Short Abstract

Efforts to end Sudan's war look through one lens: elite talks between armed command structures. This panel asks what counts as peace, and for whom, when seen from displaced families, markets, neighborhood networks born in the 2018/19 revolution, and exile, and why settlements seed new wars.

Long Abstract

Since April 2023, efforts to end Sudan's war have relied on a single lens: negotiations between two armed command structures, brokered by external states from Jeddah through Geneva to the Quad roadmap. This lens continues a long Sudanese genealogy of settlements, from Naivasha and Abuja to Doha and Juba, that tended to reward armed actors, and the current war itself erupted amid a negotiated transition.

Drawing on the image of the prism, this panel asks what counts as peace, and for whom, across social locations. For displaced families, peace may mean freedom of movement, access to food, or safe return; for traders, reopened markets and routes; for survivors, justice. These meanings are negotiated, and sometimes captured by armed authority and war economies, through local truces, cross-line trade, native administration and religious mediation, hosting arrangements, and diaspora networks.

The prism also has a temporal axis. Many networks sustaining survival today, from Emergency Response Rooms to communal kitchens, grew out of the 2018/19 revolution's resistance committees. Seen from them, the war is also a contest over the civic infrastructures that revolution produced.

We ask: What becomes visible about the war and its possible endings when peace is viewed from these locations and moments? How do elite and everyday registers of peacemaking enable or undermine one another? Why have Sudan's settlements so often seeded the next war?

We welcome empirically grounded papers from scholars of all backgrounds, across the social sciences and humanities, working inside Sudan or beyond.

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