Nisrin Elamin Ph.D. ’19 was conducting research in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, in April 2023 when fighting erupted between the country’s armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group. More than five hundred days later, the war has killed thousands, displaced millions, reignited genocidal campaigns and plunged Africa’s third-largest country into famine.

Elamin, an assistant professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Toronto and founder of the Sudan Solidarity Collective, has spent several years during her doctoral program and portions of her childhood in Sudan. Her work examines the relationships between land, agriculture, race, belonging and migration.

A dual citizen of the U.S. and Sudan, Elamin fled the country with her daughter and parents first to Saudi Arabia, then to the U.S. The vast majority of Sudanese are unable to afford the expenses to obtain an entry visa, especially as intensifying violence brings economic crisis and deepening unemployment, Elamin said.

The Daily spoke to Elamin about the causes and implications of what United Nations officials have called the largest humanitarian crisis worldwide, the role of civil society groups and the path forward for Sudan. 

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

The Stanford Daily [TSD]: When the first shots of the war were fired in Khartoum, how did you react? 

Nisrin Elamin [NE]: I arrived in Sudan about a year before the war started to conduct follow-up interviews for my book on large-scale land grabs in central Sudan, community resistance and organizing against land-drive dispossession. I also wanted to introduce my three-year-old daughter to Sudan and to her family. Additionally, it was Ramadan and I was excited to finish fasting with my family and to celebrate Eid.

Then one morning, we woke up to the sound of bullets and explosions. We had rented an apartment in a part of Khartoum that was under heavy attack. As a parent, those were probably the hardest weeks of my parenting journey, partly because we didn’t have any food in the house. During the curfews, which were not proper curfews, I would try to run out and get food for my daughter. But most of the stores had run out of fresh food very quickly. You would line up for bread and by the time you got to the front of the line, the bread was gone. That was quite hard — the sort of immediate food scarcity.

TSD: Many of your relatives in Sudan have been displaced by RSF encroachment. How severe are humanitarian conditions on the ground?

NE: Most people in my family are having one meal a day and very little animal protein. Some people in my family are farmers, and it has been very difficult for them to plant because electricity is cut. In El Gezira, Sudan’s agricultural heartland, several massacres have devastated villages where people have attempted to plant. The RSF has destroyed much of the agricultural infrastructure in El Gezira and elsewhere, looting storage facilities and preventing farmers from planting. I have been in touch with someone who works in the ​​El Gezira and El Managil Farmers Alliance, and they estimate that about 70% of farmers in El Gezira have been displaced. We see these headlines of famine in Sudan, and there is a full-blown famine, but it is also important to note that there is a full-blown famine in a country that could easily feed itself and the region. 

TSD: What are some of the immediate and long-term causes of the famine? 

NE: In many ways, this famine has been decades in the making. In the 1970s, the Nimeiry regime introduced mechanized farming schemes that began to chip away at the small-scale agricultural sector. Through these antiquated, almost colonial land laws, the government seized communal lands that had been used for herding and rain-fed farming to establish mechanized agricultural schemes, in some cases with Gulf-Arab financing.

That is the beginning of the story of food insecurity in Sudan, in the sense that it pushed some small farmers into debt. There had been famines in central Sudan, including a very terrible famine in the 1980s in Darfur, that also was in part caused by government neglect. Especially after Omar al-Bashir’s regime, there was a real attempt to privatize and decimate the small-scale agricultural sector to pave the way for large-scale foreign investments in Sudanese land. That has really undermined peoples’ ability to feed themselves and created this context from which this famine has now emerged.

Both the RSF and the army also use starvation as a weapon of war by obstructing the delivery of aid into the areas where it is most needed. All of this is leading to about half of the country being at severe risk of starvation. The Clingendael Institute issued a warning that by September, potentially 2.5 million people will die. In certain areas, especially Darfur, a hundred people are dying a day of starvation. 

TSD: How did you establish the Sudan Solidarity Collective, and what are its aims and objectives?  

NE: When I returned from Sudan, I met a couple students at the University of Toronto, and we organized ourselves into the Sudan Solidarity Collective, which supports grassroots mutual-aid efforts on the ground. Once the war started, these Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) emerged across Sudan and there are thousands of them now run by mostly young volunteers in their neighborhoods. The ERRs do everything from drive ambulances, create ad hoc emergency clinics, establish rape crisis centers, organize learning activities for children and turn some defunct schools into shelters. They have communal kitchens where they usually prepare one meal a day and sometimes hundreds of people have their meal for free. They have been retrieving and burning bodies in some parts of the country. Empty spaces have turned into cemeteries because so many people are dying without a proper burial.

The ERRs have done all this labor for free because the international aid community has been largely absent. As a collective, we have raised about $300,000 for them by doing teach-ins and educating people about what is happening in Sudan. 

TSD: How important are civil society groups in Sudan? 

NE: This is not a civil war; it is a war on and against civilians. It is those civilians that have shown time and time again that they can run the country without state elites. I think once this war ends, they will hopefully be the ones that will rebuild the country in a very different way.

This war has certainly proven to us that we do not need a violent ethno-nationalist extractive state in order for us to survive. We should abolish [the Sudanese military elites]. I think that is what gives me hope in the end. I am not very hopeful, since wars in Sudan in the past have lasted decades and killed millions — but I do have hope in the people who are keeping our people alive, and who are helping each other survive this. 

TSD: How have the Sudanese developed strength and resilience over time?

NE: From its inception, Sudan inherited from the British an economic and political system that was meant to protect elite interests by any means necessary. This was an extractive war economy, or, at the time, it was an extractive colonial economy. The Sudanese state has been run by elites primarily from the north and center at the expense of pretty much everyone else, including farmers at the center, who sustain this extractive export oriented economy that we inherited. There was resistance in the south that eventually led to independence in 2011, but that started in 1955, because people were demanding political representation and more equal development and an end to economic and political marginalization. The state responded to that with violence instead of acceding to those demands. 

I think fundamentally if you are responding to peoples’ demands for an economy that centers people rather than profit, without repression, then you need a never-ending and expanding security state to be able to maintain power. That is what has happened over the last couple of decades. What is needed right now is uprooting that system. We do not need reforms. We need a completely new Sudan — a new way of governing. The resistance committees in particular have proposed charters for a model of popular democracy from the bottom up, that basically inverts the power structure. I think that is really the way forward.