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Sudan: Saviors and Survivors

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When I wrote the article “Sudan: From Janjaweed to RSF,” the final section stayed on my mind, and I knew I would have to return to it. I did trace land, racialization, and the political economy that produced the Janjaweed/RSF—but I ended by posing a moral riddle to get at a political problem: agency. Not only individual choice, but collective participation—how group violence becomes organized, normalized, and sustained over time through histories of violence, narratives of exclusion, racialized common sense, social ties, and material incentives. The question was sincere, but it also weakened my conclusion. It shifted the focus from the political conditions that structure collective action to individual conscience, as if the last step were a moral explanation rather than an account of how agency is produced at the level of groups and power.

This article is mainly a book review of Saviors and Survivors, but it is also an attempt to expand my earlier article. The point should not be to seek a satisfying moral answer, but to clarify what a political horizon after mass violence could look like—what it would mean to repair a shared world when people still have to live together.

Get the book here: https://www.thalia.de/shop/home/artikeldetails/A1009749810

Darfur, modernity’s “tribes,” and the limits of humanitarian salvation

Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors is often read as an intervention in the Darfur debate of the 2000s—especially in arguments over whether the violence should be named “genocide.” But the book’s deeper wager is methodological: Darfur cannot be understood through a moral tableau of villains and victims, nor through a story of “ancient tribal hatred.” It must be understood as a modern political history—one in which colonial rule produced “tribe” and “race” as administrative truths, postcolonial governments repeatedly governed through those truths, and international humanitarian and legal regimes translated that political history into a depoliticized scene of rescue.

Mamdani’s core claim is stark: the categories that later became the common sense of the Darfur war—“Arab” vs. “African,” “native” vs. “settler”—were not timeless identities but political technologies, sharpened by colonial indirect rule and later weaponized within a changing ecology of land, migration, markets, and militarization. Darfur appears “premodern” only when we mistake colonial classifications for tradition. The tragedy, in Mamdani’s account, is not only mass violence; it is the political foreclosure that follows when modern conflicts are narrated as cultural pathologies requiring external saviors rather than internal repair.

Colonial indirect rule as identity production

In Mamdani’s telling, British colonial administration reorganized Sudan’s peripheries through a dual mapping of the population: race and tribe. Census categories—such as “Arab” and “Zurga”—did not merely describe; they “had teeth.” They became the frame for governance, land allocation, and local authority. Through the system of “native administration,” colonial power delegated rule to “customary” authorities, presenting a modern political arrangement as if it were an inherited tradition.

This is where Mamdani’s argument about “native” vs. “nonnative” becomes foundational. Belonging was territorialized: some groups were treated as having customary claims to land and local governance in a given dar (homeland), while others were treated as migrants—present, but politically unequal. Land became both (1) a collective tribal asset and (2) the decisive marker of political identity. The result was a system in which tribe became the master identity, not because people had always lived that way, but because rule demanded a legible grid through which to distribute rights and enforce hierarchy.

Land, livelihood, and the spiral into militarized conflict

Mamdani rejects any explanation that treats Darfur’s violence as an eruption of “tradition.” He instead reconstructs a chain of modern pressures that turned disputes into war:

  • a land regime that discriminated between “native” and “nonnative” tribes;
  • decades of ecological stress and drought that pushed northern herding groups southward;
  • the militarizing spillover from Chad’s long civil wars (weapons, fighters, and war economies moving across borders);
  • and a brutal counterinsurgency that escalated local conflicts into mass violence.

The clash, crucially, was not only between armed factions. It was also between two contradictory rights-claims: tribal rights (grounded in “customary” homelands) and citizenship rights (grounded in equal membership in a national political community). Mamdani’s formulation is that Darfur’s conflict centered on the collision of these claims—and that the “arsenal of modern weapons” turned that collision into devastation.

He also emphasizes transformations in agrarian political economy. As exports and commodity markets expanded, farmers began enclosing land more aggressively and claiming post-harvest resources that had historically underpinned symbiotic arrangements between cultivators and pastoralists. What had been negotiated coexistence—corridors, grazing after harvest, mediation by recognized authorities—became harder to sustain under enclosure, exclusion, and increasingly partisan state power.

Identity as a political choice under changing conditions

One of Mamdani’s most consequential moves is to challenge the popular story that Sudan’s “Arabization” was driven by waves of “Arab settlers” displacing “African natives.” He argues instead for a gradual, socially embedded process in which communities adopted “Arab” identification (and Arabic language) for political, economic, and status reasons. Genealogies of “Arab descent” were often retroactively produced and stabilized—less as historical record than as political claim. Intermarriage and cultural mixing were not exceptions but ordinary features of life, and identities were historically fluid—often linked to livelihood patterns (sedentary cultivation vs. nomadic pastoralism) and shifting alliances.

This matters because it undermines the racial fatalism that later frames Darfur as an inevitable race war. For Mamdani, the point is not that identity is unreal; it is that identity became governed—and then militarized—through modern statecraft.

Retribalization, racialization, and Sudan’s “soul”

Mamdani describes retribalization as a political project that intensifies tribal identity precisely when social realities are interdependent and mixed. Retribalization, he argues, was “pegged to” racialization: a strategy that classifies the population into “Arab” and “non-Arab” and then attempts to quarantine the former from the latter—making political conflict legible as racial conflict. This is why he insists Darfur is not “premodern.” It is modern in a specific sense: identities that appear ancient are often the afterlife of colonial classification, reactivated and operationalized through postcolonial strategies of rule. He extends this argument to armed actors as well: “Janjaweed,” in his framing, is better understood as a Sahel-wide phenomenon—outlaw bands emerging from the crisis of nomadism under drought, dispossession, and political abandonment—rather than as an essence of “Arabness.” Naming them as “Arab militia” versus “African rebels,” he warns, performs a racial sorting that does political work.

Read this way, Mamdani’s Darfur is not a regional exception but a window into a broader Sudanese impasse: the state’s recurring attempt to unify a fractured polity by narrowing who counts as the nation. That is why his analysis resonates with John Garang’s critique of Sudan’s search for its “soul.” Garang’s argument was not merely cultural; it was institutional. Sudan’s crisis is repeatedly misrecognized as a crisis of identity—resolved by refuge in Arabism or Islam—rather than a crisis of power, governance, and unequal recognition. In Mamdani’s terms, retribalization and racialization are not relics of tradition; they are modern tools that promise unity while producing exclusion, and that repeatedly route political conflicts into identities primed for militarization.

For a focused discussion of John Garang’s political thought and the SPLM/A’s “Sudanism”—including its tensions with Nimeiri-era state ideology and with southern secessionism during the Second Sudanese Civil War, see: John Garang and Sudanism.

What the “genocide” frame does in a humanitarian world order

The book’s most controversial contribution is its critique of the “genocide” frame—not as a moral claim about suffering, but as a political analysis of what that label does in a particular global order.

Two institutional realities frame the debate:

  • The UN International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur (2005) concluded that the Government of Sudan had not pursued a policy of genocide, while documenting extensive crimes that could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity (UN statement; Commission report PDF). (United Nations)
  • The International Criminal Court pursued cases that include genocide charges, including against Sudan’s former president (ICC case page; ICC case information sheet). (icc-cpi.int)

Mamdani’s concern is that once Darfur is stabilized as “genocide,” resolution becomes routed through international criminal law and a moral economy of saviors and victims. The humanitarian regime, in his telling, tends to depoliticize survivors—rendering them primarily as victims in need of rescue rather than agents embedded in a political history of claims, negotiation, and coexistence. It also encourages a punitive imaginary: justice as the removal of perpetrators rather than the rebuilding of a shared political community.

One can see the continuing force of this question in the contemporary ICC landscape: on December 9, 2025, the ICC sentenced Janjaweed leader Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman (“Ali Kushayb”) to 20 years for Darfur atrocities—an important milestone for criminal accountability, but not, by itself, a program for political repair. (Reuters)

This is where Mamdani’s distinction between criminal justice and survivor justice becomes central. Criminal justice seeks violations and punishment. Survivor justice asks a different question: how can relationships be repaired among neighbors who will continue to share land, markets, and institutions after violence? In a region where categories of belonging have been weaponized, and where “perpetrator” is easily collapsed into “community,” a purely punitive approach risks hardening collective stigma and reproducing exclusion—conditions that make renewed violence more, not less, likely.

Mamdani’s critique also extends to how humanitarianism can become a mode of governance: a depoliticized administration of suffering that privileges external expertise, logistics, and “stability” over local political agency. A contemporary illustration of this dynamic—especially the tendency toward NGO-ization and managerial depoliticization of grassroots struggle—is discussed in “Sudan: From Revolution to NGO Governance”.

That same essay also helps make Mamdani’s critique feel unsettlingly prophetic by situating humanitarianism inside a wider architecture of intervention and logistics. In a related analysis, Rafeef Ziadah argues that humanitarian logistics hubs—such as Dubai’s International Humanitarian City—cannot be read separately from geopolitical projection, because they bind together humanitarian, commercial, and military infrastructures. As Ziadah puts it, the task is to trace “the symbiotic relationship between humanitarian, commercial and military logistics.”

This “logistical turn” is not abstract. Dubai Humanitarian (formerly the International Humanitarian City) explicitly frames itself as a global hub hosting major agencies, and WFP operates a UN Humanitarian Response Depot (UNHRD) “c/o WFP” at the hub (WFP; UNHRD contacts). (World Food Programme)
And the push toward digitized humanitarian coordination is equally explicit: the UAE announced a Digital Response Platform using AI, machine learning, and geospatial tools to speed targeting and delivery (UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs).

For a broader critique of how data-driven systems reshape refugee governance and aid delivery, see “Artificial Humanitarianism—The Data-Driven Future of Refugee Responses”.

Taken together, these links underscore Mamdani’s political point: when crises are governed through humanitarian rescue and punitive legality, the space for political repair—the rebuilding of a shared civic life across weaponized categories of belonging—shrinks.

From Darfur’s afterlives to the SAF–RSF conflict

Mamdani wrote Saviors and Survivors in 2009, long before Sudan’s current national collapse (war since April 15, 2023), yet the book reads today like a warning about how crises get narrated—and what those narrations enable. Darfur’s 2003–2004 counterinsurgency was a regionally concentrated war organized through land, local administration, and racialized categorization; the post-2023 war is a struggle for power at the center that has unraveled the state across multiple regions and reconfigured the economy of violence on a national scale. The bridge Mamdani offers is an analytic continuity: a political field shaped by colonial technologies of belonging and postcolonial strategies of rule can repeatedly convert social vulnerability into militarized identity, while external humanitarian and legal frames tend to simplify conflict into moral archetypes that foreclose repair.

This is why today’s SAF–RSF discourse becomes perilous when it collapses into one-sided demonology or institutional fetishism. The RSF did not emerge outside the state; and treating the army as a neutral “national institution” by virtue of form risks reproducing the very logic Mamdani criticizes—legitimacy granted by institutional status rather than political history and conduct. A recent analysis in Rowaq Arabi (CIHRS) usefully names how “citizenship” rhetoric and center–periphery grievances are mobilized within the current war, even as mass violence—especially in Darfur—continues to devastate civilians.

Mamdani’s insistence on survivor justice does not replace accountability; it clarifies the additional work required if Sudan is to avoid a future in which the “defeat” of an enemy simply normalizes the continued marginalization—and cyclical remobilization—of the same communities under new labels.

Any bridge from Mamdani to the present therefore also demands a clear political commitment: to remain on the side of the Sudanese people. That means rejecting military rule, militia rule, and the normalization of violence—whether justified in the language of state preservation or in the language of periphery revenge—and refusing separatist shortcuts that merely repackage exclusion as escape. It also means taking seriously the most consistent democratic and anti-war position articulated from below: the revolutionary charters and declarations of the Sudanese Resistance Committees (RCs), which insist on civilian authority and refuse the false choice between competing armed elites. And it means recognizing the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) as more than an aid mechanism: they are a grassroots infrastructure of survival and self-organization that points to an alternative political horizon—mutual aid and popular legitimacy—rather than the managed dependency of humanitarian intervention. (The Revolutionary Charter For Establishing People’s Power)

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