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ABSTRACT
Since December 2018, Sudan has been experiencing a revolution that has engaged the large numbers of Sudanese who live abroad in a political struggle from afar. Based on a case study of the Sudanese community in France and an analysis of their long-distance support of the political upheavals from three different cities, this article assesses how times of revolution affect the sense of commonness of diasporic groups and reshape socio-political boundaries in exile. From our initial identification of two Sudanese generations in France, which we will call the elders and the youth, we assess how the collective identification process for exiles, which is initially determined by social and regional affiliations, has been affected in recent times by the outbreak of the Sudanese revolution. After presenting the two generations of Sudanese currently living in France, we show how the revolutionary context has affected their feelings of belonging and produced a temporary sense of diasporic unity. Finally, the article analyses how the stalemate in the revolutionary process during the summer of 2019 led to an erosion of this unified Sudanese consensus and resurrected political, regional, social, and generational divides, pushing the young generation to the forefront of protest from afar.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. The authors thank the ANR project “Thawra-Sur” for its support in the English editing of this article.
2. This expression was used by a Sudanese exile.
3. With the notable exception of (Franck & Etienne, Citation2019) and (Etienne, Citation2018). There has been far more extensive research in countries that have a longer history of migration from Sudan, such as Egypt (Brücker, Citation2020), the Gulf States (Malik, Citation2017; Shallal & Hamid, Citation2009), the United States (Abusharaf, Citation2002), the United Kingdom (Wilcock, Citation2018; Serra-Mingot, Citation2018), and Australia (Jay et al., Citation2013; Macaulay & Deppeler, Citation2020).
4. There have been many political fluctuations since the beginning of the revolutionary uprising in December 2018. Some events, such as the first demonstrations, the organization of the Qiyada sit-in in front of the presidential palace between April and June 2019, and the fall of Omar Al-Bashir in April 2019, are extensively discussed in this article because they help us understand the dynamics we are trying to uncover in what corresponds to the first phase of the Sudanese revolution. The post-2019 fluctuations, such as the signing of the peace agreements in Juba between the rebel groups and the Transitional Council in October 2020, and the coup of 25 October 2021, which brought an end to the transition period with the return to power of the military, are not addressed in this article.
5. We examined four national daily newspapers (Le Monde, Libération, Le Figaro, and La Croix) and three local ones (Le Parisien, Le Progrès and La Marseillaise), along with three weekly newspapers (L’Express, Politis, and Le Nouvel Observateur) and three online media outlets (Médiapart, Street Press and Orient XXI).
6. AURAT L. and IBRAHIM F. “L’exil militant des Soudanais de France”, Orient XXI, 11 September 2020, url: https://www.ritimo.org/L-exil-militant-des-Soudanais-de-France.
7. The military-Islamist regime of Omar al-Bashir, which remained in power for almost thirty years, was far from being monolithic: on the contrary, it showed an exceptional capacity to evolve and adapt, restructuring its alliances (regional, political, and ideological), developing an efficient clientelist system, and permeating every sphere of Sudanese society over time (see Berridge Willow, Citation2017; Verhoven, 2015; Otayek and Soares, Citation2009).
8. We have chosen the word “Nilians”, which was used by respondents who did not belong to this dominant group, to designate this elite.
9. The authors met them in Lyon in March 2021 and in Paris in February 2013 respectively.
10. While this movement echoes the American “Save Darfur Coalition”, it was never on the same scale, nor did it have the same connections to the media and political spheres. On this subject, see Abusharaf (Citation2010).
11. The decade of the 2000s was marked by an increase in the numbers of people returning to Sudan from the diaspora (IOM, Citation2012, p. 65).
12. John Garang (1945–2005) was one of the main leaders of the opposition in southern Sudan (SPLA-SPLM – Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement). He had a unitary, inclusive, and multi-faith concept of the country (New Sudan).
13. In particular the regime as it was reconfigured after the expulsion of the Islamist ideologue Hassan Al Turabi, which contributed to the disintegration of the convergence of interests with the Darfurians that had been prevalent in previous decades.
14. Such as the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM) in Darfur, or even the SPLM-North in the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile state.
15. The European Regulation that determines which EU Member State is responsible for examining an application for asylum: the country in which the asylum seeker is first identified (by fingerprinting) is responsible for carrying out the examination process.
16. Interview with Rasheed Saeed, Khartoum, February 2020. At the end of 2019, he returned to Sudan after years of exile in France and joined the transitional government (Ministry of Communication).
17. An expression used by a young man from Darfur during an interview in the summer of 2019.
18. An expression used by Abubakar in a lecture given at a public conference on the development of the Sudanese revolution in January 2022.
19. Although there are connections between the struggles of revolutionaries, especially in the context of the Arab Spring and its second waves (Langlois, Citation2022), from an empirical standpoint we only note minor echoes among the diasporic movements in France.
20. A review of the articles published in different French news outlets [see introduction] allowed us to establish that during the winter of 2019, several of the daily newspapers listed reported on the actions by Sudanese in France in support of the revolution.
21. https://blogs.mediapart.fr/sudfa (accessed 21 March 2021).
22. The group mainly used Facebook to circulate information. See https://www.facebook.com/Sudanese-Translators-for-Change-STC-410547673013811 (accessed 21 March 2021).
23. The symbolic date of the anniversary of the 1985 revolution.
24. The demonstrations slowed down and were replaced by an intense online activity that included relaying information on social media, organizing fundraising activities to financially support the revolutionaries, and even for those who were able to do so, returning to Sudan.
25. Former members of the Janjaweed militias, accused of atrocities during the conflict in Darfur, under the command of General Hemmitti.
26. “Au Soudan, les gens pleurent les morts et la perte du sit-in” (“In Sudan, people mourn the dead and the loss of the sit-in”), Libération, June 19, 2019, https://www.liberation.fr/planete/2019/06/18/au-soudan-les-gens-pleurent-les-morts-et-la-perte-du-sit-in_1734652/ (accessed 21 March 212,021).
27. This call to protest issued by the Alliance for Freedom and Change (ALC) was the first of its kind after the massacre of 3 June. It was massively attended: hundreds of thousands of Sudanese marched in Khartoum on 30 June to demand that the Military Council transfer power to a civilian government, in what is now called the march of the million (“milyoneya”).
30. Interview with Saddam, May 2019, Marseille.
31. Interview with Ihab, February 2020, Khartoum.
32. Othman, who is from the Nile Valley, arrived in France in the late 1990s seeking asylum as a political opponent of Omar Al-Bashir’s regime. Interview with Othman, March 2021, Lyon.
33. Asylum policies also contribute towards reinforcing and reifying ethnic and regional affiliations, as the French institutions in charge of asylum applications refer to a “grid of identity and minority assignations” to grant or reject international protection (Gout, Citation2020).
34. Interview with Taha, July 2019, Marseille.
35. Interview with Mazen, July 2019, Marseille.
36. Interview with Badreldin, who was born in Kas, Darfur, in 1992 and arrived in France in 2016.
37. Interview with Mazen [see above].
38. Hassan Al Turabi is the ideologist of the Sudanese Islamic movement and the architect of the rise to power of the Sudanese Islamic Front and Omar Al-Bashir’s coup in 1989. Darfuris supported the ruling regime, especially in its early days (Chevrillon-Guibert, Citation2013).
39. Interview with Othman [see above].
40. A term used by Mohamed Ahmed, the Sudanese owner of a construction company and a former representative of the Unionist Party in France. He arrived in Lyon as a student in the 1980s, at the age of 19, and decided to stay after the 1989 coup. He is one of the oldest Sudanese in Lyon. (Interview in March 2021, Lyon).
41. “Tribe” in Sudanese Arabic.
42. Interview with Othman [see above].
43. See how they describe themselves on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sudfamedia (accessed on 21 March 2021).
44. An expression he frequently uses.
45. On movements between political and humanitarian commitments, see Fourn (Citation2018).