Thinking Sudan

Reem Abbas is a Sudanese writer, researcher, and feminist activist. She is a former member of the coordination committee at Sudanese Women in Civic and Political Groups (MANSAM) and co-author of (Un)Doing Resistance: Authoritarianism and Attacks on the Arts in Sudan’s 30 Years of Islamist Rule. Her essay “Smuggling Books into Sudan: A Brief History from 2012 to 2016” was published in The Art and Solidarity Reader: Radical Actions, Politics and Friendships. She is also a former Nonresident Fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, where her research focused on land, conflict, and resources in Sudan.

Rebecca Glade is a Research Associate at the Makerere Institute of Social Research and the Managing Editor of the Makerere Historical Journal. Her work engages with both Africa and the Middle East history, examining the politics and social history of post-independence Sudan. Her book manuscript, Sudanese Political Movements and the Struggle for the State: 1964-1985, analyzes the ways that opposition movements pressured the state to advance their political agendas in Sudan and points to how the state developed in dialogue with them. In the process, she engages with and draws upon histories of social and cultural movements, civil society, state-society relations, and labor. Her other recent work focuses on the beginnings of Sudanese Jazz and student activism in Sudan in the 1960s and 70s.

Gussai H. Sheikheldin is a Senior Research Fellow with STIPRO (Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Research Organization), Tanzania, Adjunct Assistant Professor with the School of Engineering Practice & Technology, McMaster University, Canada, and former Director (2020-2021) of the Industrial Research and Consultancy Centre, Sudan. His work revolves around illuminating synergies between techno-science and socio-economic institutions to advance policies and solutions in governing industrial sectors, national research & innovation systems, and comprehensive agenda for sustainable development.

Khalid Mustafa Medani is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Islamic Studies at McGill University, where he is also Chair of the African Studies Program and Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies. His research focuses on globalization, and the political economy of Islamist and Ethnic Politics in Africa and the Middle East, with a special focus on Sudan, Egypt, and Somalia. He is the author of Black Markets and Militants: Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa (2021), which received an award from the American Political Science Association. In addition, he has published on the roots of political radicalization, the debate over informal financial markets, and civil conflict in the Horn of Africa with a special focus on the armed conflicts in Sudan and Somalia. His work has appeared in Political Science and Politics (PS), the Journal of Democracy, the Journal of North African Studies, Current History, Middle East Report, Review of African Political Economy, Arab Studies Quarterly, and the UCLA Journal of Islamic Law. He is a previous recipient of a Carnegie Scholar on Islam award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and, more recently, he was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship from the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in 2020-2021.

Muez Ali is a Research and Policy Lead at Earthna: Center for a Sustainable Future at Qatar Foundation, an Honorary Research Fellow at the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources at UCL, London, and an Adjunct Lecturer at Georgetown University in Qatar. His research activities and interests span food security, climate change in the MENA region and Sub-Saharan Africa, electrification and energy access, and the political economy of knowledge production and development. On Sudan, his research focuses on social and economic policy, conflict, civil society, and governance. With Alneel and Hassanain, he is co-author of “Conditionality Breeds Contempt: Donor and Multilateral Myopia in Sudan,” in African Studies Review 67, no. 4 (2024).