(Re)Collecting Sudan: Art and Culture Archives Workshop II
2026-04-15 08:00 - 17:00 (Asia/Qatar)
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
