“Didn’t ‘we’ [Britain] leave them with a viable country, functional state and infrastructure. What more do they want and when will they take responsibility for their own shortcomings?” a British journalist asks on Twitter.
Key points:
- “There has been a historical tendency to separate matters of the economy from the political process in analysis and reporting on Sudan (and in Africa more generally).”
- “[T]he failure of the civilian technocratic government to disband the economic and political project of the Islamist military establishment.
- “Sudan’s 2018 revolutionary imaginary, fluid and expansive, was brought into being through the uprising’s main slogan: ‘Freedom, Peace and Justice’. In all of their iterations, these three words came to mean different things for different groups subject to violence and marginalization by the state in different ways.
- “In large part driven by externally supported processes, the importance of labor-based identities in shaping political struggle has since been subdued. The labor question was thrown to the wayside for the sake of “peace-making,” thus reducing its role in the state and accountable governance-building.
- “The fundamental principles of the charter of ‘No Partnership, No Negotiation and No Legitimacy’ highlighted the crisis of doing politics through cutting deals and sought to address its root causes. More importantly, it signaled a break with the technocratic principles of the 2020 civic transition under the auspices of the international community.
- The predominance of the externally imposed timeline over the local in the global political imagination is emblematic of the persistence of colonial legacies. African discourses continue to be developed externally and in separation from politics on the ground (and any form of local accountability) with major consequences for the shape and content of the democratic process.”
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