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Sudan is the site of the world's largest humanitarian crisis, yet the war that produced it is widely treated as the sudden eruption of a personal feud between two generals. This talk argues, instead, that the fighting that began in April 2023 is the culmination of a longer political history. The talk will trace the war's seeds within the Islamist regime of Omer al-Bashir (1989-2019), the 2018-19 revolution that over-threw him, the 2021 counter-revolutionary coup, and eventually the rupture between the coup plotters. The talk closes by examining Sudan's present reality-a fragmenting state with rival administrations, a war economy sustained by gold and foreign patrons, and civilian and mutual-aid networks still carrying the revolution's unfinished claims-while considering possible pathways beyond the conflict and what a sustainable peace might require.

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Mai Hassan is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Faculty Director of MIT-Africa. Her first book - Regime Threats and State Solutions: Bureaucratic Loyalty and Embeddedness in Kenya - was selected as a Best Book of 2020 by Foreign Affairs, won the American Political Science Association's 2021 Robert A Dahl Award, and was the recipient of the African Studies Association 2021 Bethwell A. Ogot Award. Her on-going research focuses on popular mobilization under autocratic repression with a focus on Sudan under the 30-year Islamist regime of Omer Al-Bashir.