Sudan in the Picture: Research on Sudanese Cinema Workshop I
2025-10-30 08:00 - 2025-11-01 17:00 (Asia/Qatar)
From October 30 to November 1, 2025, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar (GUQ) hosted a workshop under its research initiative, Sudan in the Picture: Research on Sudanese Cinema. The gathering brought together a diverse group of scholars, academics, artists, filmmakers, and practitioners from across the globe to deliberate on the historical trajectory of Sudanese cinema, as well as emerging cinematic trends amidst the ongoing conflict.

The workshop commenced with a discussion led by Khalid Ali, titled “The Wedding of Zein: A Case Study for Remembering the Past, Informing the Present, and Shaping the Future of Sudanese Cinema.” He explored the collaborative effort between Sudanese author Tayeb Salih and Kuwaiti filmmaker Khalid Al Siddiq in adapting “The Wedding of Zein” into a 1976 film. He underscored this as a groundbreaking Arab-African artistic partnership, fusing literature and cinema to portray Sudan’s multi-ethnic cultural heritage. The film centers on Zein’s wedding as a micro-narrative reflecting Sudanese village life, illustrating the transformations and complexities following Sudan’s 1956 independence, and engaging with themes such as postcolonial evolution, feminism, religion, and cultural diversity. Despite its critical acclaim and international recognition, the film’s external directorship sparked debates regarding cultural authenticity; nevertheless, it remains significant for its role in globally promoting Sudanese culture. His paper aims to connect this film to contemporary Sudanese cinematic works, emphasizing ongoing efforts to restore and analyze its legacy, and advocating for cinema as a catalyst for cultural dialogue and peaceful coexistence in modern Sudan.

Samar Abdelrahman then presented “Repairing the Audiovisual Archive: Hussein Shariffe,” which is rooted in a multidisciplinary project. This initiative focuses on developing practice-based approaches to African audiovisual heritage restitution through transnational collaborations among partners from Sudan, Egypt, Germany, and the UK. She highlighted the severe threats confronting Africa’s cinematic heritage due to historical, political, and infrastructural challenges, particularly in Sudan. She posited a redefinition of restitution as “archival repair,” characterizing it as a participatory, justice-oriented process that prioritizes preservation, creative access, and the empowerment of affected communities over the mere repatriation of physical artifacts. Utilizing the Hussein Shariffe archive as a central case study, her work seeks to demonstrate how archival survival is intricately linked to issues of displacement, diasporic memory, and intergenerational cultural transmission. The project challenges conventional models of restitution, instead advocating for innovative forms of access, engagement, and collaboration that address current crises while fostering opportunities for Sudanese cinema’s creative future and intergenerational dialogue.

Following this, Abdelrahman Elbashir presented “Sudanese Cinema: A Retrospective Archaeology,” which investigates Sudanese cinema as a crucial cultural and urban phenomenon that shaped social life and collective identity throughout the 20th century. He emphasized cinema theaters as distinctive architectural forms and civic spaces, integral to Sudan’s urban fabric and modernist aspirations, particularly through open-air, climate-adapted designs. His work documents the decline of this cinematic culture due to political instability, censorship, and neglect, leaving behind deteriorating theaters and fragmented archives that serve as potent cultural artifacts. Methodologically framed as retrospective archaeology, the paper incorporates photographic surveys, spatial analyses, and a 3D digital reconstruction of a pivotal theater to reinterpret these remnants. He underscored the imperative for preserving and critically analyzing cinema heritage within Sudan’s broader cultural history and urbanism, also stressing the leveraging of this heritage in post-conflict urban restoration, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue on cinema as urban infrastructure, architecture as cultural memory, and the potential role of cultural preservation in rebuilding Sudanese society.

Frédérique Cifuentes presented “Cinema in Sudan and Its Legacy,” a multimedia project exploring Sudan’s cinematic history through outdoor cinema houses, pioneering filmmakers like Gadalla Gubara, and the Sudanese Film Group. Her work, originating from photographic research of Khartoum’s cinema architecture, aims to preserve this distinctive cultural heritage. The presentation delved into the colonial origins of photography and cinema in Sudan, highlighting their role in documenting and shaping national identity, and underscoring the fragility of these historical archives. She detailed Gubara’s impactful career, from photographer to a pivotal figure in Sudanese cinema, whose work transitioned from government roles to independent productions.

Hatim Eujayl then discussed “The Mother, The Farmer, and the Sheikh: Cinematic Portrayals of Rural Central Sudan,” which analyzes how four films—The Tomb (1977), You Will Die at Twenty (2019), Al-Sit (2020), and Cotton Queen (2025)—depict life in agricultural villages along the Blue Nile. The paper aims to explore how these films utilize cinematic techniques to construct ideas of regional and national identity through portrayals of gender, religion, economy, and tradition. Eujayl argued that rural central Sudan is frequently presented as the archetype of Sudanese authenticity, simultaneously idyllic and patriarchal, where young protagonists challenge entrenched social norms. By examining production contexts, filmmaker perspectives, and ideological messaging, he seeks to uncover how depictions of this region reflect broader political and cultural narratives. Ultimately, the work aims to establish a framework for analyzing regional representation in Sudanese cinema, advancing understanding beyond national generalizations toward nuanced regional study.

Danya Elmalik explored “Sudanese Cinema and the Archive of Tomorrow,” which investigated the fragile relationship between Sudanese cinema and archival preservation, focusing on the erasure, loss, and revival of Sudan’s film heritage. Utilizing Suhaib Gasmelbari’s Talking About Trees (2019) and Sudan’s Forgotten Films (2017) as case studies, the paper aims to examine how films themselves become archives in the absence of formal preservation systems. Drawing on theories such as Schwartz and Cook’s concept of “archives and power” and Marie-Aude Fouéré’s idea of “film as archive,” she contended that Sudanese films now function as cultural records and memory keepers amidst political and economic instability. The paper will highlight the importance of access and digitization, referencing Caroline Frick’s notion of “access as preservation,” to counteract the marginalization of Sudanese history. Ultimately, she frames this work as part of a broader endeavor to safeguard and reimagine Sudan’s cinematic and cultural memory—the “archive of tomorrow.”

Umloda Ibrahim’s presentation, “Return of Sudanese Cinema and its Aesthetics of Resistance,” traced the historical evolution and political dimensions of Sudanese filmmaking, from its colonial introduction to its post-independence growth, decline, and present-day revival. She elucidated how contemporary Sudanese and diasporic filmmakers express resistance and identity through cinema. Analyzing Our Beloved Sudan (2012), Al-Sit (2020), and You Will Die at Twenty (2019), she argued that diasporic filmmakers employ the concept of “homeplace” as a radical political space, shaped by displacement, exile, and hybrid identity. Drawing on Hamid Naficy’s theory of “accented cinema” and bell hooks’ idea of the home as a site of resistance, the paper aims to explore how gender, colonialism, and cultural memory intersect within Sudanese cinematic narratives.

Mamoun Eltlib subsequently traced the rise and decline of Sudanese cinema with his presentation, “Sudanese Cinema: Intersections of Politics and the Dream of the City.” Using personal interviews and historical research, he explained how political events such as socialist-nationalist shifts, Sharia law enforcement, and suppression under the National Islamic Front, profoundly shaped film culture and institutions in Sudan. His work will illustrate the distinct histories of El-Obeid and Atbara, highlighting the cultural vibrancy and civic role of their cinemas before state interventions and censorship began eroding the industry in the 1970s. Interviewees identified the nationalization of film distribution as the onset of cinema’s collapse, exacerbated by a lack of institutional support and creative freedom. The enduring appeal of Indian popular films offered solace to marginalized groups as local production diminished. The paper will consider how the Sudanese “Dream of the City”—reflected in the symbolic place of cinema—can only be fully realized in a true democracy and remains central to Sudan’s collective aspirations for cultural renewal.

In a subsequent session, Raga Makawi and Abubakr Omer analyzed Sudanese image-making in film with their presentation, “Literal Death or Symbolism, the Liberalization of Political Meaning-Making in Sudanese Films.” They highlighted the historically obscure and politically charged nature of Sudanese cinema, examining the sociopolitical context of the 1970s when cultural productivity was dominated by poetry and music, with film largely absent as a medium for reflecting Sudanese history and future. Since the political opening following the 2005 Peace Agreement, Sudanese filmmaking has expanded, particularly in Khartoum, primarily fueled by donor-funded projects aligned with liberal narratives focusing on conflict and resistance. Using the 2019 film You Will Die at 20 as a case study, they scrutinized the tension between local meaning-making and international reception, suggesting that Sudanese filmmakers adapt narratives to conform to dominant global liberal discourses, often resulting in simplified or orientalized interpretations. The paper proposes the development of oral mapping tools to recover richer local epistemologies in Sudanese cinema, aiming to balance external influences with authentic cultural expression and political storytelling. The research is scheduled to proceed through workshops, literature reviews, and data collection through early 2026.

Roman Deckert investigated Sudanese cinema from the perspective of German-language sources with “Sudanese Cinema Behind the German Language Barrier,” which highlighted Germany’s historically significant yet often overlooked role in Sudanese cultural relations. His work aims to overcome the “German language barrier” by systematically researching archival materials in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland pertaining to Sudanese cinema, including Cold War-era cultural exchanges between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) that involved Sudan. Key foci include the biography of Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed, an early Sudanese actor in German films, and the influence of controversial figures such as Leni Riefenstahl on Sudanese film. The paper will also explore German contributions, such as the establishment of television in Sudan and film education. Additionally, it will review private archives and rarely seen film footage, revealing complex layers of Sudanese cinematic history connected to German-speaking countries.

Sarra Idris’s presentation, “Double Vision: From Imperial Gaze to Intimate Knowing in Sudanese Cinema,” explored how Sudan’s cinematic representation has evolved from colonial distortion to self-authored storytelling. She traced early depictions, such as Khartoum (1966), which glorified British imperialism while dehumanizing Sudanese characters through caricature and erasure. Even later humanitarian films like The Good Lie (2014) perpetuated the “white savior” trope, centering Western emotional narratives. In contrast, contemporary Sudanese filmmakers reclaim their image, crafting works rooted in memory, resistance, and authenticity despite censorship and resource constraints. Framed through W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness,” she introduced “double vision”—the tension between Western portrayals and her own lived knowledge as a Sudanese raised partly in the West. Her paper aims to bridge academic analysis and personal reflection, interrogating how film shapes cultural self-perception and exploring cinema as both a site of historical trauma and reclamation.

Roopa Gogineni’s session, “Politics of Collective Filmmaking and Distribution in Sudan,” explored how Sudanese filmmakers utilize collective labor and mutual aid (nafeer) to produce and distribute films amidst censorship, displacement, and war. Drawing on her experience as a documentary filmmaker and coordinator of a mobile cinema network, she employed practice-based research combining oral histories, film analysis, and field observation. She highlighted grassroots initiatives, such as the Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement’s mobile cinema club, which screens films for large refugee audiences and fosters collaborative production. These community-driven practices transform filmmaking into a political and pedagogical act, creating shared spaces for dialogue and cultural resistance. By comparing Sudanese collectives with similar movements in Nigeria, Syria, Brazil, and India, she situated them within global traditions of Third Cinema and activist filmmaking. Her work aims to reframe cinema as a collective infrastructure for social movements, emphasizing collaboration, mobility, and cultural self-determination beyond state and market control.

In the subsequent session, Leena Habiballa discussed “Gendered Representations in Sudanese Cinema,” examining how portrayals of gender and the subaltern in Sudanese films from the 1970s to the present mirror the nation’s shifting social and political realities. Early cinema, exemplified by Gadalla Gubara’s Tajouje (1977), reinforced patriarchal ideals of stoic masculinity. In contrast, recent films such as You Will Die at Twenty (2019) and Goodbye Julia (2023) challenge these norms by presenting emotionally complex male characters grappling with social change and instability. The rise of women filmmakers, notably Marwa Zein with Khartoum Offside (2019), has further transformed representation, foregrounding agency, solidarity, and resistance by subaltern groups against patriarchal and state oppression. She argued that these evolving depictions signify a critical reimagining of gender and the subaltern in Sudanese cinema, where the voices of these groups increasingly shape national narratives and redefine cultural understandings of identity, power, and belonging.

Next, Taghreed Elsanhouri presented “Our Beloved Sudan: Reflexive Ethnographic Enquiry on the Filming of Sudan’s Partition.” She addressed her ethnographically inspired approach to documenting Sudan’s partition through her film Our Beloved Sudan. The project explores how the 2011 South Sudanese self-determination referendum redefined conceptualizations of Sudan as a nation, intertwining public and private narratives by engaging political figures and an ordinary mixed-race family experiencing national division. She emphasized a dialogic process, treating filmic inquiry as an ethnographic encounter, examining how Sudanese people articulate nationhood, memory, and identity at a historical crossroads. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from Edward Said and Bakhtin, she investigated how different voices, both dominant and marginalized, participate in constructing or challenging national identity, emphasizing situated, often contradictory, perspectives.

Mohanad Hashim explored the historical and contemporary challenges facing Sudanese cinema with his presentation, “The Quest for a Sudanese Cinema.” He highlighted the scarcity of archives and resources, exacerbated by the impact of the 2023 war. Historically, Sudanese cinema experienced brief state support in the 1970s and a recent resurgence led by young diaspora and local artists. Early film culture, dating back to 1911 with screenings in El-Obied and flourishing in Khartoum and Omdurman by the 1940s, featured cinema as both entertainment and a political instrument, notably during World War II when colonial authorities used film for mobilization. He stressed the dearth of research on Sudanese audiences, their viewing habits, taste formation, and socio-political influences. He proposes to investigate cinema appreciation and consumption through archival newspapers, magazines, and other sources, aiming to understand how Sudanese cinephiles navigated scarcity, class divides, urban politics, and national identity formation amidst structural challenges to the cinema industry.

Razan Idris presented “Sudanese Filmmakers and Egyptian Audiences: From Decolonization to Displacement,” which examined the often-overlooked history of Sudanese filmmakers working in Egypt throughout the 20th century and their representation of Sudanese identities to Egyptian audiences. She revealed that the well-known Sudanese filmmaker Saeed Hamed directed the 1998 Egyptian film An Upper Egyptian in the American University, which contains anti-Black stereotypes criticized across the Arab world. Her work seeks to uncover how Sudanese filmmakers, many of whom studied or lived in Egypt, have navigated racial, cultural, and political dynamics in their films, both during Sudan’s national struggles and periods of exile. The paper will highlight Sudanese cinema’s diasporic nature, where displaced filmmakers produce work in Egypt, engaging with themes of identity, displacement, and representation amidst political turmoil. The aim is to excavate lost films and histories, questioning how Sudanese cinema abroad has shaped perceptions of Sudanese identity and how this legacy can inform future filmmaking practices within and beyond Sudan.In the final session, Mai Abusalih examined “Khartoum (2025): The City as the Sixth Protagonist,” portraying it as both a documentary portrait of five residents and an exploration of the city as a “sixth protagonist,” shaping their experiences amidst political upheaval. Filmed between the 2019 revolution and the 2021 military coup, the work documents Khartoum’s transition toward intensified militarization and the disruptions that preceded the 2023 war. Through street-level perspectives, the film employs walking as a narrative method to reveal how spatial hierarchies, planning politics, and everyday urban informalities structure life in the capital. Juxtapositions between marginalized peripheries such as Jabarona, an area historically housing displaced communities, and central protest sites highlight the city’s entrenched social inequalities and contested notions of citizenship. Constraints imposed by surveillance and censorship shaped the film’s iPhone-based production, underscoring the tension between public space and state control. She will utilize interviews, mapping, and comparative cinematic analysis to interrogate representation, agency, and the right to the city.

To view the working group agenda, click here

To read the participants’ biographies, click here

Read more about this research initiative

Participants and Discussants:

Samar Abdel-Rahman, University of Liverpool

Bayan Abubakr, PhD candidate,Yale University

Mai Abusalih, Dcomomo Sudan | Modern Sudan Collective

Khalid Ali, Brighton and Sussex Medical School

Zahra Babar, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Misba Bhatti, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Khalid Albaih, Artist in Residence, Georgetown University in Qatar

Frédérique Cifuentes-Morgan

Maryam Daud, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Roman Deckert, Media in Cooperation and Transition (MiCT)

Danya Elmalik

Abdelrahman Elbashir,

Taghreed Elsanhouri,

Mamoun Eltlib

Hatim Eujayl

Roopa Gogineni

Leena Habiballa

Mohanad Hashim, BBC

Noor Hussain, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Razan Idris, University of Pennsylvania

Sarra Idris

Umloda Ibrahim

Raga Makawi, London School of Economics and Political Science

Suzi Mirgani, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Abubakr Omer

Sabreen Taha, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst, CIRS

Migration Studies from the Global South: Rethinking Theory and Method Workshop
2026-01-11 08:00 - 17:00
On November 16 and 17, 2025, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar (GUQ) held a brainstorming session under its research initiative Migration Studies from the Global South: Rethinking Theory and Method. This inaugural meeting brought together scholars and practitioners of migration from the Global South to explore key themes and suggest future research directions. The main themes that emerged from collective sessions and focus groups emphasized a shift towards decolonized, context-specific, and migrant-centric approaches. Throughout the discussions, participants consistently highlighted the need to move beyond Eurocentric perspectives and established categories in migration studies.

The discussion began with a focus on “State Formation, Sovereignty, and Borders.” This session explored how state formation, sovereignty, and borders influence migration patterns. Participants examined why people undertake irregular migration, how migrants cope with challenges, and the role of solidarity and agency in navigating policy obstacles and structural inequalities. The session reimagined sovereignty as a shared concept, questioning its traditional definition, and explored a decolonial perspective on borders, including pre-state migrant political communities. Notably, the focus shifted from receiving states to origin states in migration integration, analyzing sending states’ motivations and migrants’ responses. Discussions covered the Kafala system, theories of the state from the Global South, and challenges to sovereignty through social and cultural dynamics. The session also addressed gender and borders, development finance through diaspora capital, and the complexities of regular and irregular mobilities. Participants emphasized understanding migrant operations at a micro-level, utilizing digitalization, and critically assessing knowledge production in migration studies.

The second session, “Decolonization, Race, and Nationalism,” investigated power modalities, resistance forms, and research methods in migration. The session examined how race and categories shape belonging and wider power structures. The discussion emphasized ‘de-exceptionalizing’ the Gulf region and examined the continuity of colonial power structures through a postcolonial lens on migration. Anti-trafficking policies were scrutinized for blurring consent, differentiating inadequately between trafficking and smuggling, and failing to account for migrants’ coping strategies with coercion. The session stressed the need for decolonizing research through alternative methods and indigenous knowledge while addressing structural inequalities and the power of negotiation. Participants emphasized that decolonization, race, and nationalism carry different meanings across contexts, highlighting the need for both intellectual and institutional decolonization. The definition of the Global South and its role as the “majority world” were also discussed, alongside global mobility, passports, and using social media to amplify migrant voices.

In the next session, “The Problem of Migration Categories,” participants critically analyzed the impact of migration categories, advocating for new vocabularies and a “demigration” of migration studies. The unit of analysis was questioned, and regional variations in existing categories were highlighted, particularly challenging the legal versus illegal distinction as unconventional. A core focus was the need for “categories from below,” advocating for local, indigenous classifications that reflect migrants’ lived experiences and agency rather than state-imposed definitions. The group critiqued white versus non-white binaries and the homogenization of categories for specific jobs. Participants also differentiated between categorization and classification, emphasizing the unstable and evolving nature of these categories and the importance of understanding their contextual meanings.

In the “Identity, Belonging, and Citizenship” session, the discussion explored how racial capitalism constructs identities, often deeming people as “surplus” and producing “hyper mobile citizens.” Participants examined race, class, and identity as intertwined characteristics of citizenship while acknowledging the complex self-identification of people on the move. The discussion included carceral migration, detailing detention tactics and prison-industrial complexes that limit movement. Participants stressed rethinking the citizenship-belonging nexus, questioning traditional notions of loyalty and civic attachment, and contrasting the perceived value of a “strong passport” with actual belonging. Migrant identity mobility, including migrant capital and onward migration, was also analyzed. The session differentiated between “desirable” and “surplus” migrants, critiqued homogeneous categories, and sought new language beyond “blue collar” terms to define migrants. Participants also addressed how migration impacts family structures, called for a post-nationalist liberal theory of citizenship, viewed remittances as a form of belonging, and highlighted the role of networks in providing safety and security.

In the session “Labor, Capitalism, and Political Economy of Migration,” participants examined theories of migration states in the Global South, including nationalization, neoliberal, and developmental approaches, and their impact on sending countries’ economies, with particular attention to the gendered dimensions of remittances. The discussion highlighted the need for better theories on return migration, focusing on reintegration and communication with policymakers. Destination imaginaries were explored, including the evolving perception of the West as a dream destination, transient migration, and alternative routes. Remittances were critically analyzed as both a politically engineered necessity that can create dependency but also as a resource with social, human, and political value. The session also addressed tracking money flows, including reverse remittances and debt circulation, and the challenges of measuring remittances, their household impacts, taxation effects, and diverse uses.

In the next session, “Unpacking Migration and Development,” participants examined the often assumed link between migration and development, labeling it Eurocentric and non-causal. They highlighted the need to rethink this nexus through social transformation and human capabilities while exploring informal economies and their bi-directional impacts. The session sought a Global South epistemology for migration and development, focusing on social processes and knowledge production. Participants highlighted remittances as crucial, often exceeding foreign direct investments, and discussed diaspora contributions to national development through various forms. Climate migration was introduced as a new development issue, linking climate change, security, and human movement. The session questioned restrictions on free movement and promoted using regional knowledge for solutions. Participants critiqued “white saviorism” in migration development and emphasized the practical application of lived experiences. The discussion aimed for a ground-up vision of development, advocating for alternative lexicons and challenging the argument that development reduces migration.

For the session focused on “Gendered Experiences of Migration and Mobility,” participants highlighted the lack of gender-focused policies and data, which renders female migration largely invisible. They emphasized reclaiming human trafficking as a gendered issue vital for migration studies and advocated for research beyond traditional family units. The session highlighted how reintegration often neglects female returnees’ vulnerabilities, urging policies tailored to their specific needs. Participants critiqued governance’s legal focus for overlooking the care economy and transnational care networks, challenging the assumption of women as domestic caregivers regardless of professional background. Data indicate that women send remittances more frequently and in larger amounts than men, often also serving as primary recipients in origin countries and efficiently managing household finances. However, methodological gaps persist, with insufficient data disaggregated by gender and age. The discussion also addressed phenomena such as “self-deportation” triggered by policy changes, gender disparities in digital platforms, and the role of social media in increasing visibility. Migration was considered both a form of protection from and a context for violence. The session highlighted female migrants’ life cycles, the rise of mail-order brides, and the effects of male return on women’s empowerment. It further emphasized the importance of pre- and post-departure orientation and the need to recognize diverse family structures, including single mothers.

In the last session, “Conflict and Climate Mobilities,” participants highlighted the need for community-centric solutions in conflict and climate induced mobilities while addressing citizenship and belonging during displacement. The discussion examined the 1951 Convention’s relevance, advocating for refugees’ self-definition and re-evaluating classification systems. Localized knowledge is crucial for climate mobilities, with participants acknowledging that displacement often stems from both climate change and conflict. The session highlighted trapped populations, such as those with disabilities, who cannot relocate. Participants emphasized communal efforts, in preparing for and reacting to climate events. The health consequences of climate change were also explored, stressing sending states’ and embassies’ roles in awareness and preparedness.

The discussions from this workshop will inform a series of CIRS-led projects, fostering studies and publications on migration that advance innovative theoretical and empirical approaches in and of the Global South.

To view the working group agenda, click here

To read the participants’ biographies, click here

Participants and Discussants:

Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Georgetown University in Qatar

Idil Akinci, University of Edinburgh

Haya Al Noaimi, Northwestern University in Qatar

Hessa Alnuaimi, University of Sharjah

Zahra Babar, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Misba Bhatti, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Maryam Daud, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Denisse Delgado Vázquez, Georgetown University

Priya Deshingkar, University of Sussex

Bina Fernandez, University of Melbourne

Amanda Garrett, Georgetown University in Qatar

Noor Hussain, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Neelima Jeychandran, Virginia Commonwealth University, Qatar

Syed Taha Kaleem, PhD candidate at Brandeis University

Leander Kandilige, University of Ghana

Anju Mary, New York University Abu Dhabi

Themrise Khan, Independent Researcher

Hasan Mahmud, Northwestern University in Qatar

Suzi Mirgani, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Laila Omar, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

Linda Adhiambo Oucho, African Migration and Development Policy Centre (AMADPOC)

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Princeton University

Zarqa Parvez, Georgetown University in Qatar

Md Mizanur Rahman, Qatar University

Dina Taha, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

Sabreen Taha, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar

Brenda S.A. Yeoh, National University of Singapore (NUS)

Meron Zeleke, University in Ethiopia

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst at CIRS

CURA Research Workshop | Visualizing Your Research: Poster Design
2026-01-29 12:00 - 15:00
On 29 January 2026, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) hosted a research skills workshop titled Visualizing Your Research: Poster Design Workshop. The workshop was facilitated by Sahar Mari, Senior Learning Engineer at Northwestern University in Qatar, and Sara Shaaban, Creative Director at VCU School of the Arts in Qatar. The workshop attracted students from Qatar Foundation partner universities, including Northwestern University in Qatar, Texas A&M University at Qatar, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, and Weill Cornell Medicine – Qatar, enriching the experience through interdisciplinary exchange as participants applied these skills to their own research practices.

The session introduced participants to strategies for transforming complex research projects into clear, visually compelling posters that communicate a strong central message. The facilitators helped students understand how logos, ethos, and pathos shape not only written arguments but also visual presentations. Students analyzed sample posters through group discussions with smaller groups and with the facilitators to spot the strengths and weaknesses of each design. These exercises encouraged participants to reflect on how even the smallest design choices can influence credibility, logical flow, and audience engagement, which helped the students gain practical insight into the elements required to produce a visually strong and persuasive research poster.

The session then introduced what the facilitators referred to as the “Four Secret Weapons” of design: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity (CRAP). It emphasized how these principles work together to create a cohesive and clear visual structure that guides the viewer’s attention and strengthens overall communication. This resonated with many students, who recognized how these principles could immediately improve their work. The workshop concluded with dedicated time for students to work on the designs for their own research project and receive personalized feedback from the facilitators, ensuring the students leave the session equipped with both conceptual knowledge and practical skills to enhance their future research presentations.

Article by Mehek Elahi, CIRS Research Assistant.

Rethinking Migration Categories from the Global South Workshop I
2026-02-08 09:00 - 2026-02-09 15:00
On February 8 and 9, 2026, the Center for International and Regional Studies held a research workshop under its project, Rethinking Migration Categories from the Global South. The purpose of the two-day meeting was to discuss and provide feedback on a collection of draft abstracts submitted for the project. Scholars, working on the topic, were convened for the meeting from around the globe. The topics discussed various aspects of developing theories around categories of migration that are centric to the Global South.

The discussion was initiated by Payal Banerjee, who examined how temporary visa systems transform migrants into specific legal categories that constrain their personhood and rights. She questioned what it means to be “documented,” arguing that legal status involves restrictions and vulnerabilities rather than simply lawfulness. Her proposed paper aims to analyze temporary visa regimes in the US, to understand how visa classifications create hierarchies among migrants and weaken their ability to challenge discrimination based on gender, race, or caste. The research positions visas as instruments of power that shape migrants’ social, economic, and political positioning in destination countries.

In the next session, Rachel Silvey addressed how temporary migration regimes create “stuck movement,” the paradoxical simultaneous production of mobility and immobility for low-wage foreign workers. Drawing on Massey’s “power geometries,” she discussed three dimensions of im/mobility: spatial (border-crossing yet employer-tied), temporal (cyclical contracts creating perpetual temporariness), and social (international movement without occupational advancement). Workers experience involuntary immobility across the migration cycle, waiting before departure, confinement during contracts, and stuckness after return. Her work will examine how legal documentation doesn’t guarantee true mobility, as temporary workers face institutionalized uncertainty and precarity. This im/mobility framework reveals how contemporary migration governance relies on immobilization as a control technique.

Brenda Yeoh talked about the concept of the “developmental migration state” in East and Southeast Asia, where migration governance prioritizes economic development over individual rights. She highlighted how the state employs categorise and control strategies through: hierarchizing migrants by skill levels as proxies for developmental utility; managing degrees and varieties of temporariness to balance market demands with citizenship boundaries; controlling category conversion between migrant statuses; and creating legal versus permissive zones that can transform migrants from “illegal and precarious” to “legal yet precarious.” These power-knowledge techniques divide, differentiate, and discipline migrant populations, reinforcing global hierarchies while obscuring racial and gender prejudices in migration management.

Meron Zeleke then shifted the focus to Ethiopian female migrants in the UAE and how they strategically navigate a highly racialized labor market through skill acquisition and sectoral transitions. Challenging victimhood narratives, she highlighted the female migrants’ agency as they invest in training, from basic domestic skills to beauty industry certifications and marketing courses, to improve their positioning within the UAE’s hierarchical capitalism. While migrants face systematic devaluation based on nationality rather than actual skills, returnees use planned migration and skill upgrades as coping strategies. The research reveals how migrants exercise negotiated agency to achieve limited mobility within racialized structures, though such strategies don’t fundamentally destabilize the racial order underlying labor market inequality.

Zahra Babar presented on the liberal/illiberal binary in migration scholarship that treats Gulf states as exceptional authoritarian cases while positioning liberal democracies as normative baselines. She argued that Western-centric frameworks overlook how liberal states also produce migrant precarity through detention, deportation, welfare exclusion, and legal stratification. Rather than governance failures, Gulf labor regimes, including the kafala system, reveal global logics that render migrants economically essential yet socially excluded. Her proposed work will use the Gulf as theory generating rather than exceptional case, demonstrating structural continuities across political systems in producing differentiated membership and migrant vulnerability.

In the next session, Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh examined critiques of three displacement categories, refugee, host, and camp, through Syrian, Palestinian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and Jordanian interlocutors’ perspectives in Lebanon and Jordan. Drawing on 450 interviews, her work challenges bounded categorizations by demonstrating that refugees are hosts and hosts experience displacement, proposing ‘refugee hosts’ as a concept highlighting agency and intersecting identities. Her paper will look at how these labels impose epistemic violence while also offering analytical tools to disentangle complex realities. Using Baddawi camp as a ‘more-than-camp’ hosting multiple displaced populations and ‘camps within camps,’ the intervention aims to move beyond essentialized hierarchies toward relational understandings that recognize displacement’s inherently intertwined nature with hosting.

Bina Fernandez talked about theorizing protection for migrant domestic workers (MDWs) through a feminist international political economy lens on social reproduction. She argued that MDWs are constituted as precarious workers, over-regulated through restrictive immigration policies yet under-regulated in labor protections, serving employer and state interests within global capitalism. Her paper proposes analyzing MDW protection through assemblages of formal and informal social provisioning across origin and destination countries, evaluating whether protections are transformative (replenishing social reproduction) or depleting. Key protection areas include abuse prevention, labor exploitation, health, pregnancy/maternity, social security, and community-based support. The discussion emphasized that inadequate MDW protection isn’t oversight but structural design sustaining gendered, racialized inequalities.

Aashsih Karn shifted the discussion towards Gulf migration and argued for situating the scholarship beyond suffering-centered approaches that reduce migrants to victims of exploitation. While acknowledging labor precarity under systems like Kafala, his paper proposes analyzing Gulf cities as hybrid urban formations where non-citizen life is normalized rather than exceptional. The framework examines three interdependent processes: identity and belonging (how migrants position themselves in stratified urban worlds), place-making (symbolic anchoring of social location), and agency (collective practices sustaining migrant life). The paper aims to conceptualize Gulf cities as composed of distinctive migrant ecosystems, dynamic social worlds characterized by proximity and boundaries, and migrants as social actors who actively produce meaning and sociality under non-citizenship conditions.

In the next session, Faisal Garba Muhammed expressed that mainstream migration studies misrepresent African migration and depict migrants as burdens driven by desperation. His paper aims to decenter Eurocentric frameworks that ignore intra-South mobility and African scholarship. He advocated historicizing migration as integral to African life, not exceptional, including examining the transatlantic slave trade’s legacy in contemporary migration regulation that “wants the body, not the human.” He emphasized that migrants are collective actors in world-making and challenged the narrow nationalist belonging concepts.

In the last session, Anushka Bose looked at passport acquisition as a categorical mobility strategy beyond physical migration. Her work analyzes three citizenship-by-investment programs (golden passports), strategic naturalization through temporary migration, and ancestry-based acquisition as pathways that convert different resources, financial capital, time/bureaucratic compliance, or kinship claims, into second passports. Focusing on the GCC, where passport nationality determines high-skilled workers’ salaries (Western passport holders earning the most, followed by Middle Eastern, then Asian nationals), she questions whether passports proxy for skill or credentials. She proposed treating diverse acquisition pathways as unified categorical mobility strategies, examining how passport capital transforms labor market positioning, especially for expatriates seeking stronger legal anchors while maintaining Gulf-based careers.

The final papers from this workshop will be published as a special issue of a journal by CIRS.

To view the working group agenda, click here

To read the participants’ biographies, click here

Read more about this research initiative

Participants and Discussants:

Zahra Babar

Payal Banerjee

Misba Bhatti

Anuska Bose

Maryam Daud

Nandini Deo

Mehek Elahi

Bina Fernandez

Faisal Garba

Amanda Garrett

Noor Hussain

Syed Taha Kaleem

Aashish Karn

Torsten Menge

Suzi Mirgani

Honore Mugiraneza

Shyryn Nurlybek

Haala Qamar

Elena Fiddian Qasmiyeh

Rachel Silvey

Sabreen Taha

Brenda S.A. Yeoh FBA

Meron Zeleke

CIRS Monthly Dialogue: Asian Migration in a Global Context
2026-02-09 18:00 - 19:00
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.

Political Economy of Development in Sudan: A Historical View of Economic Relations, Trade, and Informality Workshop I
2026-04-19 13:00 - 2026-04-20 17:00
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

Book Talk: Remittance as Belonging
2026-06-24 08:00 - 17:00
The Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) hosted a thought-provoking book talk with Professor Hasan Mahmud, author of Remittance as Belonging: Global Migration, Transnationalism, and the Quest for Home (Rutgers University Press). Moderated by Zahra Babar and Professor Amanda Garrett, the conversation delved into the moral, social, and emotional dimensions of remittances, reimagining them as acts of care, obligation, and identity that link migrants to their homes across borders. Drawing from ethnographic research with Bangladeshi migrants in Los Angeles and Tokyo, Professor Mahmud explored how remittance practices challenge conventional understandings of integration, citizenship, and belonging, revealing the deeply human stories behind economic exchange and migration.

Opening remarks introduced the book’s core proposition: remittances are not simply economic transfers. Rather, they are social acts grounded in obligation, care, and identity. The event also formed part of a broader CIRS research initiative on migration from the Global South. Drawing on three and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork with Bangladeshi migrants in Los Angeles and Tokyo, Professor Mahmud advanced a multidimensional conception of “home” as locational, relational, and aspirational. He showed how migrants enacted belonging across borders through financial support, investments, and gifts, and he challenged economic models that reduced remittances to altruism versus self interest. Instead, he located remitting in enduring social relationships and cultural expectations that shaped who sent money, to whom, and why.

Professor Mahmud contrasted incorporation contexts. In Japan, restrictive legal pathways and persistent social exclusion encouraged migrants to imagine their stays as temporary; remittances there tended to be frequent and oriented toward return, including investments in land and housing. In the United States, even with opportunities for settlement, citizenship, and family reunification, migrants continued to remit, although motives shifted over time: early transfers sustained relatives, later transfers helped restore status through property investments, and established professionals often turned to philanthropic giving in home communities. Across both sites, Bangladesh remained an anchor of belonging.

Audience questions highlighted the emotional labor that underwrote remittances on both sides of the border, including gendered obligations and intra family negotiations. Participants also raised the phenomenon of reverse remittances, when families in Bangladesh temporarily supported migrants during periods of precarity abroad. These dynamics complicated policy narratives that instrumentalized remittances as development finance and underscored the limitations of treating money in motion as a simple economic variable.

Article by Maryam Daud, Administrative Assistant at CIRS.

Speakers:

Hasan Mahmud is assistant professor in residence at Northwestern University in Qatar. He has a PhD in sociology from the University of California Los Angeles, an MA in global studies from Sophia University in Tokyo, and an MSS and a BSS in sociology from the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh. He was a visiting faculty member in the Department of Sociology at Ball State University prior to coming to NU-Q. His teaching and research interests include sociological theories, globalization, international migration and development, identity politics, and global ethnography. His research has appeared in such publications as Current Sociology, Migration & Development, Contemporary Justice Review, and Journal of Socio-economic Research and Development.

Amanda Garrett is Assistant Professor of Comparative and International Politics at Georgetown University in Qatar. Her research focuses on migration and ethnic diversity in advanced democracies, including immigration and integration, ethnic violence, minority political incorporation, and Islam in Western societies. Her current book project, developed from her Harvard PhD dissertation When Cities Fight Back, examines when religious or ethnic minorities use violence as political expression in France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States. She has held appointments at Harvard University, New York University, Sciences Po, and the German Bundestag, and received the 2014 APSA Ernst B. Haas Best Dissertation Award.

Zahra Babar is the Executive Director at CIRS at Georgetown University in Qatar. Previously, she has served with the International Labor Organization and the United Nations Development Program. Her current research interests include rural development, migration and labor policies, and citizenship in the Persian Gulf states.

Launch Event: Migrant Stories from Qatar
2026-06-25 08:00 - 17:00
Join us for the launch of the Migrant Stories from Qatar project website!

This project brings together oral histories from migrant workers across Qatar, offering rare insight into their lived experiences and contributions to the country’s social and economic fabric. The six principal investigators will reflect on the research process, its findings, and the broader significance of archiving migrant voices in Qatar, an endeavor that seeks to reframe narratives of labor, belonging, and memory in the Gulf.

More info

On November 10, the Center for International and Regional Studies held the official launch of the Migrant Stories in Qatar project website, a digital platform dedicated to preserving and sharing the lived experiences of migrant workers in Qatar. Conceived as a long–term public resource, the project curates oral histories, testimonials, and personal narratives that illuminate the social worlds, aspirations, and challenges of the migrant communities whose labor has shaped the contemporary Gulf. It seeks to democratize knowledge production by placing migrant workers not merely as subjects of study, but as active contributors and curators of their own histories.

Zahra Babar, the project emerged from intimate exchanges with migrants and from frustration with how their voices are routinely mediated, silenced, or reduced to anonymous data points. The website functions as a counter archive that democratizes knowledge production by coproducing narratives with migrant workers themselves and making these stories accessible to migrants, their families, and wider publics.

Speakers at the launch highlighted the project’s methodological, ethical, and political stakes. Trish Kahle and Nadya Sbaiti situated the archive within broader efforts to document global south histories at a time when formal state archives remain inaccessible, arguing that migrant narratives reveal migrants not as marginal to the Gulf, but as central to its social and economic order.

Noha Aboueldahab drew attention to the global significance of these testimonies, observing that themes of law, its absence, and its uneven application recur across the interviews. She argued that oral histories offer multiple truths that complicate existing legal narratives and have important implications for fields such as international law and transitional justice. Integrating such testimonies into legal analysis, she suggested, could transform understandings of rights, accountability, and lived experience.

The project also involves extensive technical and linguistic labor. Suzi Migani, responsible for recording and editing the English–language podcasts, spoke about the logistical challenges of conducting interviews and the delicate process of editing without inadvertently shaping the narrative. She explained that the platform provides two versions of each interview: a full recording with only identifying details removed, and a shorter public podcast episode of approximately fifteen minutes. Misba Bhatti, who leads editing in hindustaani, described the complexity of translation and the responsibility to convey meaning and emotion with accuracy and integrity.

Together, these interventions articulate Migrant Stories in Qatar as both an archive and a collaborative intellectual project that reclaims authorship for migrant workers in and beyond Qatar.

Cotton Queen | Film Screening and Panel Discussion
2026-06-28 08:00 - 17:00
Join us for the screening of Cotton Queen, register below!

Register Here

Cotton Queen is a 2025 internationally co-produced drama written and directed by Suzi Mirgani in her feature directorial debut. Set in a cotton-farming village in Sudan, the film follows Nafisa, a young woman raised on her grandmother’s stories of resistance against British colonial rule. When a businessman arrives with a development scheme centered on genetically engineered cotton, Nafisa finds herself at the heart of a quiet but fierce power struggle that exposes the entanglements of land, memory, gender, and exploitation.

The film had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2025 and has since received wide international acclaim, including the Golden Alexander Award for Best Feature Film at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. With a haunting score by Amine Bouhafa and striking cinematography by Frida Marzouk, Cotton Queen is a powerful meditation on resistance, inheritance, and the cost of so-called progress.

Africana Studies Across Regions: In Conversation with Dr. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer and Professor Akintunde Akinade
2026-06-30 08:00 - 17:00
In Conversation with Dr. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer and Professor Akintunde Akinade

What does Africana Studies look like depending on where it is practiced? This lunch talk brings scholars into conversation on how institutional location, disciplinary training, and regional context shape the questions, methods, and stakes of Africana Studies. The discussion considers the relationship between scholarship and community, and how recognition, accountability, and relevance vary across contexts.

On January 22nd, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) hosted Dr. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, a scholar of anthropology and Africana Studies at the University of Michigan, in conversation with Professor Akintunde Akinade, Professor of Theology at Georgetown University in Qatar. The dialogue explored the intersections of theology, Africana Studies, pedagogy, and resistance within increasingly hostile academic environments. The conversation began with both scholars reflecting on their experiences teaching liberation theology and Africana Studies, with Professor Akinade sharing that after nearly 30 years of teaching, he remains passionate about doing “theology for the people” and moving students beyond Eurocentric frameworks to engage with theologies from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. He described teaching a course on liberation theologies at GU-Q and noted that students are responsive and engaged, coming to class ready to move beyond dogma and think critically.

The discussion outlined the challenges of teaching in the current political climate, particularly around issues of white supremacy and institutional resistance. Professor Akinade shared a powerful teaching moment from his recent class where he defined white supremacy as sin, explaining that from a theological perspective, sin is separation—separation between humanity and divinity, but in the context of white supremacy, it manifests as separation between people through hierarchies that deny our shared humanity. Dr. Abdul Khabeer added Islamic theological perspectives on this, citing scholars like Sherman Jackson who frames white supremacy as shirk, the association of partners with God that destabilizes the fundamental Islamic principle of tawhid, the oneness of God. She also mentioned feminist Islamic theologian Amina Wadud who makes similar arguments about patriarchy usurping divine authority. Both scholars emphasized that these theological framings ground their resistance to oppression in core spiritual principles.

The conversation addressed how space and place shape what can be taught and said. Professor Akinade contrasted his experience teaching in Doha, where he feels freedom to speak openly, with his previous position in High Point, North Carolina, where students were more resistant to revolutionary content. Dr. Abdul Khabeer spoke candidly about the contemporary reality of teaching in the United States, including students recording classes to try to “catch” professors saying something controversial, the need to have attorneys on standby, meticulous documentation of all interactions, and the recent elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion programming at the University of Michigan where she teaches. Despite these hostile conditions, both scholars emphasized the absolute necessity of continuing the work.

A significant portion of the discussion focused on teaching the humanity of Black people and moving beyond caricatures and stereotypes. Professor Akinade grounded this in the theological concept that everyone is created in the image of God, making every person precious and important with a divine spark. Dr. Abdul Khabeer described teaching a hip-hop course where she uses albums like Biggie Smalls’ “Ready to Die” to help students understand Black humanity in three dimensions rather than one-dimensional caricatures. She explained that by analyzing songs like “Suicidal Thoughts” and Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” students learn to understand the socioeconomic contexts shaping people’s lives, recognize the community and relationships that exist, and see the solidarity and care present even in difficult circumstances. The goal is to move students beyond seeing Black people as hypersexual and hyperviolent stereotypes to understanding the fuller context of lived experiences, mental health struggles, and community support systems.

Both scholars emphasized the importance of embodiment and experience as forms of knowledge, challenging the Enlightenment paradigm’s overemphasis on reason alone. Dr. Abdul Khabeer, who is also a dancer trained in Katherine Dunham’s dance anthropology technique, explained how everyday life, how one dresses, moves through space, and physically exists, is deeply tied to history and politics. She shared an example of applying to Vassar College and discovering that the staircases were built for “women’s gaits” but her feet were too large for them, teaching her viscerally about who institutions are designed for and who they exclude. Professor Akinade connected this to his theological work, arguing that experience—particularly the experience of those raised in villages, those who have suffered, those marginalized—must be used to redefine orthodoxy and challenge monolithic paradigms. He referenced James Cone’s declaration that “God is Black” not as a statement about skin color but as an ontological connection with suffering, as Cornel West says, letting suffering speak.

The conversation highlighted the expansiveness that Africana Studies offers as an epistemology. Dr. Abdul Khabeer explained that unlike the traditional Euro-American tradition that says “you do it this way or that way and that’s it,” Africana Studies provides more options, more possibilities, and therefore more solutions. She attributed this expansiveness to the fact that Black people, particularly descendants of enslaved people, are “miracles walking” because they were not meant to survive but did survive through imagination and refusing to accept oppressive narratives as truth. This survival through creativity and alternative ways of knowing gives Africana Studies its power to envision futures and discover opportunities that dominant frameworks foreclose.

Professor Akinade challenged who gets to define rigorous scholarship, questioning why work not done at elite Western institutions like Rome, Columbia, or Yale is deemed less rigorous. He invoked Steve Biko’s book title “I Write What I Like” to assert his own approach: “I write what I like, I teach what I like, and I’m accountable, accountable to my people.” Both scholars emphasized that scholarship cannot be abstract but must be connected to life, must be life-giving, must help things grow. They discussed the danger of “dead scholarship” that exists only in ivory towers disconnected from the communities it purports to study, though Dr. Abdul Khabeer nuanced this by noting that death itself is a portal to other things in many traditions, so perhaps the better term is scholarship that is not life-giving, that doesn’t allow things to grow and flourish.

Article by Maryam Daud, Administrative Assistant at CIRS and Honore Mugiraneza, CIRS Publications Assistant

CIRS Lunch Talk: Masterclass with Professor Arjun Appadurai on "Global Cultural Flows"
2026-07-01 08:00 - 17:00
In the 1990’s, the world began to see a massive growth in transnational traffic in images, ideologies and commodities, a process which popularized the term globalization. Today, almost four decades later, the world order is multipolar, highly unstable and full of obstacles to free cultural flows. How can we interpret these changes?

Hosted by CIRS, in collaboration with the Indian Ocean Studies Working Group, this masterclass brings together scholars and students for an engaging discussion on the dynamics of globalization and cultural movement. Renowned anthropologist Arjun Appadurai will reflect on how people, objects, and ideas circulate across borders, and how imagination, media, and markets shape these flows. Drawing on his influential works Modernity at Large, The Social Life of Things, Fear of Small Numbers, and Banking on Words Professor Appadurai will offer a framework for understanding disjuncture, modernity and power in the present moment.

Laboring to Keep the Dead Alive: Commemoration and Social Reproduction in the Kurdish Movement
2026-07-02 08:00 - 17:00
Speaker: Marlene Schäfers, Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University

On November 13, CIRS hosted a lunch talk in collaboration with the Critical Security Studies Hub at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University, titled “Labouring to Keep the Dead Alive: Commemoration and Social Reproduction in the Kurdish Movement.”

In this talk, Dr Marlene Schäfers explored how the Kurdish movement understands and mobilizes martyrdom as a form of labour that sustains the community. Drawing on examples of funerals, memorial ceremonies, social media tributes, and the production of “martyr albums,” she showed that these practices constitute a vital mode of reproductive labour, one that preserves continuity and identity when biological kinship cannot be relied upon.

What emerged clearly is that these acts of remembrance are not peripheral or decorative. They are central to how the movement reproduces itself. In contexts where traditional forms of kinship or biological reproduction cannot be relied upon, especially in guerrilla camps marked by precarity and constant threat, memory becomes a primary means of sustaining life. The speaker drew attention to the idea that narration itself becomes a reproductive act. Each story, each obituary, each ceremony extends the presence of the dead into the lives of the living. Through this narrative labour, the community cultivates what one might call descendants or extended selves, people whose identities form through their attachment to martyrs and to the struggle they represent.

A striking quote from the presentation captured this ethos: “We have learned that there are other ways of multiplying.” In other words, the reproduction of the community does not depend on producing biological offspring. Instead, it comes from producing affective ties, political commitment, and a shared sense of continuity. As one Kurdish interlocutor explained, “If you go to Kurdistan, to Rojava, and ask who Martyr Zîlan is, everyone will tell you. In this way martyrdom becomes a means of reproducing the existence of the people, and of the person herself.” Martyrs do not disappear; their memory generates new forms of political life.

The presentation also highlighted how internationalist volunteers in Rojava engage with this culture of martyrdom. For many of them, the emotional and ethical demands of this form of commemoration require a departure from liberal Western assumptions that individual life is the highest good. Instead, they are encouraged to adopt a long-term, historical view: to understand their lives as part of a continuum that includes those who fought before them and those who will continue the struggle after. This shift in orientation is both necessary and unsettling. It asks individuals to situate their grief within a broader collective horizon.

This does not mean that death becomes easy. On the contrary, participants repeatedly acknowledged that death remains bitter. One writer described rebelling against each new announcement of martyrdom, asking, “Why is there death? Are we condemned to lose our beautiful friends forever?” Even language seems insufficient. “No single word does justice to them,” another wrote. The task of writing about the dead becomes a dilemma: if one writes, the attempt feels inadequate; if one does not write, the memory risks disappearing. This tension is precisely what pushes many to take up the pen again, despite what they describe as their own lack of skill. Writing becomes a moral responsibility.

Ultimately, the speaker argued that martyrdom in the Kurdish movement is not only a political symbol. It is a mechanism of social reproduction, a way of keeping the community alive under conditions of war, displacement, and uncertainty.

Article by Maryam Daud, Administrative Assistant at CIRS

Marlene Schäfers is associate professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the impact of state violence on intimate and gendered lives, voice and memory, and the politics of death and the afterlife. She specializes in the anthropology of the Kurdish regions and modern Turkey. Her first monograph, Voices that Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey, was published with the University of Chicago Press in 2023 and awarded the annual Book Prize of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association in 2024.
