Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper discusses the affective and political strategy of “revolutionary suicide” as employed by Sudan’s revolutionaries to manage their grief and politically respond to the military’s necropolitics after their 2021 coup d’état.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how, under the necropolitical conditions produced by Sudan’s 2021 military coup, Sudan’s street revolutionary movement managed and politicized grief through embodied protest. Drawing on one year of ethnographic research in post-coup Khartoum, the paper shows how different forms of grief generated distinct modes of resistance.

The analysis forms part of my doctoral project, which investigates shifts in street-level resistance as the political situation deteriorated and culminated in the outbreak of war in April 2023. During this period, protestors were increasingly confronted with death, the collapse of revolutionary expectations, and the erosion of revolutionary futures.

The paper departs from what one interlocutor, drawing on Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton’s (1973) concept of “revolutionary suicide,” described as the decision to continue protesting despite the high likelihood of death. I argue that this framing enabled protesters to reconfigure overwhelming power relations, sustaining political agency amid necropolitical governance and exhaustion. Revolutionary suicide did not signify a desire for death, but an ethical and political orientation toward life where death had been normalized.

In this sense, street protest became a way of enacting grief and political agency. Having lost friends and comrades, remaining in the streets sustained the possibility of revolution for which others had died. By foregrounding revolutionary suicide as an emic concept, the paper illuminates the relational dynamics of necropolitics, grief, agency, and temporality, showing how necropolitics shapes not only who may live or die, but how the living endure, relate to one another, and imagine political futures.