Bridges of Resistance, building together: We All Stand With Sudan
Disclaimer: several forms of GBV, including rape and sexual assault are discussed in this blog, please be caring with yourselves when reading.
Sudan is “a living story of hope”, with the highest mass displacement crisis in the world currently. In 2019, a 30-year dictatorship was brought down by a peaceful civilian revolution. leading to the transitional period where power was shared by the civilian revolutionary forces and the military component, the transitional period was meant to lead to a peaceful transfer of power to a civilian-led government, in line with the goals of the revolution. This vision was actively pursued by the civilian resistance, with women often leading and fueling revolutionary mobilization. However, instead of fulfilling this path, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), along with part of the signatories of the Juba Peace Agreement (JPA), staged a military coup in 2021, derailing the civilian transition. In April 2023, violent conflict erupted between SAF and RSF, threatening the already fragile peace and provoking the mass displacement of over 12 million people, launching “a war on the bodies of women”.
Hosted on the 5th of July by Caribbean Feminist, with partner organisations Feminitt Caribbean, TrinbagoforPalestine, IGDS Ignite and featuring speakers from Nalafem Sudan Taskforce, the Sudan Teach-In, second in our ‘Building Bridges for Resistance’ series dedicated to consolidating feminist transnational solidarity (stay tuned for our next Teach-In!) broke down one of the most underreported current crises and conflicts in this world. This blog reports on key takeaways from our speakers, sits the Sudan crisis within an international context, and discusses how we must act in solidarity.
What is currently devastating Sudanese populations, particularly Sudanese women, is not random, it is a part of a trend of rising fascist movements that police all bodies, particularly the bodies of racialised and sexualised minority communities. With the network of companies, states and individuals benefiting from and actively fueling this conflict, Sudan is a part of a network of imperial games that treat the world as its personal chessboard. We, communities in the Caribbean dealing with the present tense of a long history of occupation and violence against our peoples, must recognise the symptoms of the same forces at work so violently in Sudan, as we do in our own islands and archipelago.
“What is happening in Sudan is not a civil war… it’s a war that’s fuelled by foreign greed”, Samah Jamous, Nalafem Sudan Taskforce speaker
Between December 2023 and December 2024, there was a 288% increase of survivors seeking help after instances of Gender-based Violence (GBV) with Women-Led Organisations (WLO) and humanitarian groups stationed in Sudan. Individuals affected were reported to be between 6 and 75 years old. Samah, speaker with Nalafem during the teach-in, indicated that reports of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) started arising in the hours after the first implosion of conflict in April 2025 - she stated that records of this violence are currently in the hundreds, when the reality is in the thousands. What is clear from Samah's presentation is that this conflict is fuelled by external state actors, namely the Emirates, sponsoring military conflict for the sake of further extraction of Sudan's resources. Samah shared with us a brief overview of Sudan's history, environment and communities, comprising over 100 tribes and languages - with equally distinct musical cultures and forms - and the resources naturally found within its landscape: oil, gold, copper, iron… Resources that historically, have attracted imperial powers, companies and state actors like carcass to vultures to extract profit from the systematic exploitation and blood of indigenous communities. Sudan is not the exception here, it is land that sits at the “crossroads of Africa”. Samah outlined how Sudan's placement between 2 regions, sitting across several water routes makes the area particularly susceptible to predatory foreign intervention.
In the current conflict, this translates to the mass assault, displacement and starvation of civilian populations, which disproportionately targets women and children, racialised and sexualised vulnerable communities.
“Widespread gender-based violence (GBV) including conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) encompassing rape and gang rape, Sex slavery, trafficking, sexual violence in the context of abduction and disappearances, forced marriage, and sexual violence combined with brutal attacks and killings against women, girls, men, and boys has been a defining feature of the violent conflict in Sudan.”
The catastrophic levels of starvation and hunger that face over 12 million of Sudan's displaced population has layered in a new violence, forced by the circumstances of human-made famine: obtaining food is increasingly put to the value of sexual violence, that is forcing women to suffer sexual violence in order to obtain food and protection. The systematic infliction of forms of GBV in Sudan has major impacts across bodily and mental health, economic impact and social stigma, carrying lethal risks.
“The violence against women cannot be disengaged…”,
- Reem Abbas, Nalafem Sudan Taskforce speaker
Reem Abbas, second speaker with the Nalafem Sudan Taskforce, emphasised that the conflict is completely tied to the violence inflicted on women. GBV is weaponised as institutionalised oppression against racialised and sexualised bodies. Reem traced the significant place of women within the 2019 revolution, as local leaders within their communities and a key part to the civil organising of the revolution to the mass rates of CRSV now as retaliation, as a way of punishing women for ‘asking too much’. The social impact of this within displaced communities is complex:
Reem explained that at least 50,000 women are missing, and it is uncertain whether they have been kidnapped, held captive, sexually trafficked, killed. She also explained that the rates of femicide (as the above quote also explains) have increased alongside the dangers of GBV at the hands of SAF and RSF forces. There is no safe place for women in Sudan. The varying threats of GBV confront women from within their own communities and from the heavy militarised threats of Emirates-sponsored armed forces. This “imperial project in Sudan is dangerous”, Reem emphasises, placing the conflict in Sudan not as a civil war, as is portrayed by mainstream Western media, but as an intentional conflict connected to networks of extraction that stem all the way back to the implementation of plantation estates in the Caribbean.
The colonial outlook that was tried and tested in our region was globalised, re-branded and exported for use across the world. Within this, the same bodies and communities remain the most vulnerable: women (all women), particularly brown and black, non-white women. Reem and Samah both compelled us to, as first instance, stand with Sudan by amplifying what is happening there, shining a deliberately turned-away light onto the crisis on the ground, the systematic inflicted violence on women, and the resilience and resistance that survives nonetheless. The traumas confronted by women, in lack of access to sanitation products, lack of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene facilities and infrastructure provoked by forced displacement, the engineered difficulty of accessing WLO sites, are a forced impoverishment of women within a war that utilises the bodies of women as sites of brutal violence. These are feminist issues, in fact they're simply human issues.
Our role, as Samah and Reem emphasised, reinforced by Fariba with the UWI Institute for Gender Development Studies Ignite group, is to amplify voices from the ground, highlight the connections between this conflict and others to force global accountability across all fronts, and act in transnational solidarity (see the linked resources to start with!). That can look like chalktivism, picking up a piece of chalk to communicate within your own communities, talking, widely advocating on social media, researching and writing pieces, teaching and sharing resources about this crisis - again, this may not be our backyard but is our neighbour backyard and the weeds there, have cousins present in our yard. To fight ours and theirs, we must act together.
Author bio: Nyala Thompson Grunwald, is a Trinbagonian pannist [steelpan player] and researcher in Caribbean Studies. The Lead Content Writer/Editor with Feminitt Caribbean, Content Researcher with The Repair Campaign, she engages her praxis as a black intersectional feminist within social justice advocacy and communities in the Caribbean.