As part of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology Colloquium Series, Khalid Medani presents: "War Making as State Making: Understandings the Logic of War and Violence in Sudan".

Title: War Making as State Making: Understandings the Logic of War and Violence in Sudan

Abstract: On April 15th, 2023, Sudan witnessed an unprecedented war that interrupted a popular struggle towards a transition to democracy which first began in the aftermath of a popular revolution in 2018. Conventional narratives of the war have characterized the mass-scale violence in reductive terms, arguing that it is a result of a political rivalry between a powerful militia and senior military cadres of the Sudan Armed Forces. However, the causes and consequences of the war are far more structural in nature and rooted in a counter-revolutionary campaign chiefly designed to reverse the momentum and social basis underpinning the 2018 revolution. The stated and strategic objectives of both warring parties is to re-order categories of identity, citizenship, and nationhood among Sudanese in ways designed to alter the social as well as political foundation of State and Nation. My presentation will examine the causes and consequences of the counter-revolutionary war in Sudan paying special attention to critical junctures in Sudan’s political history and external interventions that have shaped and accelerated dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. In so doing, the presentation historicizes the current asymmetrical balance of power between civilians, and the leaders of the Armed Forces and para-military militias, all of which are prosecuting the war through the instrumentalization of ethnicity, the strategic deployment of violence and displacement, and the use of food as a weapon in, what will I argue, are nascent, albeit extremely violent, efforts at State Making via War Making.

Bio: Dr. Khalid Mustafa Medani is Associate Professor of Political Science and Islamic Studies where he is also the Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies and Chair of the African Studies Program at McGill. Dr. Medani received a B.A. with Honors in Development Studies from Brown University, an M.A. in Development Studies from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Khalid Mustafa Medani is Associate Professor of Political Science and Islamic Studies where he is also the Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies and Chair of the African Studies Program at McGill. Dr. Medani received a B.A. with Honors in Development Studies from Brown University, an M.A. in Development Studies from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. 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. Dr. Medani is the author of Black Markets and Militants: Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2021) which received an award from the American Political Science Association for the Best Book in the Field of Middle East and North Africa Politics by a Senior Scholar in 2022. Dr. Medani 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.