Paper short abstract:

This paper examines affective commitments and emotional attachments in the Sudanese revolutionary movement and their influence on youth participation in street protests against a military coup. It investigates how emotional bonds lead to resistant practices and how they are, in turn, shaped by them.

Paper long abstract:

This paper identifies conditions for continuous collaborative, cooperative street action to counteract state oppression by exploring the emotional dimensions of resisting the military coup in Sudan and the commitments and loyalties that arise from these. It addresses the cultural and temporal embeddedness of prevailing political emotions emerging among protestors and their linkage to the persistence of the resistance.

The findings of this paper are based on eleven months of ethnographic research in Khartoum in the context of a military coup d’état, which included various data collection methods such as interviews, group discussions, and extensive participant observation, especially at the protests. As part of a dissertation project about the different forms of subjectivation of resistance among the youth members of the revolutionary movement, the paper will examine the affective commitments and emotional attachments emerging within the movement and their dialectic relationship with locally circulating discourses, power relations, and practices of resistance.

The paper shows how the revolution’s objectives, as communicated by different revolutionary sub-groups, have been individually and collectively internalized and function as guiding and regulating background emotions. Furthermore, it portrays how moral and normative demands place the resisting subjects within a distinct social order and command a particular behavior through affective commitments.

Finally, it will explore how these affects and emotions partake in the production, appropriation, and alteration of resistant political subjectivities among the protestors in what they see as “the next chapter of the continuing revolution”.