“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 ...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51