It is a tall order to chronicle the definitive events that occurred during Sudan’s democratic transition; it is harder still to use a historical lens to analyse why some events unfolded in the way they did. Yet this is what four seasoned experts on Sudan’s political dynamics, Willow Berridge, Justin Lynch, Raga Makawi and Alex de Waal, do in Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy. This compact volume provides a perceptive account of Sudan’s political developments since the 2019 uprising that deposed long-time dictator Omar al-Bashir. The book examines the driving forces behind the 2019 revolution, the subsequent rocky political transition, and the numerous challenges that the civilian Sudanese political forces faced as they confronted deep state remnants and worked towards building a democracy.
Each of the text’s six chapters highlights a different aspect of the 2019–21 transition period, revealing each author’s analytical strengths. Moving between contemporary events and their historical origins, the authors deftly provide a chronological account of seminal events in the revolution’s course, while also investigating recurrent themes in Sudan’s political history, economy and foreign relations. The authors focus on tracing the fickle agreements made between April 2019 and 2020 to clarify why the revolution’s initial gains faltered and the Sudanese people were robbed of a successful democratic transition.
The book draws insights from key themes in Sudan’s cyclical past to understand the 2019–21 transition. Even though the target reader is expected to know enough about Sudan’s politics to follow the post-2019 developments, the analytical segments bring to the fore snapshots from the past (e.g. the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement) to contrast them with more recent developments (p. 104). Not only does this technique give the reader some space to wonder about what could have happened had the Transitional Military Council (TMC) or Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) acted differently at certain inflection points, but it also clarifies the intrinsic flaws in previous agreements. The hypothetical ‘What if?’ scenarios draw attention to the marginalized voices and issues that tended to be overlooked over the course of Sudan’s history of civil wars and social conflicts. Each of the book’s chapters offers a stand-alone puzzle piece of the ‘unfinishedness’ of Sudan’s democratic transition, while providing sufficient theoretical depth for academics.
Scholars interested in civil–military relations, elite coalitions, democratic backsliding, ethnic stacking, women’s participation in uprisings, and international actors’ implicit or explicit support to parastate actors will all find relevant analyses. Importantly, the book is not short of meso-level descriptions of activists and political players, using a cinematic approach straddling both academic and creative writing styles. This hybrid writing mode is best exemplified in the authors’ narration of the 2018–19 events leading up to Bashir’s fall: it captures both the Sudanese people’s viewpoint and that of Bashir’s inner circle.
The core analytical strength of Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy lies in the fact that it is comprehensive and sensitive in contextualizing the 2019 uprising while situating it within Sudan’s longer political trajectory. In Chapter 5, ‘More than history repeating itself’, the three uprisings of 1964, 1985 and 2019 are put in conversation with one another while the authors also point to the variables that have changed – or not – since the 1960s and 1980s. The authors know where to look for plausible patterns, continuities, divergence from and convergence with the two past uprisings. They look at the prominent players that have turned the wheels of political change in Sudan: armed groups in the peripheries, traditional political parties, modern forces, the military, the security forces and foreign actors. This comparative exercise concludes by arguing that, even though the Sudanese uprisings ‘do not fit any [social movement] template other than their own imperfect one’ (p. 195), understanding them is the key to achieving democratization in Sudan in the future.
More importantly, the comparison provides an otherwise neat, logical way to understand why the transition was foiled by a counter-revolution. Sudan’s two other social movements and short-lived transitions help us understand the TMC–FFC divisions and why the civilian side could not reconcile its internal disagreements on Sudan’s future. As early as 2019, the specific political arrangements made between the TMC and its civilian counterpart, the FFC, carried the seeds of a probable democratic failure. Still, to the authors, it is of secondary importance to argue whether the broken promise of democracy can be attributed to the FFC’s failure to compromise and design an inclusive, democratic social contract that satisfied the demands of various voices or to the intractability of dismantling the ‘deep state’. The book places more weight on elucidating the manner of Bashir’s downfall and the particular political legacy he left through a historical, path-dependent narrative that pays attention to Sudan’s chronic centre–periphery dilemma, its factional party system, and its decades-long civil war with South Sudan, among other ailments.
This short volume is pertinent for understanding Sudan’s altered political landscape before and after Bashir’s ousting in 2019 and beyond 2021. Through the historically rich segments in each chapter, the book guides the reader to the origins of factionalism, distrust and violence, among other issues, in Sudan’s ongoing political developments. Although published when Sudan’s political future was at a crossroads, the book offers an insightful account of the relationship between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by Hemedti and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and foretells the then unfolding conflicts between them.
