Nisrin Elamin is standing in front of a wall of windows while a January blizzard rages in the bleak Toronto night behind her. A banner in the corner of the room shows Sudanese student activist Alaa Salah over the words of Kwame Ture: “PEACE IS THE WHITE MAN’S WORD OURS IS LIBERATION.” “There are no genocides and wars in 2026 that most of us living in the secular colonies of North America are not somehow connected to,” she says to the group in front of her, “whether through our tax dollars, pension funds, the banks and cell phones we use. We need to abandon statist, masculinist forms of solidarity in favor of abolitionist, feminist, people-centered approaches across borders, from Sudan to Falasteen!” The gathering, organized by a neighborhood Palestine solidarity group, erupts in snaps and applause.
Elamin is a professor in the Anthropology and African Studies department at the University of Toronto. She’s also a co-founder of the Sudan Solidarity Collective (SSC), a volunteer-run fundraising and political education group that emerged shortly after the outbreak of civil war in the country on April 15, 2023. By December 2025, the SSC had raised and redirected $1 million (CAD) to grassroots civil society formations on the ground in Sudan. It was a major milestone in face of the unimaginable: 1,000 days of genocide, famine, and the world’s largest displacement crisis, the result of what Elamin calls “an internationalized, counterrevolutionary war.”
Sudan is now the third-largest country on the African continent, and prior to South Sudan’s independence in 2011, it was the largest. The capital city of Khartoum, located on the Red Sea, is home to the Nile River’s confluence, where the Blue Nile and White Nile meet. The silty river runs through the country, flooding annually, and watering the arable lands along its length, making Sudan an agricultural breadbasket for a region bordering desert. Today, the country’s primary exports are livestock, oil, and gold.
There’s a direct connection between the conflict in Sudan today and a legacy of extractive statecraft and intervention, enacted by a British colonial system that exacerbated ethnonationalist faults and strategically dispossessed the societies it governed. One year before Sudan’s independence from British and Egyptian rule in 1956, the burgeoning nation’s first civil war started. South Sudanese wanted political representation and regional autonomy from a centralized government that ruled the South in what Elamin calls “a quasi-internal colony.”
After the 1956 independence, an overwhelming majority of governing positions in parliament and civil service were transferred from British administrators to elites from the country’s North and center. Endemic underdevelopment of rural areas through resource and labor extraction prevailed, as did violent quashing of dissent from farmers, workers, trade unions, and displaced peoples. Over the decades, this has resulted in the deaths of millions of mostly South Sudanese people. After taking over the state in a 1989 coup, Omar al-Bashir consolidated control over public life with regime loyalists.
Into this protracted context of resource competition and regional rebellion emerged the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Constituted from the notorious Janjaweed militia, responsible for the Darfur genocide of the early aughts, the RSF functioned as a counterinsurgency force supported by the state military, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
In 2019, the people of Sudan initiated a popular revolutionary movement that led to a million-person sit-in at military headquarters in Khartoum and the ousting of Omar al-Bashir, 30 years after his coup. The people demanded thawra, revolution, in the form of civilian-led democracy. After three months, the sit-in ended with a massacre of protesters by armed forces under the joint leadership of SAF and RSF brass.
The people of Sudan initiated a popular revolution that led to a million-person sit-in.
A transitional government agreement between civilian elites and the military establishment followed. The agreement held until October 2021, when the SAF staged a coup, working again with the RSF. But on April 15, 2023, fighting broke out between the two military forces in Khartoum, with both factions vying for political and economic control over industries such as rubber, livestock, real estate, and gum arabic. This war continues now, over three years later.
Al Jazeera reports estimates of 150,000 people killed. And according to an April 2026 UN report, almost 10 million people have been displaced. When the war broke out, the RSF quickly occupied much of Khartoum, staging a campaign of unprecedented urban warfare against its citizens. By October 2025, after 18 months of siege, the RSF had captured El Fasher, the largest city in the western region of Darfur.
The RSF’s brutality in taking control of the country has led some Sudanese to support the SAF’s campaign against them, believing it will put an end to the extreme violence. But Khaldah Salih, who organizes with the SSC, notes that the SAF “has never fought anybody who is not Sudanese.” The end of the war between military factions does not guarantee the end of violence against citizens. Instead, war limits the horizon of possibility. “We are being forced to not think about the revolution or the future; only what’s going to end the violence right now.” But, despite the end of the transitional government agreement, the revolution’s work continues in the form of a new political consciousness flowing between Sudan and its diaspora.
“There’s still debate over who shot the first bullet, but the result was immediate and targeted all major infrastructure,” says Salih. We’re in a busy café on a convivial stretch of Toronto’s Danforth Avenue, where Greektown gives way to East African shops and mosques and culminates in Little Bangladesh. “The airport’s in the middle of Khartoum and the RSF offices were in residential areas,” she continues. “Everyone was displaced immediately — even people that didn’t leave the city had to leave their home.”
In those early days of the war, Salih felt restless and anxious. She was already organizing around Canada’s restrictive immigration policy for Sudanese refugees. Urban warfare was not the norm in the tri-city region of Khartoum, which contains the city proper as well as Bahri (also known as Khartoum North) and Omdurman. Her father quickly evacuated her family’s northern neighborhood of Shambat; she asked for a summary of his experience and posted it online, where a collective evacuation map was emerging. “The way Sudanese people use Twitter is different. Social media is where you learn, what roads do you take to exit Khartoum? Or, if you’re trying to get to the city, what happens?”
Seemingly overnight, life in Sudan changed. “I remember seeing a video of one of the biggest food factories being bombed, and immediately I was like, ‘Oh right, everyone’s going to go hungry.’ It was very obvious a famine would happen.” Urban siege resulted in the swift departure of the many international NGOs, including UN workers, that had provided scaffolding for social infrastructure — food, health, education — of the country, isolated for two decades under Clinton-era U.S. sanctions. (The situation has been exacerbated by Donald Trump’s decision to dissolve USAID in 2025, resulting in the abrupt loss of almost 50 percent of humanitarian funding to Sudan.)
But the 2019 revolution had seeded a new sphere of political consciousness, connecting people across Sudan, from the streets of resourced Khartoum to underresourced rural areas. This created the conditions for survival. Thousands of neighborhood resistance committees formed across the country, entrenching a grassroots, localized mutual aid network and creating ad hoc social infrastructure where the Sudanese state hadn’t, and where the international community only encoded cycles of dependency. When Covid-19 emerged, the resistance committee network established emergency response rooms (ERRs) to support people through the pandemic — and in April 2023, these localized groups began the work of humanitarian war relief.
An ERR is local in structure and action, organizing people on the level of the neighborhood to survive institutional and economic collapse. There are 19 ERRs in Khartoum alone. Some of them function mainly as a place to get and distribute food, while others might provide medical care, schooling, or shelter. It’s trial by triage: Immediate needs define operations and how volunteers mobilize.
The ERR is a sharp contrast to other “humanitarian” aid efforts centered around Sudan. In the mid-2000s, the Save Darfur Coalition, established by the American Jewish World Service, raised millions of dollars, made humanitarians out of celebrities, and instigated U.S. sanctions, bringing Sudan and the plight of Darfurians into the headlines. Twenty years on, the legacy of this American “movement” should be reevaluated; in particular, its emergence into a post-9/11 political atmosphere and its reliance on a colonial framing of racial animus between Arabs and Black Africans. One notable dissenting voice at the time was Mahmood Mamdani, the Columbia University political theorist and father of New York City’s current mayor, Zohran Mamdani. He saw the Save Darfur movement as “a slogan that masks a big power agenda to recolonise Africa” and “the humanitarian face of the War on Terror” — reactionary, racist, ignorant of history, and pointedly silent on the culpability of regional and Western powers in the conflict.
While Save Darfur courted cultural currency — Ryan Gosling wore a “darfur” shirt to the 2005 MTV Movie Awards, the year he and Rachel McAdams won Best Kiss for The Notebook — Elamin was involved in initiatives that supported capacity-building on the ground in Darfur. “I’m not from Darfur … Organizing in the diaspora needs to be very restrained, not take up too much space,” she says. “I needed to figure out, through the people I was connected with in Sudan, how to leverage some of my own privilege and facilitate the movement of money to people who needed it.” In this moment Elamin experienced something that would shape the SSC: Institutions wouldn’t fund this kind of grassroots work, but individuals would.
Today, the SSC works to redistribute funds — carefully, laboriously, navigating Canadian state restrictions — to civilian-led formations in urban and rural areas across Sudan. The SSC began by supporting ERRs but has expanded its scope to a range of mutual aid groups, including a farmers’ alliance that distributes seeds, allowing farmers to stay on the land. The revolution brought the depth of grassroots organizing to the fore, says Elamin. From another member of the SSC, Duha Elmardi, I learn about nafeer, a long-standing Sudanese cultural practice of mobilizing kinship networks for communal activities such as harvest or weddings. In the context of state collapse, sanctions, genocide, displacement, and war, nafeer — pooling resources, sharing a home and food — becomes both humanitarian and political in nature.
Abeer Dirar is a medical doctor currently living in Cairo. During the revolution she worked with the resistance committees, and then, when the pandemic hit, she helped to initiate an ERR in her east Khartoum neighborhood of Al Taif. “That was the start of my activism,” says Dirar, speaking over a WhatsApp call one evening during Ramadan. “It was important during the absence of the state that the ERRs were there, replacing the role of the government in the conflict zones and Sudan more generally.” After the war broke out, with bonds of reliance already established, Dirar says they simply reactivated their networks “with a new strategy” that’s more organized, more structured.
The resistance committees were politically significant because they connected “communities, activists, and the youth movement in Khartoum with the whole of Sudan,” says Dirar. The ERRs have to be careful to maintain the perception that they are neutral in the conflict: “They cannot contribute to any political party or intervention, because that would threaten the life of the volunteers in Sudan.”
They maintain trust by assessing what’s urgent and acting on those needs; early on, it was essential supplies and food access, then, as the war continued, medical support for cholera and dengue fever outbreaks. Because trust is proximal, Dirar says it’s important for diaspora partners, like the SSC, not to intervene with the ideas or vision of people on the ground.
The SSC’s auxiliary work of political education therefore focuses on mobilizing within the diaspora and between movements. Workshops4Sudan is a knowledge-sharing and fundraising model inspired by the popular Workshops4Gaza series that emerged in the wake of October 7, 2023. Through the workshops, artists, activists, and scholars like Safia Elhillo, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offer and further theories of solidarity, linking internationalism, abolition, land protection, and anti-imperialism. In this way, the SSC does what the Save Darfur movement wouldn’t: They situate “awareness” of the war within its appropriate political contexts. The balance of trust requires this partitioned approach, where political education addresses the contradictions of living within empire instead of pushing paternalistic humanitarian agendas.
The workshops also take advantage of popular enthusiasm for mutual aid as an ongoing liberation practice that emerged over the last decade through the Movement for Black Lives and accelerated through Covid-19 lockdowns. “This is the part I’m most proud of,” says Elamin. “We have built a model through political education, inviting people to support this work — and 70 percent of our donors are monthly donors. A lot of them are giving $10 a month.”
The digital infrastructure leveraged by Palestine solidarity organizing brought people toward the SSC as well. “In the beginning, our fundraising was maybe just being in spaces with people who are academics and have big pockets,” says Salih, “but with social media, after October 7, we built a good global community, where people could give … as a way to be in solidarity.” She thinks that the rupture of October 7 also changed how people understood Sudan. Initially, the level of destruction taking place in Sudan was obscured. “After the Americans got out, media coverage slowed down,” she says. “The impact is that not a lot of people cared.”
The people’s revolution doesn’t just threaten the dueling armed factions: It destabilizes neoliberalizing reforms.
Elamin points out how anti-Blackness fuels depoliticization of the conflict, “as if it’s just natural for Sudanese and Congolese to be experiencing these forms of violence, completely detaching it from capitalist extraction.” There was also a bit of an “ … and Sudan, and Congo” happening, says Salih, “[but] I think Palestine changed people politically and gave them an understanding of imperialism. We can do political education as to why Sudan on its own is worthy of your solidarity.”
Dirar is clear that even though her work with Khartoum ERR is explicitly humanitarian, the international community owes Sudan more than just aid — it has a political obligation to Sudan’s people. “It’s not enough. Twelve million Sudanese are displaced in the North and East, and you can see that there is still displacement,” she says. “We need to focus on the war that causes this crisis.”
In the spring of 2025, as part of research into a University of Toronto Faculty Association (UTFA) divestment campaign, Elamin and her colleagues discovered that some of the weapons manufacturers supplying the Israeli occupation forces are also supplying the UAE, which provides material support to the RSF. Elamin believes that connecting struggles, and broadening the scope of culpability in war crimes, led the vote to pass in favor of pressuring the pension fund to divest by a margin of 52 percent. UTFA must now advocate for this position to its managing body. Divestment initiatives remain a viable, winnable lever for workers, she notes. Especially where governments fail: In March 2026, the Canadian government voted down Bill C-233, which targeted loopholes in laws about arms exports to America, where parts are made into weapons that get sold to Israel and the UAE.
A well-organized and connected transnational network profits from these wars and genocides, says Elamin. Sudan is a frontier for the United Arab Emirates’ economic expansion. An April 2026 report in Business Insider Africa notes that gold accounts for almost 60 percent of Sudan’s total export value — nearly all of it purchased by the UAE. The gold trade and control of gold mines have become major revenue drivers for both the SAF and the RSF, “reinforcing gold’s position at the centre of the country’s war economy.”
The push to connect the struggles between Palestine and Sudan has gained ground. When El Fasher fell to the RSF in October and thousands were murdered, the influential, long-running Palestinian Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee called for “escalating boycotts of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) regime and its interests,” pointing to a deep “military, security, and political alliance” between the UAE and Israel.
Solidarity at this present moment, where states launder their complicity in war, land theft, and genocide through corporate transactions, demands that our organizing is oriented toward internationalism. It is not enough to simply be “against genocide,” without naming the antagonists and their patrons, who benefit from free-market interference. The potency of the SSC’s work lies in how the group has met the moment, putting its faith in the legacy of Sudanese organizing and care, and leveraging the political freedoms that comrades on the ground do not have, to deepen the values of people-centered liberation in the diaspora and across movements. “The only way we can start to chip away at their power and disrupt what they’re doing is by linking our struggles and organizing,” says Elamin. “It’s not going to be possible any other way.”
In January 2023, a grassroots coalition organized by the resistance committees published the Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People’s Power, addressed to the Sudanese people. The 50-page document, available online, articulates a radical political vision that transcends “the chronic Sudanese crisis” and defines sovereignty as “consolidating a democratic power practiced by the people at all levels and power structures.” The Revolutionary Charter advocates for national unity and the stripping of power from historic and contemporary elites who facilitate resource extraction and foreign interests over the needs of most Sudanese people. The people’s revolution doesn’t just threaten the dueling armed factions: It destabilizes neoliberalizing reforms that have reshaped the region.
While some romanticize the resistance committees and ERRs, others see them as less legible than institutions such as the military or political parties because of their nonhomogenous, localized, bottom-up structure — or because they aren’t prefigured by a single charismatic male figure. But that might also be their greatest strength. The popularity of the ERRs means that many Sudanese have experienced firsthand a type of democratic practice of survival. The skills and social structures that regular Sudanese people built to first enact a revolution, and then to survive a counterrevolutionary internal war, laid a foundation for the realization of the Revolutionary Charter.
They aren’t perfect, but the resistance committees offer a path toward genuine democracy and an end to interconnected, regional cycles of war. “We know that we can’t depend on the international community. We know that we can depend on ourselves,” says Salih. True self-governance is what a real end to the war would look like: not simply peace, but liberation.
Anupa Mistry is a writer and producer from Toronto.
Here's why we publish
Feminist thought is increasingly banned from universities and marginalized in billionaire-owned media. We’re proud to publish it. While these institutions are firing feminists, we’re hiring them — as brave journalists, writers, and artists who challenge ideas about gender at every level.
If this matters to you, please support Lux today. Independent media depends on you.