Providing a platform for Sudanese scholars and activists

For Sudanese scholars and activists navigating a rapidly changing political landscape, opportunities to publish analysis without delay and distortion are rare. The Sudan-Norway Academic Cooperation (SNAC) and its blog Sudanese Perspectives has opened up a space where these scholars and activists can reach an international audience with their writing.

Working in a context of war, authoritarianism, and international intervention, opportunities to publish critical analysis without delay, distortion, or political filtering are often limited. Few places are such an argument more valid than in Sudan, where international media, donor-driven research agendas, and academic publishing formats often shape both who gets published and how Sudan is represented, frequently forcing what comes out of Sudan into a humanitarian narrative rather than deeper political analysis.

The Sudan–Norway Academic Cooperation (SNAC) aims to address these challenges by providing a platform that puts Sudanese perspectives at the centre. Through its blog Sudanese Perspectives, as well as policy briefs, reports, and working papers, the project enables Sudanese scholars and activists to publish analysis and participate in both international and national academic and policy discourses about Sudan.

This impact story draws on interviews with two Sudanese contributors to Sudanese Perspectives: Taharqa Elnour and Shahinaz Jamal. Their reflections demonstrate how publishing through SNAC functions as impact across several dimensions: access to publishing, international reach, narrative autonomy, analytical exchanges, and political agency.

Access to publishing for Sudanese scholars and activists
Sudanese Perspectives was established as a platform explicitly aimed at Sudanese scholars and activists, with a particular focus on publishing texts written by women, youth, and contributors from marginalised areas in Sudan. The blog emerged initially through the ARUS project and was further developed and institutionalised under SNAC from 2022 onwards.

Since then, Sudanese Perspectives has published analyses by Sudanese writers from a wide range of disciplinary, professional, and activist backgrounds. For several contributors, publishing on the blog was their first opportunity to publish for an international readership.

To support the goal of bringing Sudanese perspectives to the forefront of debates on developments in Sudan, SNAC has organised writing workshops covering different genres, including academic writing and policy briefs, but with a particular emphasis on blog writing. Participants are invited to submit ideas and drafts in advance, and workshops function as collective spaces for discussion on both form and substance. Rather than insisting on a particular analytical framework, the workshops have focused on critical reflection and open discussions.

Taharqa Elnour, a Sudanese researcher, initially approached the first workshop with caution:

-My concern was that it might reproduce familiar international approaches to Sudan, ones that reduce a deeply complex, geopolitically entangled conflict to a crisis to be administered rather than a political and economic outcome in which external actors have themselves played a role. This pattern does not merely describe the crisis, it can actively reproduce its structural conditions, he says.

He was also uneasy about the possibility that the workshop might align, even implicitly, with established European foreign policy traditions.

-In the Sudanese context, it is difficult to ignore that some international actors helped shape the transitional trajectory, whether through pressure toward asymmetrical power-sharing arrangements or through earlier frameworks, such as migration containment policies, that effectively normalised engagement with the RSF years before the current conflict.

Elnour’s hesitation highlights a key impact of SNAC: creating a platform that Sudanese contributors can enter critically, without having to suspend or dilute their analysis in order to participate.

Reaching an international audience without delay
A second dimension of impact lies in enabling Sudanese scholars and activists to reach international audiences in a timely and accessible way. The blog format allows for publishing of analysis while events are still unfolding, rather than months or years later through academic journals.

-A blog allows an argument to enter the conversation while it still matters, says Elnour.

He also stresses the importance of audience and a voice that is more direct. The accessible language that the format requires reaches audiences far beyond academia. He specifically mentions his own blog series for Sudanese Perspectives.

-The War of Recruitment series, for instance, was able to reach people directly affected by the dynamics it was analysing. That feedback loop is simply not available through conventional academic publishing, he says.

Sudanese activist and human rights defender Shahinaz Jamal describes how writing for Sudanese Perspectives has marked an important shift from her earlier forms of publishing, which were closely tied to her academic training and professional background in cytology and public health. While her academic work followed a clear structure and methodology, her political and community‑focused writing did not always benefit from the same framework. Through participating in the blog workshops, however, she has gained new tools to organise and sharpen her political analysis in blog form. She also highlights how blog writing opens up a very different landscape from academic publishing, offering far greater freedom to express thoughts and opinions without sacrificing clarity or conviction. As her political engagement deepened and she became an active member of the resistance committees during and after the 2019 revolution, addressing international audiences became increasingly important. 

For Jamal, SNAC provided both practical tools and an enabling infrastructure.

-It is crucial that young Sudanese activists can reach an international audience, and SNAC gives us the tools to write and the infrastructure to reach this audience, she says.

Elnour similarly highlights the importance of addressing international audiences as far more than an intellectual contribution. He sees it as a way of intervening in how Sudan is understood by the international community and argues that writing for Sudanese Perspectives as an attempt to challenge the dominant narratives about Sudan.

-Sudan is often presented in the West through a distorted lens, one that overlooks the historical and ideological foundations of its crisis while minimising the weight of its geopolitical reality as a country surrounded by regimes that perceive democratic transformation as an existential threat.

Publishing without distortion
One of SNAC’s ambitions is to provide a publishing space where Sudanese contributors are not required to conform to simplified narratives. Texts go through an editorial process to make sure the language is accessible and fits the blog format, but Sudanese Perspectives welcomes a wide variety of topic and perspectives. There is no one size fits all approach.

For Elnour, this was the decisive factor that led him to participate in the blog writing workshops despite his initial reluctance. He explains that what eventually changed his mind was the workshop’s explicit engagement with structural questions.

-What ultimately convinced me to participate was that the workshop agenda appeared conscious of these structural tensions, particularly its engagement with NGO-isation not as a technical funding mechanism, but as a process that reshapes public space and social movements according to donor logics rather than political ones.

This openness made it possible, in his words, to ‘offer analysis that moves beyond what I call the soft-landing paradigm: the idea that a smooth, aid-driven transition managed by elite mediators can substitute for genuine structural transformation.’

For Elnour, writing for Sudanese Perspectives became an act of reclaiming the narrative. In his blog series, The War of Recruitment, he examines polarization and battles over political charters and attempts to dissect the co-optation of Sudan’s youth movements, also describing how some Sudanese organisations are adapting to fit the frameworks set by international donors.

-I wanted to question how certain funding structures and capacity-building programmes have contributed to reengineering youth movements into manageable, fundable formats rather than enabling them to confront the deeper political and economic roots of the crisis, he says.

He places his critique within a broader concern about how Sudanese political agency is represented internationally.

-We are often cast as perpetual victims awaiting intervention and externally designed programmes. This narrative erases our long struggle against military dictatorships, our daily acts of political agency, and the magnitude of challenges confronting our social movements. If we shift from international frameworks to lived reality, a different picture emerges.

Elnour points to how even initiatives like the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), including their nomination for peace awards, are often reframed in international media as humanitarian stories rather than recognised as deeply political forms of resistance.

He argues that by allowing extended, politically grounded critique, Sudanese Perspectives offers something different.

-In this context, Sudanese Perspectives and the broader SNAC publications offer a vital breach in that pattern. They centre the analyses of Sudanese scholars and activists, particularly those directly affected by war and displacement, without subjecting their voices to the logic of simplification for acceptability.

Cultivating analytical exchanges
While SNAC does not impose analytical frameworks, it actively supports contributors in strengthening their ability to articulate complex arguments clearly and confidently.

Jamal describes the workshops as spaces that strengthened both the technical and analytical dimensions of her writing, particularly through collective discussion, feedback, and practical work on shaping arguments. She highlights the importance of knowledge exchange and working concretely with drafts.

-The workshops are good arenas both for learning more from each other and for crafting and developing powerful messages. And this, knowledge paired with powerful messages, is what can ultimately have an impact in local communities, she says.

For Elnour, the value of this support lies first and foremost in enabling more precise and rigorous critique.

-Participating offered a platform to challenge dominant narratives from within, not by rejecting engagement altogether, but by interrogating it. In my view, that is a more effective form of critique than remaining outside the conversation, he says.

In this way, SNAC contributes to the opportunity not only to publish and participate in discussions about Sudan, but to do so on an analytical level also in the blog format.

Jamal, who has previously contributed to Sudanese Perspectives with a blog on the role youth can play in Sudan’s path towards peace, is now working on her second blog. She emphasizes that she sees the SNAC project as academically strong and ethically aware.

-This is something that makes the project and its publications stand out.

Publishing as political agency
Publishing from a context of war and polarization, Sudanese scholars and activists face challenges and risks on many levels when participating in public debate. Elnour points to some of the main challenges: Threats from the warring parties and communication surveillance, infrastructural problems like poor internet connectivity, a filtering of Sudanese voices through mainstream media that forces them into a certain narrative with the risk of reducing substantial critique, a tendency to focus on war and crisis that overshadows nuanced analysis, and a lack of resources and amplification that makes it hard to reach broader audiences.

-The risks that Sudanese face for speaking out openly, surveillance, threats of exile, or graver dangers, are not merely personal constraints. They shape the architecture of public debate itself, consistently pushing discourse toward safer, more diluted positions, he says.

But according to Elnour, even though the risk will never disappear, platforms like Sudanese Perspectives, and the SNAC project, address these challenges by providing a relatively safe space for scholars and activists ‘to express unfiltered analysis, granting additional credibility and enabling access to academics, diaspora communities, and policymakers in a more substantive way’.

Crucially to Elnour, such platforms also enable something he misses from many other publication platforms: layered critique not only of international actors, but of local elites and the diaspora.

-What distinguishes these platforms is precisely that they make such layered critique possible, enabling activists and researchers to assert their right to narrate their own story consciously, and to do so from a position of analytical strength, he says.

Despite the risks, both Elnour and Jamal continue to write, convinced that the potential impact justifies the effort. As Jamal concludes:

-Because spreading the word, sharing our knowledge on what is happening in Sudan, is what leads to actual change.