It may be the world’s worst hunger crisis. And the world’s largest displacement of civilians fleeing war. Yet in Africa’s third-largest country, Sudan, a 15-month-old conflict between two rival militaries has become something else.
It has become a model of how everyday people who were once strangers to each other can bond and band together during a war to build the kind of society they want after a war.
A key fact illustrates the point: Sudanese families have opened their homes to more than half of the people displaced by the war, according to the International Organization for Migration.
These host families have several reasons to provide food, shelter, and comfort to others who may be of different religions or ethnicities. For one, the front lines of the war keep moving, so anyone could suddenly be forced to flee.
Two, Sudan has a strong tradition – reflected in the Arabic word nafeer (meaning “a call to come together”) – of organizing local, voluntary responses to urgent needs, whether they be a harvest or a flood.
“We feel that any person in Sudan can go through this humiliation, so solidarity is our duty in order to relieve each other,” one man told The New Humanitarian after opening his home to 40 people across six families.
Yet thirdly, Sudan has a new tradition that began during a popular uprising in 2019 that ousted a dictator but later led to the current military conflict.
Local pro-democracy groups that led the protests have repurposed themselves into youth-driven “emergency response rooms.” They provide charity kitchens, alternative schools, and other services for displaced people.
These activists are doing more than humanitarian work. They are “working towards a vision of Sudan that is peaceful, just and equitable,” wrote Michelle D’Arcy, Sudan country director for Norwegian People’s Aid.
In the midst of war, these groups are creating “the kind of governance – democratic, equitable, people-centered – that Sudanese communities have long craved,” said Samantha Power, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s administrator.
The war may soon end – peace talks are planned for mid-August in Switzerland. But Sudan’s democratic spirit and nafeer mobilization are already laying the groundwork for peace.