, the Agricultural Bank of Sudan’s discriminatory lending, and the co-constitution of domestic and foreign elite interests in driving land dispossession and fueling conflict. The study considers what land justice might look like, drawing on testimonies from communities who have endured successive cycles of state-driven dispossession.

Mohamed Salah Abdelrahman then discussed the paradoxical relationship between Sudan’s gold boom and the state’s deepening developmental failures and fragility. Despite gold’s rise to over 58% of total exports by 2025, this expansion has neither strengthened fiscal capacity nor improved development outcomes. Instead, it has fueled a parallel economy, with official channels capturing less than 21% of actual production due to widespread smuggling. This paper highlights how such a dynamic cannot be explained by resource curse theory alone, but must account for Sudan’s weak institutional foundations and unstable governance. The study looks at how gold’s physical characteristics, geographic dispersion, high portability, and artisanal extraction make it structurally resistant to state oversight; how competition over gold revenues has militarized local politics and empowered armed actors, including the RSF; and how traditional native administration structures have been reshaped by mining’s economic logic, collectively transforming gold into a primary driver of war economy and state collapse.

Gussai H. Sheikheldin and Yousif Elsamani then examined the collapse of Sudan’s science system and its consequences for economic development, arguing that chronic underfunding, political instability, and foreign dependency have produced a critical “sovereignty gap” in knowledge production. Drawing on philosophy of science, endogenous growth theory, and a bibliometric audit of Sudan’s research landscape from 2000 to 2025, they emphasized that autonomous domestic scientific output fell below 8% of total production by 2024, with Sudan’s narrative increasingly shaped by external actors. The paper focuses on two structural challenges: a “broken triple helix” in which domestic industry and government have been replaced by foreign surrogates, leaving universities as the sole fragile pillar; and a devastating brain drain, with approximately 90% of medical graduates having left the country since 2002. It also aims to work out a post-war policy roadmap focused on decentralizing science infrastructure, establishing agenda sovereignty, leveraging diaspora networks, and building institutionally independent research systems to achieve genuine epistemic and developmental resilience.

In the next session, Mayada Hassanain explained Sudan’s persistent developmental crisis over the longue durée, challenging essentialist explanations centered on state failure, elite capture, and ethnic conflict as insufficient for understanding the country’s structural economic stagnation. Drawing on theories of primitive accumulation, sub-imperialism, and Samir Amin’s concept of unequal exchange, Hassanain argued that Sudan’s underdevelopment reflects deeply intertwined domestic and global political economy dynamics rather than exceptional pathology. Her work examines three historical periods: independence to the early 1970s, the 1980s to 2000, and 2000 to the 2020s, and analyzes four key commodities: cotton, oil, livestock, and gold. Each commodity is examined as both a driver of foreign capital accumulation and a site of violent contestation, tracing how social relations, labor dynamics, state policies, and international economic structures have collectively foreclosed structural transformation. Even Sudan’s oil boom, which generated 7% GDP growth, left the underlying economic structure entirely unchanged, exemplifying this enduring paradox.

Aida Abbashar reframed taxation in Sudan as a fundamental site of state formation, constitutional authority, and political identity rather than merely a technical revenue mechanism. Tracing fiscal extraction from the Mahdist state through the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, postcolonial rentierism, the Islamist shadow state, and the current militia economy, she detailed that the question of “who pays” has always determined “who belongs” to the national project. Where formal constitutions have been suspended or ignored, fiscal practices, from religious tithes to RSF checkpoint fees, have functioned as Sudan’s living constitution. Her paper looks at how successive regimes decoupled taxation from citizenship and accountability; how commodities like gold and gum arabic became sites of contested fiscal authority rather than national development; and how the 2023 war has reduced taxation to raw checkpoint sovereignty.

Next, Rogaia Anusharaf examined Sudan’s informal economy through a feminist political economy lens, arguing that women’s labor has always constituted the essential but systematically invisible foundation of Sudan’s economic survival across decades of structural adjustment and political instability. She contended that the April 2023 war did not create the informal economy but rather exposed its true structural centrality by dramatically expanding its boundaries. Professionals from the formal sector, physicians, teachers, and engineers, were abruptly absorbed into informal survival strategies previously feminized, stigmatized, and rendered invisible. The paper examines two interconnected transformations: mapping women’s pre-war role in Sudan’s informal economy across urban and rural contexts and tracing how the war reconfigured these patterns across displacement camps, refugee settlements, and diaspora communities. It looks at how gendered invisibility imposed on informal labor was never a reflection of its marginality, but rather of the formal economy’s deliberate choice not to account for the work upon which everything else depended.

Alzaki Alhelo traced Sudan’s political economy across three decades, from the oil boom of 1999 through the gold era to the ongoing conflict, arguing that a tragic continuity defines Sudan’s development failure: successive resource windfalls were captured by authoritarian elites to sustain patronage networks rather than drive structural transformation. The oil boom generated high GDP growth but entrenched crony capitalism, while South Sudan’s secession in 2011, stripped Sudan of 75% of oil revenues and exposed the complete absence of economic diversification. Gold emerged as a substitute export, rising to 37% of total exports by 2022–23, yet its predominantly artisanal structure made it resistant to regulation and taxation, reproducing the same rent-capture dynamics. This paper examines structural transformation and informality across both eras, drawing on labor market surveys from 2011 and 2022 to analyze how shifting resource dependencies reshaped employment patterns, expanded informal economic activity, and deepened Sudan’s persistent developmental crisis.

In the final session, Khalid Osama Alfeel argued that Sudan’s industrial crisis cannot be explained by immediate economic shocks, oil revenue loss, gold smuggling, or hyperinflation, but reflects a foundational, decades-long structural failure rooted in three interlocking forces: urban bias, crony capitalism, and securitization/militarization. Dating back to the colonial era, these forces systematically concentrated resources, power, and industrial development in the capital city Khartoum while extracting wealth from peripheral regions without reinvestment. The paper, which was proposed by Khalid and Muzan Alneel, expands on three domains where these structural forces have crippled Sudan’s manufacturing economy: bank financing, which favors large conglomerates and produces a “missing middle syndrome”; state policies governing production inputs, shaped by political and military calculations rather than developmental logic; and infrastructure planning, which reflects military priorities and entrenches centralization. Drawing on case studies, key informant interviews, industrial surveys, and Central Bank reports, the study offers a structural diagnosis of Sudan’s industrial vulnerability and proposes alternative pathways for rebuilding manufacturing as a pillar of post-war stability.

CIRS will publish the submitted papers for this project as an edited volume.

To view the working group agenda, click here

To read the participants’ biographies, click here

Read more about this research initiative

Participants and Discussants:

Mazin Abdallah, Conflict Sensitivity Facility

Aida Abbashar

Mohamed Salah Abdelrahman, PhD candidate, Panthéon-Sorbonne University

Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Georgetown University Qatar

Khalid Osman Alfeel

Alzaki Alhelo, PhD candidate, Tufts University

Hamid E. Ali, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

Muez Ali, Earthna: Center for a Sustainable Future, Qatar Foundation

Muzan Alneel

Munzoul Assal, Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI).

Zahra Babar, CIRS, Georgetown University Qatar

Misba Bhatti, CIRS, Georgetown University Qatar

Maryam Daud, CIRS, Georgetown University Qatar

Nisrin Elamin, University of Toronto

Yousif Elsamani, University of Tokyo

Mayada Hassanain, International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs)

Noor Hussain, CIRS, Georgetown University Qatar

Ahmed Kodouda, Impact Policy Group

Suzi Mirgani, CIRS, Georgetown University Qatar

CJ (Caleb) Pine, Georgetown University Qatar

Sabreen Taha, CIRS, Georgetown University Qatar

Gussai H. Sheikheldin, Technology and Innovation Policy Research Organization (STIPRO)

Alden Youn, Yale University

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst, CIRS
