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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, racialization, 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 a book review of Saviors and Survivors, as well as an attempt to expand my earlier article. The point should not be to seek a satisfying moral answer, but to clarify 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 in the Darfur debate of the 2000s—especially in arguments over whether the violence should be named “genocide.” But the book’s motivation is methodological. Darfur cannot be understood through a „decontextualised“ moral of villains and victims, nor through a story of “ancient tribal hatred.” It must be understood as a modern political project: colonial rule produced “tribe” and “race” as administrative categories, and postcolonial governments repeatedly governed through—and thereby re-legitimized—those categories. In turn, international humanitarian and legal regimes reframed this history as a depoliticized scene of victimhood.

Mamdani’s core claim is that the categories that later became common sense in narrating the Darfur war—“Arab” vs. “African,” “native” vs. “settler”—were not timeless identities. They were political technologies: produced under colonial indirect rule, then weaponized within a shifting ecology of crisis—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 also what follows politically when modern conflicts are reduced to culture—a narrative that calls for saviours.

Colonial indirect rule as identity production

In Mamdani’s telling, British colonial administration reorganized Sudan’s peripheries by mapping populations into “race” and “tribe.” Census labels—such as “Arab” and “Zurga”—did not simply describe social difference; they became the operative framework for governance, land allocation, and local authority. Through “native administration,” colonial power delegated rule to designated “customary” authorities, presenting a modern political arrangement as though it were an inherited tradition.

Some groups were treated as “native,” entitled to customary claims over land and local governance within a given dar (homeland), while others were cast as “non-native”—“settlers” or “migrants”—and thus excluded from legitimate land claims. Land became both a collective tribal asset and the central marker of political identity and belonging. The result was a system that naturalized tribal identity as fixed and timeless, using it to allocate rights, enforce hierarchy, and maintain order in the colonial peripheries.

Land, livelihood, and the spiral into militarized conflict

Mamdani reconstructs a chain of modern crises that turned disputes into war:

  • a 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.

Mamdani 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.

The conflict, in this account, came to hinge on two contradictory rights-claims among the population:

  • tribal rights: grounded in “customary” homelands
  • 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 under conditions of crisis—and that an “arsenal of modern weapons” turned that collision into devastation.

Identity as a political choice under changing conditions

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

This reframes the later racialized narratives of “native” and “settler” that cast Darfur as an inevitable race war. For Mamdani, the point is not that identity is unreal, but that it was racialized, made governable, and then militarized.

Retribalization, racialization, and Sudan’s “soul”

Mamdani describes retribalization as a political project that intensifies tribal identity precisely where 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 seeks to separate them, making political conflict legible as racial conflict. He extends the argument to armed actors as well. In his framing, the “Janjaweed” are 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 expression of some essence of “Arabness.” Naming them as “Arab militia” versus “African rebels,” he warns, reproduces and amplifies the very racializing narratives that drive the conflict, without addressing its true causes.

Read this way, Mamdani’s Darfur becomes a window onto a broader Sudanese impasse: the state’s recurring attempt to unify a fractured polity by narrowing who counts as the nation—so that belonging is secured for some and denied to others.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 marginalization. In Mamdani’s terms, retribalization and racialization are not relics of tradition; they are modern tools of exclusion.

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 labelled 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 involved in a history of claims, negotiation, and coexistence. It also encourages an understanding of 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 focuses on violations and punishment. Survivor justice asks a different question: how can relationships be repaired among neighbors who will continue to share land after violence? In a region where categories of belonging have been weaponized, and where “perpetrator” is easily collapsed into “community,” an approach centered solely on punishment risks hardening collective stigma and reproducing exclusion—conditions that make renewed violence more, not less, likely.

Mamdani’s critique also extends to how humanitarianism becomes a mode of governance: a depoliticized administration of suffering that privileges external expertise, logistics, and “stability” over local political and grassroots 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. 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. 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 criminal law, 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 war that began on April 15, 2023—yet the book reads today as a warning about how crises are narrated, and what those narrations make possible. His insistence on survivor justice does not replace accountability; it clarifies the additional political work required if Sudan is to avoid a future in which the “defeat” of an enemy merely normalizes the continued marginalization—and cyclical remobilization—of the same communities under new labels.

There is also a continuity across Darfur’s 2003–2005 conflict and the war that erupted in 2023 share a central feature: the failure to address root causes, alongside the state’s use of militia forces to manage dissent and rebellion. In that trajectory, al-Bashir’s 2013 formalization of Janjaweed-derived forces into the RSF—as a regime-centered guard and counterinsurgency instrument—entrenched the conditions under which violence could recur, while Darfur remained marginalized.

This is why today’s SAF–RSF discourse becomes perilous when it collapses into one-sided fetishism. The RSF did not emerge outside the state; and treating the army as a neutral “national institution” risks reproducing the very logic Mamdani criticizes—legitimacy granted by status rather than political history, merit 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.

Any bridge from Mamdani to the present requires a clear 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. 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 grassroots popular legitimacy—rather than the dependency of depoliticized humanitarian intervention. (The Revolutionary Charter For Establishing People’s Power)

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References (links)

MACHT MIT.

WIDERSTAND IST DIE MENSCHLICHE REAKTION AUF UNGERECHTIGKEIT.

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  1. Avatar von Voices from Sudan – tadamun
    Voices from Sudan – tadamun

    […] For a detailed analysis of the Janjaweed/RSF, see Sudan: From Janjaweed to RSF. For an indepth discussion of the post-colonial structures that contributed to the Darfur war, see Sudan: Saviors and Survivors. […]

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