2020 Theses Master's

You Arrogant Racist, We are All Darfur': Human Rights Protests as Nation-Building in Sudan

Latif, Dena

On April 11th 2019 the Sudanese people succeeded in ending the 30-year presidency of Omar Al Bashir. This paper discusses the transformational impact of months of protest on conceptions of Sudanese national identity within the revolutionary community. It is argued that a human rights state was created in the Sudan, comprised of revolutionaries practicing and embodying human rights, which transcended deeply entrenched ethnic, gendered, regional and religious divides and engendered a more inclusive national identity in its wake. Focusing on the revolutionary experiences in Khartoum, Nyala (Darfur), Kadugli (Nuba Mountains) and Atbara, this paper explores the oft-neglected and mischaracterized relationship between human rights, revolutions and nationalism. By focusing on protester testimony and the artistic artefacts of the revolution, the westerncentricity and elitism of conventional human rights approaches is challenged as the experiences of non-elite and non-western actors in Sudan are foregrounded and the localization of human rights through revolutionary protest in these spaces elucidated.