Parallel realities
I returned home to Khartoum after completing a postgraduate degree abroad in early 2023, just before the war began. I planned to live there for a couple of years while I looked for jobs, and then take it from there. But the fighting changed everything.
For instance, the available job opportunities changed drastically, forcing millions of Sudanese citizens to pursue various types of employment. I witnessed many individuals, including those who had stable careers before the war, searching for informal jobs. I saw women set up small businesses to sell food, beverages, perfumes, and other products to try to meet the financial responsibilities of this new context. Other, more established businessmen and women courageously attempted to restart their businesses in new Sudanese cities and abroad, despite the high risks inherent to new markets.
Still others fled abroad, attempting these same livelihoods strategies in other countries like Egypt, the Gulf states, and other countries with communities of displaced Sudanese. But obtaining a work permit as a refugee is, in most contexts, extremely challenging. For these individuals, the risks of trying to earn money to survive were, and are, great.
Many Sudanese individuals now work long hours or on multiple jobs. Those who managed to flee and find employment have become financially responsible for several households, fighting uncertainty, changing employment policies and insecure job markets all at the same time.
The social fabric has become a lifeline during a time of institutional neglect. Along with initiatives like community kitchens and networks of extended families and friends, it has played a profound role in mitigating the costs and consequences of displacement. This is especially true for the millions who fled with only few belongings and little money.
Living through a war makes you ask yourself: how far can personal resilience stretch in the face of bureaucratic violence? While individuals struggle to rebuild, powerful actors continue to restrict their movement, safety, and survival. This line of questioning often leads me to consider the actions of governments such as the UAE, offering crisis and emergency visa routes as part of their performative humanitarian efforts, while simultaneously being accused, according to several reports, of orchestrating and supplying arms to the Rapid Support Forces.
Refugee agency, resistance and return
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is the paramilitary group formerly under the command of the Sudanese Army and loyal to the government, but now rebelling against the state. They have a proven track record of foreign countries funding and managing them. RSF has systematically impoverished much of the country. From widespread looting of homes and agricultural projects to the purposeful destruction of infrastructure, assets and factories in areas under RSF control, the damage has been both material and psychological.
Two of my family members were recently able to visit Khartoum after its recapture by the Sudanese army. They found a devastating scene: an organised looting and erasure operation had stripped our family home of everything, including furniture, tools, and even electrical wires, after it was occupied and used by RSF for a full two years for military purposes.
The RSF left not just loss behind, but a wound that has yet to heal. Some narratives suggest that such acts are a natural consequence of war. But there is nothing natural about it. The damage has been intentional, and millions have experienced it to varying degrees.
Essential services, such as running water, power, and medical care, are still lacking. Yet, life is beginning to pulse again in the liberated cities. Following the looting and destruction of entire neighbourhoods, people are trying to restore what they lost, with immense effort and little support.
There is no romanticism here. If Sudan recovers, it won’t be because of the political will or international aid; it will be because of the ordinary Sudanese citizens. People are gradually returning, not to their familiar homes but to a drastically altered world. Some of them are bearing the burden of reconstruction, paying for what they have lost with blood, lifelong savings, and everything they have ever owned.
War is a deeply personal experience that significantly influences one's political stance. Many of the people who fled are now left with profound survivor’s guilt, among other psychological troubles. Yet this is still considered a privilege compared to the unimaginable atrocities millions of Sudanese have had to endure.
After enduring the war and witnessing the stark double standards in the world’s response to different conflicts, my perception of the international system, both its political and humanitarian arms, has fundamentally changed.
I have become acutely conscious of the international system’s inability to address people’s true needs or respond meaningfully to their lived realities. I am profoundly aware that it operates within a complicated matrix of states’ interests, rival narratives, and geopolitical ambitions. In comparison to those political forces, individual people appear to be of little consequence.
For instance, enormous systems like the UN do not consistently apply their mandates, even or especially when faced with ongoing atrocities like those in Sudan and genocide in Palestine. It’s far more than simple oversight or inefficiency. The deliberate neglect, whether in the failure to pressure actors fuelling the wars, in the minimisation of our suffering in the global media, or in the chronic underfunding of urgent humanitarian needs, indicates a structural failure and a deeper truth: this is not a broken system, but an unjust system functioning exactly as designed. This fact cannot be justified, and it can no longer be ignored.
The international system needs to be fundamentally reformed in ways that account for the lived realities of refugees. By listening closely and seriously to their own narratives, we can establish a foundation for responses rooted in their agency, dignity, and needs. We might even begin to contemplate reclaiming a measure of faith in an international system that serves, rather than abandons and stigmatises, the very people it claims to protect. At the end of the day, this is not a merely personal critique or a cynical resignation. Rather, it is an attempt to pose the genuine questions that displaced communities on the ground have been thinking of and asking. Those in power owe us the answers.
