“The experience of the oppressed is the experience of living without protections.” — Achille Mbembe
In conflict settings, the line between survival and complicity is rarely stable. In Sudan, it may become one of the most contested questions of the post-war order. What keeps communities alive today may later be used to question their legitimacy – not because it was illegitimate, but because power will decide how it is remembered.
As state institutions collapse across large parts of Sudan, civilians have stepped in to organise essential services – from coordinating food distribution and sustaining informal education to mediating disputes and maintaining fragile systems of local order.
Across cities and smaller communities alike, these efforts have become essential to everyday survival. They are often framed as acts of resilience. Yet in highly polarised conflict environments, such practices do not remain politically neutral. Over time, they are reinterpreted through the lens of power, raising difficult questions about legitimacy, accountability, and who ultimately defines the boundary between survival and collaboration.
This ambiguity is not incidental. It reflects a structural feature of conflicts in which authority is fragmented, and control is constantly shifting. In such contexts, civilians are compelled to navigate multiple centres of power, often engaging in forms of negotiation necessary for immediate survival but vulnerable to later political reinterpretation.
In parts of Sudan, local neighbourhood committees and informal networks have coordinated access to food, healthcare, and safe passage, at times negotiating with whichever force holds territorial control. What appears as pragmatic adaptation in the present may later be recast as political alignment, particularly in environments where lines of control are fluid and contested.
The absence of a stable state does not eliminate governance; it redistributes it. In Sudan, this redistribution has been uneven, often falling on civilian actors with limited protection and no formal recognition. These actors operate in conditions shaped by risk, scarcity, and uncertainty, yet their decisions carry long-term political consequences. Their authority is real in practice, even if it remains invisible or contested in formal political frameworks.
Cameroonian political theorist and historian Achille Mbembe’s writing on the relationship between violence, sovereignty, and precarious life is useful here. In contexts where power is exercised through the management of vulnerability itself, survival becomes deeply political.
The question is no longer simply who governs, but who is allowed to remain visible as legitimate within systems shaped by force. Sudan’s war reflects this tension acutely: civilians are simultaneously relied upon to sustain life and exposed to suspicion for the very practices that make survival possible.
These dynamics carry significant implications for security and political order. Civilian networks that emerge in response to state collapse can act as stabilising forces, filling critical gaps in service delivery and local conflict mediation. In many cases, they help prevent further fragmentation by sustaining minimal forms of coordination and trust within communities. At the same time, they may become entangled, intentionally or otherwise, in broader systems of control, shaping patterns of authority on the ground.
In contexts where the state’s monopoly over the use of force is weakened, such networks blur the boundary between civilian agency and political authority. This complicates distinctions between state and non-state actors, and between governance and survival. These distinctions, however, are precisely the ones upon which post-conflict security arrangements are typically built. When they fail to reflect lived realities, the risk is not only analytical misreading but also institutional fragility.
Recent patterns circulating in Sudanese public discourse – including repeated accusations directed at civilian volunteers and local organisers – further illustrate how the boundary between survival and complicity is increasingly being contested in real time.
Recent public debates in Sudan, including discussions in local media, civil society circles, and volunteer networks, have featured accusations directed at Emergency Response Room volunteers and humanitarian organisers who continued operating in territories controlled by different armed actors. Such accusations reflect growing suspicion toward civilian actors working in conflict-affected areas and illustrate how the boundary between survival and complicity is increasingly being contested.
Volunteers who organised food distribution, emergency healthcare, evacuation routes, or neighbourhood support networks are now, in some cases, being accused of collaboration simply because they operated within territories controlled by particular armed actors.
This pattern is not limited to informal discourse. Sudanese state media has reported formal legal proceedings involving individuals accused of participating in civilian administrative structures established in areas formerly under the control of the Rapid Support Forces, with allegations including providing logistical and administrative support during the conflict.
These cases illustrate how humanitarian and community-based roles during wartime can be reinterpreted through legal and political frameworks once territorial control shifts. This reflects a broader tendency in post-conflict settings to retroactively reclassify survival-based governance as political alignment.
The challenge becomes particularly acute in post-war transitions. As formal institutions are rebuilt, the question of who is recognised as a legitimate actor comes to the fore. Civilian groups that sustained communities during the war may find themselves excluded, scrutinised, or even criminalised, depending on how their actions are interpreted within shifting political narratives.
This creates the conditions for retroactive judgement. Practices that were necessary for survival are reassessed through accountability frameworks that do not adequately capture the constraints under which they emerged. The risk is not only individual injustice but also the broader delegitimisation of social structures that played a critical role in maintaining order during collapse.
The Senegalese scholar Felwine Sarr has argued that African political futures cannot be understood solely through imported institutional categories but through the lived realities and social imaginaries produced within African societies themselves. Sudan’s current moment clearly reflects this insight.
Across sub-Saharan Africa more broadly, periods of institutional weakness have repeatedly enabled alternative centres of authority to emerge.
In Liberia, for example, community-based governance mechanisms that emerged during the civil war continued to influence local authority structures after the conflict ended, demonstrating how wartime adaptations can shape post-war political arrangements.
Some of these have later intersected with, or been absorbed into, formal political and security arrangements. The Sudanese case must, therefore, be understood not in isolation, but as part of a wider pattern in which governance does not disappear in times of crisis – it shifts form.
What is at stake here is not merely how survival is remembered but how political legitimacy itself is reconstructed after conflict.
Eglal Hamid
Eglal Hamid is a Sudanese writer and media professional focusing on war, displacement, and the social consequences of conflict across Africa. Her work explores how language, gender, and power shape civilian experiences in wartime.
