Sudan’s December revolution of 2018: the ecology of Youth Connective and Collective Activism

ABSTRACT

Sudan experienced a nationwide nonviolent revolution between December 2018 and July 2019, which has remained underrepresented in communication studies literature. This study employs empirical data from personal interviews with Sudanese activists as well as a theoretical framework of social movements based on media ecologies. The study’s theoretical framework considers social movements in terms of their historical contexts and as a whole consisting of communication networks and interaction between various forms of communication and actors, particularly the entanglement of online and offline elements of activism. The research contributes to the body of knowledge on social movements and communication, particularly in Sudan. The findings of the study show that the media ecology approach provides a more comprehensive understanding of the interplay and intertwinement of human actors in social revolution, collective agency, and technologies than the one-medium biased approach used in previous studies on social movements, particularly in the Arab world.

KEYWORDS:

• Sudan
• political communication
• youth
• connective
• ecology
• social revolution

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Acknowledgements

Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2090768)

Notes

1 Sudan’s civil wars (1955–1972 and 1983–2005) served as a historical example of the policies used by successive regimes in northern Sudan to marginalize the south politically, religiously, culturally, and economically. Furthermore, following Omer El-Bashir’s military coup in June 1989, and the spearhead of Sudan’s Islamization process by El-Bashir’s military government, the conflict transformed from a civil war to Jihad holy war against ‘infidels.’

2 Janjaweed: Is a militia formed by the government of El-Bashir that originates from and mostly operates in western Sudan and eastern Chad. They are responsible for massacres in Darfur in 2004, Nuba Mountains, South Sudan and mostly recently, Khartoum in 2019. The term entered the broader political lexicon later, when members of these militias were restructured and reorganized into the so-called Rapid Support Forces (Casciarri & Manfredi, 2020)

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Saadia Izzeldin Malik

Dr. Saadia Izzeldin Malik is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mass Communication, College of Arts and Sciences at Qatar University, where she has been since 2007. From 2009 to 2011 she served as a department chair. During 2005-2007 she worked as an adjunct professor at the University of Kansas' William Allen White School of Journalism.She received an MA in Women Studies from the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, the Netherlands in 1995 and an MA in African Studies from Ohio University in the United States in 1996. She received her PhD in Communication from Ohio University in the United States in 2003.Dr. Saadia ‘s research interests are: global media ethics, political communication, women and media, popular culture and audience, transnational migration studies.