Introduction
In April 2019, following several months of sustained protests and industrial action, Sudan’s longest-serving head of state was overthrown. Until 2019, Omar Bashir and the National Islamic Front (NIF)/National Congress Party (NCP) in its various incarnations had managed to survive mass demonstrations, strikes, and armed rebellions – the most sustained of which culminated in the secession of the South in 2011.1 Much of the mainstream discourse on the longevity of the regime has understandably highlighted the sheer scale of violence and repression unleashed by the government, which accumulated a harrowing raft of charges ranging from the imprisonment of political opponents to charges of genocide by the International Criminal Court. Literature has also explored the political economy behind the NIF’s reign through various lenses, including that of a ‘political marketplace’, ‘oil curse’, civil–military relations and state-building projects (de Waal 2015; Sidahmed 2014; El-Battahani 2016; Verhoeven 2015; Patey 2010; Elnur 2009). Sudanese and South Sudanese in particular have focused on historicising these transformations alongside the NIF’s ideology in order to illustrate important continuities and ruptures from previous regimes (Ali 2010; Jok 2015).
In this article, although I partly build on these and other works in an attempt to explore the social transformations that took place under the NIF, I also chart a different theoretical path by focusing on the NIF’s changing relationship with various social groups through what Femia (1981) describes as ‘minimal’ hegemony. In recent years, scholars have increasingly turned to closer readings of Gramsci – often alongside Fanon – to provide rich analysis of hegemonic relations in different colonial and postcolonial contexts (Hart 2014; Ali 2015; Mallick 2017). Following these and earlier attempts to ‘translate’ or critically ‘travel’ with Gramsci in the global South, I focus on Sudan and two forms of political leadership articulated by Sudanese communists and Islamists – specifically Abdel Khaliq Mahgoub and Hassan Turabi – in an attempt to trace the NIF’s reign through the lens of minimal hegemony. In particular, I find these works provide greater precision for exploring how different forms of hegemony have been theorised, contested and reproduced in a postcolonial African context by paying acute attention to social relations within Sudan, and how these interrelate with broader, global economic trends. I argue that a Gramscian method can shed more light on the relational nature of class configurations in Sudan than those that centre on elite politics, while also paying due attention to how the ideational and material base of the NIF’s hegemonic project morphed across time and space.
The next section outlines the theoretical approach adopted throughout this article, before then turning to the NIF’s rise and subsequent rule, and finally ending with the crisis of authority that resulted in Bashir’s overthrow and the emergence of social forces seeking to build a radically different society.
On hegemony
The origins of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony are often traced to multiple strands including Lenin, Machiavelli, Croce’s concept of ethico-political history and Gramsci’s studies in linguistics (Boothman 2008). Gramsci credits Lenin with theorising the concept of hegemony, though within Lenin’s writings the term is used to describe the leadership of the working class over the peasantry and other exploited groups in the struggle against tsarism (Femia 1981). Gramsci’s reformulation sought to explore the emergence of bourgeois rule in a capitalist society, and subsequently theorise an (alternative) proletarian hegemony (ibid.; Thomas 2009).
Despite the plurality in interpretations, there are common strands in most anglophone attempts to define hegemony within the Gramscian fold. Hegemony is often described as a form of political leadership encapsulating both coercion and consent; as a continuously constructed and contested process whereby a social group exercises moral and intellectual leadership over other groups; and as both ‘ethical-political’ and ‘economic’ – that is, the ideational has its roots in the economic but hegemony cannot be reduced to the economic (Gramsci 1992 [1975]; Femia 1981; Morton 2007). Rather than being juxtaposed against domination as its antinomy, Thomas (2009) highlights what he identifies as the dialectical integration of hegemony within domination (and similarly, of consent within coercion). A class’s ability to secure consent from allies relies on its ability to coordinate domination over opponents; similarly, its ability to exert coercive force against opponents depends on securing prior consent from allies (ibid.). As will be argued, this relationship played out in Sudan, though here the NIF’s alliance with the military-security apparatus enabled it to exercise domination over rival groups, and this ability to exercise domination enabled it to lead allies in turn. Against attempts to ‘locate’ hegemony in either civil or political society, Buttigieg (1995) and Green (2002) highlight how crucial Gramsci’s concept of the integral state – defined as political and civil society; dictatorship and hegemony – is to his concept of hegemony. More specifically, Thomas (2009) argues the integral state constitutes a dialectical unity of civil and political society, with hegemony traversing the boundaries between the two – any attempt to secure hegemony over civil society must be coupled with attempts to secure hegemony over political society (the state).
Femia’s (1981) categorisation of hegemony in varying degrees – integral, decadent and minimal – attempts to distinguish between different forms of hegemony. The ‘lowest’ (minimal hegemony) is used to describe a form of hegemonic activity that prevailed in Italy from the Risorgimento until (roughly) 1900; one that rested on the ‘ideological unity of the economic, political, and intellectual elites’ (ibid., 47). Confined to these restricted classes and coupled with an aversion to intervention by the masses in state life, this minimal hegemony was maintained through a process of transformism, whereby the formation of a ruling class was achieved through absorption of active elements arising from allied and enemy classes (Gramsci 1992 [1975]). Distinct from integral hegemony, minimal hegemony is associated with forms of passive revolution (loosely interpreted as one ‘from above’ or without mass participation), though here I use it more narrowly to explore the NIF’s relationship with various social forces.
Although Femia’s focus here is largely confined to the national level, the question of how minimal hegemony is also constituted by international relations is crucial. As Morton (2007) and Jessop (2005) illustrate, Gramsci’s reading of hegemonic relations within a particular nation-state are intertwined with relations within the international as well as regional scale. As I will argue, the reconfiguration of Sudanese society under the NIF was substantially shaped by global economic developments; its ‘minimal’ hegemony was constituted by relations at the regional and global scale as well as internal relations. Before exploring questions of scale, capitalist development, and hegemony in Sudan more deeply, it is worth first turning to influential readings of hegemony in postcolonial societies, which this article both draws on and diverges from.
Within analysis of the global South, arguably the most influential use of Gramsci can be found in postcolonial studies and – more specifically – in the work of the Subaltern Studies project (Guha 1982, 1997; Chatterjee 1986, 2004; Chakrabarty 2002). These attempts to adapt Gramscian concepts to formerly colonised nations with particular emphasis on subaltern groups have elicited much praise and critique, relating primarily to questions of interpretation and, consequently, whether these adaptations hinder or help revolutionary theory. Those sympathetic tend to argue that, unlike the economic determinism promoted by many Indian Marxists at the time, Subaltern Studies gave deserved attention to questions of culture and ‘people-centred’ history, while critics often argue that although these scholars use Gramscian terminology, this is increasingly done in a way that pays insufficient attention to the context in which Gramsci was writing and ends up valorising culture and ideology at the expense of class (Prakash 1994; Jani 2003; Ahmad 1992; Brennan 2006; Bannerji 2000). Drawing on Gramsci, Guha (1997) posits that while the metropolitan state was hegemonic as persuasion outweighed coercion, the colonial state in which coercion outweighed persuasion was not – rather, it was one of ‘dominance without hegemony’, with the native bourgeoisie’s failure to secure hegemony – to ‘speak’ for the nation – characterising the resulting postcolonial state.
In paying greater attention to the role of colonialism in constituting the present world-system and social relations within postcolonial societies, early Subaltern Studies scholars provided more critical analysis of North–South relations than early neo-Gramscian approaches that sought to apply Gramscian concepts to a different spatial terrain (Persaud 2016). Yet, increasingly, Subaltern Studies scholars have also come under criticism for a tendency to promulgate spatial and cultural splits – between subaltern/elite domains, hegemony/domination, and civil/political society – that end up approaching interrelated Gramscian concepts in isolation, promoting a dualistic reading of dialectical relations in the process of travel and metamorphosis to (post)colonial societies (Modonesi 2014; Mallick 2017; Hart 2015; Nilsen and Roy 2015).2 These dualisms are arguably a result of the lens adopted, which Sarkar (1997) criticises for reading colonialism as a ‘total rupture’, and enable categorisations of subaltern figures as ‘outside’ hegemony in the South, rather than seeing subalternity as a relation of subordination to be overcome through transforming social relations (Green 2002; Parry 2012).
Although I partly draw on these readings, I also diverge from some of their adaptations of key Gramscian concepts in an attempt to critically interrogate how Sudan’s peripheral position in the global economy and the NIF’s international relations relate to its attempts to build a hegemonic project, and the uneven ways its ‘minimal’ hegemony was reproduced in practice. The rest of the section is dedicated to exploring the tensions that emerge as part of this attempt, and builds on the works of Sudanese Marxists.
Sudanese Marxists throughout the twentieth century – like their counterparts across the continent – undertook the painstaking task of ‘translating’ Marxism to the Sudanese context, generating their own theories and partially translating ‘back’ (Abusharaf 2009; Ismael 2012). Translating here is used in the literal sense of reproducing European-language writings in Arabic, and also in the sense that Ives (2006) argues involves altering ways of thinking and acting. Although Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) cadres were translating selections from Gramsci’s writings in the 1960s, including through the party’s own socialist publishing house, time scales suggest their attention to questions of culture and pedagogy emerged independently.3 Rather than a process of ‘travel’, it might be more accurate to speak of the emergence of multiple theorisations pertaining to North–South relations, the role of intellectuals, and revolutionary subject(s) that – when read alongside Gramsci – provide constructive points of divergence and convergence.
Writing at the height of anti-colonial movements and military dictatorships that followed, Sudanese Marxists were preoccupied with the question of how to develop a national-popular collective capable of uniting the various subaltern groups divided not only by region and uneven (under)development, but also culture, language, ethnicity, religion and gender. In line with dependency theorists, they were attuned to how the global scale reproduced inequalities within Sudan, arguing that as long as Sudan retained its subordinate structure in the global capitalist economy, it would be subject to continued exploitation. For Mahgoub (2008), the break from colonialism had to be socialist, otherwise Sudan would remain locked in a dependent position in the shadow of the global capitalist system. Their attention to questions of scale meant an awareness that building a national-popular collective will was not simply a national question; the Sudanese state had been forged from the colonial experience and corresponding anti-colonial struggle, and questions of national unity were inextricably tied to the international (Garang 2010 [1971]).
Rather than merely a dialogue between Sudanese Marxists and their European counterparts, translating requires a pedagogical relationship between Sudanese Marxists and the broader society. Both Gramsci and Mahgoub were attuned to the need to translate realities on the ground into theory capable of responding to a specific political conjuncture. Mahgoub (2007) was critical of those intellectuals he argues applied a ‘sterile’ Marxism for their separation from the masses and preoccupation with abstract theory, arguing it is through political struggle that theory is formed. Such a process would necessarily expose the SCP to errors, but these could only be corrected in the midst of struggle. Echoing Fanon’s (1963, 197) argument that political education means ‘to teach the masses that everything depends on them, that if we stagnate it is their responsibility and that if we go forward it is due to them too’, Mahgoub (2007) argued that intellectuals had to learn from workers and the peasantry while also being able to challenge ‘reactionary’ arguments. In congruence with Lenin, from whom we can discern a more direct influence, and cognisant of the small size of the proletariat in Sudan, the SCP emphasised an alliance between workers, peasants and other oppressed groups.
Gramscian hegemony, or rather the process of building a hegemonic project, is also read by Thomas (2009) as involving a process of dialectical exchange between leaders and participants of a political movement, not dissimilar to what Sekyi-Otu (1996) elsewhere argues is how Fanon envisaged hegemony itself in colonial contexts.4 This relational Freirean pedagogy remains an integral part of subaltern (proletarian) hegemony and its absence forms a crucial aspect of ‘minimal’ hegemony. From this starting point, one can distinguish between the leadership theorised by Sudanese Marxists and the minimal hegemony realised by the NIF that I trace in the next sections, a distinction I argue relates not only to the class character of a hegemonic project, but also its relationship with various social forces, and whether it merely reconfigures relations of exploitation within its borders in an attempt to conceal the contradictions underpinning them, or seeks to transform the system that reproduces them. Rather than merely being a ‘lower’ form of hegemony indicating a pendulum swing towards limited consent, I argue that minimal hegemony in Sudan encapsulates a different form of hegemonic relations shaped by these forementioned factors.
The reason I characterise this as minimal hegemony and not domination (without hegemony) is that the latter lens risks focusing excessively on the NIF’s relationship with subaltern groups through the lens of coercion and exclusion, and not enough on its relationship to those allied with it, nor how its approach to subaltern groups also involved attempts to mobilise and co-opt them into its project. Reading it as a case of minimal hegemony is therefore not merely a question of semantics, but provides greater precision for interrogating the party’s shifting relationship with several camps across civil and political society. As Bashir’s removal illustrates, the regime was made up of various forces whose support for the NIF’s project was often conditional, and who sought to maintain a level of cohesion in the face of intense pressure from below. Minimal hegemony and domination were mutually reinforcing in the first instance, and characteristic of the NIF’s reign.
Rise of the party, 1964–1989
The SCP and NIF emerged decisively as the two rival ‘modern’ movements in 1964 following the overthrow of Ibrahim Abboud and against the traditional Sufi parties that had hitherto dominated government. At the time, the SCP yielded greater influence among trade unions, peasant groups, students and professionals, while the NIF’s base was predominantly confined to universities. These ties were reflected in the role they played in the uprising, with the NIF dominating university debates while the SCP’s strength among workers and professionals enabled it to mobilise a general strike that hastened Abboud’s downfall. Many have rightly linked the SCP’s attempts to organise workers, professionals and peasant groups to its strategy of building a Leninist united front. Less has been said about the SCP’s attempts to build what might be termed a hegemonic apparatus in the Gramscian sense – that is, those institutions and practices through which it sought to build this front and terrain on which ideological battles occurred. These included development of its own newspapers, educational initiatives, trade unions, clubs and art societies as it sought to recruit forces of civil and political society (including military officers) into its project.5 Ismael (2012, 35) notes that between 1965 and 1969 the NIF ‘made stopping the SCP a prime objective’ and part of this would be through attempts to develop its own rival apparatus.
After obtaining 5.1% of votes in the 1965 elections (Willis, El-Battahani and Woodward 2009), the NIF adopted two key approaches to neutralising rival forces. One was a campaign of repression; although the NIF did not possess the coercive powers of the state itself, it was able to access and influence them. It pursued a campaign depicting the SCP as anti-Islam, culminating in the expulsion of elected SCP representatives from parliament, and routinely accused the Republican Brotherhood of apostasy: a charge resulting in the hanging of its leader in 1983 (Al-Gaddal 1999). The second approach attempted to co-opt forces of civil and political society, primarily through appeals to morality and religion. Cockett (2016, 73) claims that the NIF emulated the SCP’s approach by permeating ‘sections of society that Islamists would not traditionally engage with’, such as unions, women’s groups, and professional bodies. Many have likened this to the concept of the vanguard party, with some bestowing upon Turabi the title of ‘Islamist Lenin’ (de Waal and Abdel Salam 2004), while Cockett (2016, 73) goes so far as to claim that the Islamic movement in Sudan ‘reads much like the Bolshevik revolution’.
Such comparisons, while popular, risk overemphasising the party’s revolutionary tactics and give too much credence to claims by NIF members to have adopted the SCP’s approach (Turabi 2009). First, the notion that a movement should seek to secure mass support within the realm of civil society before or alongside advances into the state was not relegated to the left; these tactics were routinely adopted by Islamists elsewhere, including Egypt and Pakistan. Secondly, a closer look at the NIF’s activities suggests a process of transformism rather than revolutionary vanguardism. Here the distinctions between forms of hegemony, their class content and the role of intellectuals and revolutionary subject(s) are crucial. Rather than seeking to raise the class consciousness of subaltern groups, a process which was arguably the antithesis took place – the party sought to weaken or neutralise the class consciousness of subaltern groups, subordinating it to the primacy of its political-religious ideology. While the NIF may have reflected the economic interests of the middle-class professionals who formed its base and functioned as its ‘organic’ intellectuals, it often had little to say about the economic interests of subaltern groups; here its focus was almost entirely on securing cultural hegemony.6 By Turabi’s (2009) own admissions in 1989 the NIF failed to make inroads among workers despite the SCP’s decline, leading him to propose greater religious education – questions of class struggle are conspicuously absent. The concentration of educated elites in the movement is attributed not to its class character, but portrayed by Turabi as a natural consequence of the NIF’s strength in universities, thereby concealing how these intellectuals both emerged from the NIF’s specific class project and reproduced it on an ideological and economic level (ibid.).
In analysing the social function of intellectuals, Gramsci (1992 [1975], 133) highlights the need to interrogate their attitude to various classes, arguing that ‘[i]n the history of the Risorgimento, the so-called Action Party had a “paternalistic” attitude’, which meant it could only bring the masses into contact with the state ‘in a minimal way’ (ibid., emphasis mine); one can say the same regarding the NIF’s approach to subaltern groups. Its limited success despite attempts to develop its own hegemonic apparatus through associations, unions, charities, missionary organisations and media outlets illustrates how it exercised neither bourgeois nor subaltern ‘integral’ hegemony, and it is worth exploring how it nevertheless came to power.
Two sectors proved crucial to the NIF’s rise, one enabling it to lead a new class, the other increasing its coercive capacities. The first – crucial to expanding its base – were the Islamic banks. Nimeiry had entered office on a socialist orientation critical of neo-colonialism but shifted rightwards after his 1971 confrontation with the SCP, improving relations with Western and Gulf countries and increasing Sudan’s reliance on foreign capital (Kaballo 1994). After the 1973 oil price crisis, Gulf nations looked to develop Islamic finance institutions and Faisal Islamic Bank was established in Sudan in 1977, funded by the Saudis and managed by the NIF. The sizeable Sudanese diaspora in the Gulf – some with ties to Saudi business people, including Muhammad al-Faisal al-Saud – further facilitated the development of Islamic finance as hundreds of thousands emigrated in pursuit of higher salaries, with much of this finding its way back into Sudan through remittances that exacerbated regional inequalities, often through these institutions (Sidahmed and Sidahmed 2005).
Leading Islamists dominated the higher echelons of the bank where political ties were more important than business proposals (Stiansen 2004). The 1983 Islamic laws prohibited interest-based banking to the detriment of commercial-based banks, further enabling Islamic banks to flourish as a source of party funds and recruitment tool. Middle-class professionals and traders were absorbed into the party, forming an emerging group that owed their higher income to Gulf salaries or Islamic finance. Nimeiry’s early nationalisation measures and confiscations had led to a flight of foreign capital and sought to break the grip of the traditional bourgeoisie that dominated agriculture and commerce; his neoliberal turn now enabled Islamist business people to emerge through ties to Gulf capital. Both global and internal developments during this period therefore shaped social relations to the detriment of traditional elites and the left, and facilitated the expansion of Gulf finance into Sudan.
In the 1986 elections, the NIF captured 18.4% of votes, having expanded its base of support from students to graduates and soldiers (Chiriyankandath 1987). It failed to gain substantial support elsewhere, giving further evidence that its influence over civil society was often overstated. The same Islamic banks that provided material benefits to their middle-class supporters alienated the lower classes and came under fire for their monopoly on grain and role in exacerbating the famine in the 1980s – indeed Seddon (1986) notes that during the 1985 ‘bread riots’, Faisal Islamic Bank was one of three buildings that sustained particularly heavy damage. If anything, it was the NIF’s inability to exercise hegemony over civil society that left it with little recourse for securing state power in the immediate sense, except through force.
Consequently, the military was the second vital institution for the NIF’s rise. It was able to penetrate the armed forces through various strategies, including delivery of religious teachings in the military and campaigns urging its members to join (Taha 1993; Warburg 1995). In turn, this co-option of officers into the NIF would further facilitate its use of coercion, enabling it to seize control of the state. By 1989, resolution of the civil war (predicated on repeal of Islamic laws) seemed imminent. Aware of impending peace talks with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLM/A) and ideologically opposed to the agreement, the party’s leadership opted for military action, drawing on Islamist officers and ushering in Sudan’s third military dictatorship.
The ‘salvation’ years, 1989–1999
The first decade of the NIF’s rule was characterised by mass coercion against opposing forces, with the party’s ideological base anchored to an austere interpretation of Islam. Drawing on narratives of anti-colonialism, the movement articulated itself as anti-imperialist and pan-Islamist on the global stage while claiming its ideology as capable of uniting Sudanese within its borders, even as coercion underscored its approach towards much of the population. The war against the South was escalated and portrayed as a noble jihad, while Islamic laws were reintroduced as a way of disciplining the population. A restricted hegemony over the social forces that came to form the ruling bloc facilitated this widespread violence, and the reforms of this decade enabled the NIF to restructure the economy in a way that benefited those close to the state, leaving the majority to face increasing economic security as a consequence.
Internationally, the NIF’s declared pan-Islamist and anti-imperialist (what Amin [2007] might describe as ‘anti-Western’) approach quickly alienated neighbours. It supported rebel movements in neighbouring countries, supported Saddam Hussein in the Gulf war, hosted Osama bin Laden, and supported an assassination attempt on Hosni Mubarak. Gulf nations swiftly cut off economic ties, the US imposed sanctions, and an exodus of Sudanese from Kuwait ensued with remittances decreasing as a consequence. With the economy already in dire straits – Sudan had defaulted on debts and arrears to the International Monetary Fund totalling over a billion US dollars – and limited recourse to external funds beyond Islamist networks, the NIF adopted a programme of austerity couched as self-sufficiency (Yongo-Bure 1991).
Cognisant of the role unions historically played in unseating dictatorships, the NIF used coercion and transformism to discipline organised labour, paving the path for painful reforms. Along with political parties and associations, unions were initially banned and a wave of strikes and protests was violently crushed as prisons and ghost houses – unofficial detention sites that served as torture chambers – swelled with workers. The Sudan Workers’ Trade Union Federation was co-opted, with NIF cadres placed in top positions and others purged, while the civil service, judiciary and military were similarly transformed through mass purges. Unions were restructured on the basis of employer rather than occupation, limiting coordination and the impact of strike action. Social transformations cut across civil and political society – Bashir Ali (2010, 441) illustrates how NIF networks ‘reached into all aspects of life in rural and semi-urban areas’, including schools, mosques, universities, sports clubs, publishing houses and non-governmental organisations. While corruption was rife, these institutions played a strong role in disseminating the NIF’s religious views in ways that nonetheless deeply connected with a small minority – a campaign mobilising wealthy women to sell their gold to finance the war relied on these women strongly identifying with the NIF’s ethical-political project (ibid.). We therefore see a continuation of attempts to develop a hegemonic apparatus alongside mass violence, but also their failure insofar as the dominance of civil society institutions that were aligned with the NIF required mass coercion, wherein forces of political society continuously crushed independent alternatives.
Despite its ostensibly ‘radical’ foreign policy, the NIF adopted a neoliberal programme of its own accord similar to those imposed by international finance institutions elsewhere. It was neither a passive receptor of neoliberal restructuring across the continent, nor did it meaningfully contest these tides. Put otherwise, the NIF did seek to restructure the economy, but not under conditions of its own choosing. Its adoption of neoliberalism imposed through mass violence was ideological, but this ideology was interwoven with international relations as well as relations between social forces within Sudan. Lacking support from the population and starved of funds needed to implement large-scale development programmes that could garner widespread support, structural adjustment enabled the NIF to reconfigure relations between social classes in its favour, using privatisation policies and state contracts to replace the traditional bourgeoisie with its own. Privatisation did not simply entail selling entities to existing supporters (therefore shoring up the base), but also acted as a mechanism by which new members could be recruited (thereby expanding its support base), with the vast majority of public-sector entities sold well below market price to party members and institutions in a process likened to a garage sale (Sidahmed and Sidahmed 2005).
The exacerbation of war resulted in mass migration from peripheries to the centre, while the move away from agriculture towards services similarly contributed to (semi) proletarianisation of those formerly tied to agriculture, producing an increasingly informal labour force that the formal economy failed to absorb. Coercive control of space, which often took the form of ‘public order’ policing in the capital, involved displacement elsewhere, with NIF incursions into southern oilfields violently displacing those living near them (Rone 2003). Land policies in today’s borderlands further dispossessed locals and produced new subaltern groups; communal land was transferred to private ownership (largely NIF members and allies), turning local land-users into workers who toiled the land on their behalf (Johnson 2013). Public-sector workers faced successive waves of dismissals – the purge and privatisations – while real incomes fell and inflation soared. Private-sector actors unaffiliated with the regime were displaced or permitted to continue in diminished capacity, provided they ‘stayed out of politics’ (Verhoeven 2015, 113).
The extensive repression of this period not only illustrates the limited support for the NIF’s project but also how the existing police and army were perceived as insufficient for demobilising opposing forces. The methods by which hostile elements were absorbed or decapitated were varied and often violent, necessitating the development of new institutions. The National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) was established to deal with the centre, while paramilitary forces were formed against the peripheries. At the neighbourhood level, ‘popular’ committees were established to carry out surveillance, police social behaviours and deliver services. Religious language was wielded to justify scaling back welfare provisions, while expanding the state’s role in the social sphere through coercive ‘morality’ laws. Here it is important to emphasise that since hegemony involves both coercion and consent, it is not merely the existence nor even sheer scale of coercion, but the absence of popular consent validating coercion that evidences the limited support for the NIF’s rule. In understanding how it was able to consolidate its rule, coercion only tells part of the story – as previously mentioned, domination over opposing groups was reinforced by minimal hegemony, and it is worth identifying these allied forces.
Writing about coup-installed regimes in postcolonial states, Kandil (2012) argues that such regimes must ally themselves with one or more social classes to create a loyal support base and consolidate their rule. As in Egypt under Anwar Sadat (Roccu 2013), the group the NIF desired in Sudan – one that would support its extensive violence as well as its social and economic project – did not exist in any substantial form. As a result, the party sought to create a new social group, one not only supportive of its ideology but whose economic interests would be tied to it remaining in power. Femia (1981) notes how in contexts of minimal hegemony, dominant groups maintain their rule by co-opting leaders of potentially hostile groups into their elite network. Such co-option can take the form of bringing existing elites into their circle or, as in this case, creating new elites out of existing supporters, thereby undermining the old. Three primary forces initially formed this group in Sudan, and their empowerment resulted in configurations that undermined the old elites and impoverished the lower classes.
The first was civilians of the NIF (the highest being senior ‘party bureaucrats’ and business people). This group was largely made up of those already who had already bought into the NIF’s ethical-political project before 1989. Professionals including lawyers, academics, civil servants, senior officials in Islamic banks, politicians and relatives of politicians made up this previously disparate middle class that was transformed into a group of business people, landowners and party bureaucrats. One well-known example is the medical doctor and professor Mamoun Homeida, who became dean of his own private university, minister of health for Khartoum State and owner of several private hospitals simultaneously, overseeing closures of public hospitals and their replacement with his own.
The second force was senior army officials: the military restructure purged hundreds of top- and middle-ranking officers and ensured that a majority were Islamists. Rewards were given to officials who set up their own enterprises and in 1993 the Military Industrial Corporation (MIC) was established by a consortium of Islamists, business people and army officers (El-Battahani 2016). In part response to international isolation, the MIC specialised in producing military equipment, invested in construction projects and held part-ownership over numerous factories (ibid.). The amount of funding allocated to the army would skyrocket during the oil years and senior officials would go on to benefit considerably from trade links with Gulf business people.
The third was security chiefs occupying positions at the top of the NISS. Many came through the civilian wing of the party, such as those who carried out its intelligence-gathering activities before it came to power. Others were drawn from the rank of military general, their links to the NIF predating the coup. The NISS came to dominate telecommunications, services and import-export sectors, and held ownership of various private hospitals, private security services, factories and parastatals (Baldo 2016).
These divisions were by no means static, party bureaucrats could become security chiefs and former generals could be placed in ministerial positions. One illustration is Bakri Hassan Saleh, who served in the military from the 1970s and played a leading role in the coup, going on to serve as NISS director between 1990 and 1995 and subsequently holding several ministerial posts, including that of prime minister from 2017 to 2018. Despite such rotations, these institutions should not be viewed as a single unified entity; these factions made up the regime but were distinct parts of it, with interests that coalesced and diverged during periods of crisis. Nor were they the only beneficiaries of direct links to the party; a second, less wealthy stratum made up of ordinary members empowered through access to Islamic finance or managerial positions in NIF-run institutions acted as an outer layer of support. Still, they formed the backbone of the government, constituting a narrow bloc not only able to exercise the powers of the state to crush opposition, but whose economic interests became intimately tied to the party in power. Crucially, as we see acutely today, these institutions would develop different international ties, a factor that not only influenced relations between the ruling bloc but would increasingly shape their relations with the broader society.
Within this bloc, the division of labour was often contested, and transformist measures intended to neutralise inadvertently fomented instability. Rather than facilitating its absorption by the NIF, the economic empowerment of the military led to officials wanting a greater say in political affairs. The 1999 Bashir–Turabi split was due to a convergence of multiple economic and ideological disagreements and internal contradictions. These included growing discontent among the new elites over the economic impact of Turabi’s foreign policy; support for greater decentralisation by Turabi and Islamists from the West; and the visible failures of the Islamist project to appeal to the broader public (Verhoeven 2015). These coalesced around Turabi’s attempt to bring the army under the NIF’s civilian control, resulting in his expulsion from government as security chiefs and key NIF civilians – many of whom were Turabi’s protégées – tipped the balance by siding with Bashir.
The oil years, 1999–2011
The second decade of the NIF’s rule marked a shift in its economic policies and ideology, influenced by the party’s split and opening of the economy. During these years, rather than being ‘isolated’ from the global economy as is often claimed, Sudan was integrated in a way that further empowered the ruling bloc and provided greater opportunities for economic development in the centre, while displacing many elsewhere. Bashir was successful in convincing neighbours that the NIF’s ideological fervour had left the party with Turabi, and Sudan was welcomed back onto the regional stage, although the US maintained sanctions. The UN lifted its sanctions, Gulf nations resumed economic relations and made a commitment to invest in an ambitious dam project, and the IMF withdrew its non-cooperation designation.
The most important economic actor though was arguably China. In the mid 1990s, Asian investors were invited to work on oil extraction, and Sudan began exporting crude oil in 1999. By 2002, Sudanese oil imports constituted 9.3% of China’s total oil imports and, around the same time, China became Sudan’s largest reported supplier of military weapons (Large 2008). Oil is often credited with enabling the government to consolidate its base, develop infrastructure in Khartoum and the surrounding areas, and – along with internal developments within the SPLM/A (namely neutralisation of factionalism) and international lobbying – provide further incentive to resolve the war (revenues would be shared equally between North and South). Rather than approaching this period as proving or disproving the ‘resource-curse’ hypothesis, this section explores how these shifts in international relations interlaced with social transformations across Sudan.
A reorientation in the business class took place during this decade, and a process of transformism brought old elites back in. With most Islamists from the West following Turabi out of government and the eruption of conflict in Darfur, ethnic ties took greater precedence than religious ones in politics – Musso (2017) notes how sections of the Islamist business community from the peripheries (including those who joined the NIF as early as the 1960s) were marginalised by the government, while the traditional commercial riverine bourgeoisie were given greater autonomy. The coercive apparatus underwent a similar transformation, with Darfuris from certain backgrounds sidelined in security positions. Militias in the peripheries were restructured as the government drew on predominantly Arabic-speaking groups, and ethnicity became a more visible factor in recruitment than religious fervour (de Waal 2005).
The opening of the economy enabled the old commercial class to grow again, independent of ties with the NIF: while Gulf investors often worked with senior regime figures, sanctions meant that Western investors such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Unilever and Kraft tended to work with the traditional private sector (Mann 2013). It also enabled those within the ruling bloc to further enrich themselves, with their privileged access to state contracts maintaining their dominance. Fresh sanctions over Darfur did little to stem the continued rise of this group; although sanctions applied to the NISS as an institution, officials were able to circumvent them by setting up their own companies – a leaked US embassy cable from 2008 showed over 400 ‘grey’ parastatals linked to security and military officials (Wikileaks 2010). Perversely, while sanctions hindered the ability of state hospitals to import medical equipment, private hospitals owned by NISS officials were able to procure state-of-the-art equipment. As oil revenues further enriched the ruling bloc, within that bloc the NISS grew rapidly as an economic and political force that began to encroach on the terrain of the military, turning what was previously a government divided between a civilian and military wing into a tripartite structure.
Although the NIF maintained the language of (moderated) political Islam, it sought to shift the ideational base of its hegemonic project to one based on ethnic and regional ties. Khartoum’s middle class was prioritised in development as the government sought to broaden its base of support, and its strategy was (in)famously encapsulated in a plan by the former finance minister outlining how the party would consolidate its power following commitment to elections:
The decisive voting bloc in the coming election resides in the geographical North – at least 25 million – in the Northern States, down to Sinnar/Gezira and Blue Nile areas. Voters in this zone are election oriented, more educated and can be influenced. … We must focus on this zone. …
The geopolitical body which I referred to earlier as the North … is very homogeneous … it is possible to incorporate this Axis into an Arab-Islamic political coalition … Even if the others have gone separate, this Axis can continue as a viable state. (Hamdi 2005)
The state stripped to its bones in the 1990s was fleshed out again; in 1999 the public sector’s share of GDP stood at a starved 6%, but by 2009 it reached 40% (World Bank 2009). Oil strengthened the Sudanese pound and provided the government with high liquidity, while road networks, electricity production and enrolment in primary school all expanded substantially (ibid.). Development projects financed by oil and foreign investment concentrated on the North, with much of the visible infrastructure investment in Khartoum.
How then did the regime maintain its power in a country with levels of inequality off the charts at a time when it was supposed to be democratising? Here it is vital to recognise not only the temporal nature of coercion in Sudan, but also its spatial nature; beyond Khartoum little attempt at generating consent (whether through economic or ethical-political means) was made. Coercion – often facilitated by attempts to co-opt certain groups and by use of proxy forces – remained one of the first weapons in the regime’s arsenal in the peripheries, as illustrated by its notorious approach in Darfur. Recognising that Gramsci’s (1992 [1975]) analysis of hegemony was attentive to relations across different scales – Jessop (2005) highlights his analysis of the Parisian urban bloc’s domination of other cities – helps shed light on the spatialised nature of coercion during this decade. ‘Minimal’ hegemony was still pursued in practice, though this no longer necessarily meant hegemony over a narrow social class as defined by Femia, but a narrow region as well: the NIF would pursue hegemony in Khartoum and a contradictory approach of co-option, mobilisation and domination elsewhere, with devastating results. Brutal violence took on an increasingly racialised and regional nature, and the focus on Khartoum’s middle class at the expense of the rest of the nation fuelled discontent elsewhere, most notably Darfur, while within Khartoum the city’s poor and displaced often faced the brunt of police and NISS brutality. Rebel groups contested the NIF’s project on a similar ideological terrain; uneven development was articulated as racial as well as regional inequality, tapping into long-held narratives and realities on social relations within Sudan.
Violent extraction of minerals and expropriation of land led to increasing conflict over resources in the peripheries, and the benefits of Sudan’s greater incorporation into the global economy were felt first and foremost by the ruling bloc and secondly, and less so, by the middle classes in the centre. Wealth transfers to the peripheries failed to address inequalities and went largely to those well connected, in the form of wages (Thomas 2017). In arguing for an understanding of war as globally and historically constituted – with the global ‘mutually constituted by local, domestic, regional and international relations and exchanges’ – Ayers (2010, 155) emphasises how Sudan’s integration into the global economy shaped patterns of accumulation based on primary commodity exports. Put more explicitly, capitalism operates across multiple scales insofar as the international connections marked by the extraction of resources for regional capitalist markets emerged alongside – and were constituted by – a transformation of social relations within Sudan, wherein the national government supported ‘localised’ violence enacted by militias to ensure extraction. Once again, however, the NIF was not a passive facilitator but played a key role in shaping these patterns of accumulation and uneven development. During this decade, oil-financed investment was accompanied by a shift in the NIF’s ideological base, as it reoriented itself away from the austere Islam of the 1990s towards a similarly exclusionary nationalism based on ethnic and regional ties, in which the borders of this ‘imagined community’ stopped at the riverine core. This realignment of the regime’s material and ideological base resulted in a level of acquiescence from greater sections of the population in the centre, and widespread discontent elsewhere.
After secession, 2011–2019
In January 2011 as anti-regime protests spread across neighbouring countries, Sudan underwent its own equally momentous upheaval as southern Sudanese voted overwhelmingly for independence. Secession not only symbolised the SPLM/A’s ability to articulate an alternative project for many South Sudanese at the time, but also the failures of the NIF’s project and all those that preceded it. It was also the point at which an internal crisis among the ruling bloc began and intertwined with a broader crisis of authority over society. This was due not necessarily to secession itself – many had long accepted this was likely – but rather to material configurations brought about as a result and the way these connected with broader narratives against the NIF’s cultural project. Here we begin to see the rapid unravelling of its minimal hegemony and the rise of social forces that would bring down Bashir. Contrary to Hamdi’s assertion that the NIF could survive on the centre alone, secession laid bare how the ruling bloc’s hegemony was integrally linked to its exploitation of those regions often classed as ‘excluded’ but actually violently integrated within hegemonic relations.
In 2011, Sudan witnessed limited anti-regime protests which were quickly dispersed by security forces. It was not until 2012, when the NIF’s inability to agree the cost of a barrel led South Sudan to shut down oil production, that the economic effects of secession began to pinch, and widespread protests erupted over fuel subsidies. Loss of oil reserves which made up over half of the government’s revenue and 95% of exports meant that continuing the expenditure of the previous decade would be impossible – between cuts to the military-security apparatus or cuts to public spending, Bashir chose the latter. In 2013 resources allocated to defence, security and ‘sovereign expenses’ (those of senior parliamentary officials) accounted for 78% of the budget; by 2014 this reached 88%, signalling that the NIF would prioritise consolidating its hegemony over the ruling bloc to maintain its rule (El-Battahani 2016).
Secession reconfigured relations of domination, requiring the NIF to find other resources and social groups to exploit while increasing its dependency on external funds. Here it is important to acknowledge Sudan’s subordinate position not only within the global economy, but also the nature of its regional dependency, and how this compounded the vulnerability of the ruling bloc to external shifts and accelerated exploitation of subaltern groups. Gulf states took a more actively interventionist role in Sudanese affairs: internationally the NIF’s attempts to maintain Gulf support included severing long-standing ties with Iran and joining the Saudi-led offensive in Yemen, while domestically this included changes to investment laws enabling Gulf investors to lease vast tracts of communal land to the detriment of local land-users (El Amin 2016). The turn towards gold mining post-secession – gold became Sudan’s biggest export in 2012, most of which went to the United Arab Emirates – similarly led to confrontations between locals and militia leaders, and between miners and international firms.
Within the regime, divisions began to spill over into public; what was previously rumoured by critics was confirmed by defectors, and tales of corruption and coup plots featured regularly in public discourse. Protests in 2013 over fuel subsidies exposed further cracks as long-serving NIF figures ostensibly used the crackdown to distance themselves from the regime’s violence, while also providing openings for forms of organisation we would see more prominently in 2018.7 The coercive apparatus also expanded during this decade; by 2018 the army faced rivalry from not only the NISS, but also the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Formed from elements of the notorious Janjaweed and initially absorbed under NISS command in 2013, the RSF was partially integrated into the armed forces in 2017. The 2017 budget allocated it distinct funding, separate to the military and NISS. Along with direct state funding, the RSF benefited from attempts to diversify Sudan’s economy post-secession; gold mining, hiring out mercenaries to the Saudi-led offensive in Yemen, and border patrols linked to EU migration agreements all strengthened its leadership, reconfiguring social relations in the peripheries in its favour. In such contexts of uneven development, the RSF not only played a coercive role, but also provided social mobility for poorer youth, thus ‘absorbing’ groups that might otherwise be rendered excess under capitalism.
These international and intra-regime realignments failed to stabilise the regime and plug the gap left by secession. By 2018, the failures of the NIF’s ideological project were widely acknowledged and the economic failures acutely felt. The nation suffered from an acute shortage of foreign currency, food prices continued to soar and lengthy queues for fuel and cash were increasingly common. When the price of bread tripled in Atbara, protesters set NIF headquarters alight in protest against the lifting of wheat subsidies, in a move echoing the 1985 uprising when a branch of Nimeiry’s Socialist Union came under attack. Immediately, Khartoum’s professionals threw their weight behind these protests sparked by subaltern groups, and the newly formed Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), which had hitherto focused primarily on wage issues, turned its ire towards the regime, with medics singling out hospitals owned by prominent members of the party and military-security apparatus for boycott.
For Sudan’s middle class, the value of subsidies was such that their removal threatened ‘to push them down the social ladder’ (Elgizouli 2019); the state contracted and those who benefited from public-sector investment in the 2000s were now at risk of joining the poorer classes. Increasing precarity partly explains the SPA’s ability to mobilise large swathes of Khartoum, however the catalyst was not simply the SPA’s calls for protests, but the militancy of subaltern protesters in Ad-Damazin, those who torched NIF buildings in Atbara and elsewhere, local resistance committees from poorer neighbourhoods who mobilised protesters, and the unemployed and underemployed youth who erected the barricades at the sit-in outside army headquarters.8 Fiery anti-regime mobilisation elsewhere by subaltern groups spurred the SPA to move away from purely economic-corporate issues and towards incorporating broader ethical-political demands, and these groups sustained protests for several months alongside Khartoum’s increasingly disenfranchised middle class.9 Sparked by economic factors, the uprising rapidly expanded to encapsulate opposition to the NIF’s entire project articulated in chants, poems, songs and graffiti that coalesced through attempts to produce a new discourse; to link economic grievances to universal themes around freedom, peace and justice. Revolutionary narratives were not simply formulated during this period of struggle; they drew on narratives that rebel groups and others had long articulated in the public sphere. The oft-repeated distinction between ‘civil’ uprisings and armed rebellions risks concealing how the latter have often fed into the former; chants decrying racism or sectarianism resonated precisely because the atrocities and inequalities inflicted unevenly across the nation had successfully been articulated as racial and religious as well as economic inequalities (Anonymous 2000; SPLM 1983; 2008). Nation-building was a common idiom; calls for protests and strike action invoked memories and melodies of past uprisings and combined them with newer articulations that seeped into the popular imagination as ‘good sense’.10
These protests that emerged against a backdrop of the collapse of the Sudanese pound both coincided with escalating divisions within the regime (exemplified by Bashir’s constant reorganisation of parliament and coercive forces) and exacerbated them, threatening the already unstable equilibrium between ruling factions. In turn, the response of the various armed forces – particularly when contrasted with previous responses to demonstrations and rebellions – enabled the momentum of protests and strikes to continue and escalate for as long as they did, leading to Bashir’s removal. The mutually constituted crisis of authority within the regime and society, shaped by national and international factors, led to increasing contradictions within the military as lower-ranking officers pushed for aligning with protesters (ICG 2019). In ultimately sacrificing Bashir, the coercive forces sought to distance themselves from the NIF in a manner not entirely dissimilar to how Bashir distanced the regime from Turabi two decades earlier. This move partially met protesters’ demands, while seeking to restore balance within the ruling bloc through a new alliance aiming to disrupt any possibility of subaltern autonomy emerging through the process of struggle. The events of 2019 produced a situation where the regime has suffered a crisis of authority, but where none of the social forces that played a leading role in the uprising have yet been able to forge an alternative project from all the diverse groups in Sudan that could rival the fragile consensus uniting the ruling bloc.
Conclusion
In the wake of the June 2019 massacre, those seemingly clear alliances encapsulated in the leading chant ‘first are you with your country, or with the thieves?’ began to unravel. The sit-in outside army headquarters had served as a space where alternative hegemonies were conceptualised, and previously fragmented subaltern groups came together to contest the NIF’s project; its violent dispersal threatened this precarious unity. The blame attributed to ‘Colombia gangs’ by the military and echoed by sections of the middle class carried uncomfortably familiar racialised, religious and class connotations and later came to symbolise that while protesters had successfully ended Bashir’s reign, idioms of nationalism which proved potent in mobilising risked giving way to familiar divisions across class, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexuality, among others.
In almost three decades of rule, the NIF failed to exercise ‘integral’ hegemony in the sense of moral and intellectual leadership over Sudanese society. Focusing on its relationship with various forces, I sought to illustrate the spatial and temporal nature of its minimal hegemony, exploring its reproduction across different periods and regions. I argued that the first decade was marked by the creation of a new economic elite aligned with the regime, and use of transformism and widespread coercion against contending forces. I then explored how oil revenues and shifts in international alignments led to an approach based more on securing acquiescence from a broader constituency of riverine groups, with the ideological base of its project shifting to one that relied more on the overlap between ethnicity, religion, region and class. Following secession, the government initially sought to exercise greater coercion, while facing mounting unrest from an increasingly destitute population along with internal divisions due to a sharply deteriorating economy.
Rather than any inherent stability, the NIF’s rule was characterised by constant instability, and each crisis gave birth to reconfigurations within the regime as it sought to maintain its cohesion. The prioritisation of military-security spending after secession evidences not only its failure to secure even passive consent from the population, but also the precarious nature of consent secured from these officials whose loyalty faltered as the economy deteriorated. The continuous regional rebellions and secession of South Sudan stand as testament to the failures of its ideological project, but it is in the context of an economic crisis that an alternative hegemonic discourse linking the two together resonated deeply among protesters across the rural–urban divide. The NIF’s articulations of a shifting but always exclusionary nationalism based on narrow religious and/or ethnic ties further compounded existing divisions within the nation and gave birth to multiple and at times divergent nationalisms (including secessionist movements), but failed to secure enduring support for the NIF.
Returning to the writings of Sudanese Marxists at a particular conjuncture – the rise and fall of anti-colonial liberation movements – helps situate the emergence of the NIF’s hegemonic project and reveals crucial differences between how proletarian leadership was theorised by the former, and how a bourgeois ‘minimal’ hegemony was realised by the latter. Importantly, these points of divergence remind us that – as with Gramscian hegemony – there is no ‘singular’ shape that hegemony takes in societies such as Sudan and enable us to understand how the social transformations that characterised this period were shaped by the NIF’s class base, its shifting articulations of Islam and ethnicity, and the relationship between global and internal economic developments. In reading repression not only as enacting material violence but also closing down spaces wherein social groups can come together to co-produce new forms of knowledge, we also see how, for the NIF, knowledge production or ‘translation’ was unidirectional and would flow from its intellectuals to the wider society, but never in reciprocal relation or process of dialectical pedagogy that Mahgoub, Gramsci and Fanon all emphasised.
While this article has focused on the minimal hegemony of the NIF, I argue that a Gramscian reading of the present conjuncture can also open up ways to critically interrogate the post-Bashir period and forge a genuine subaltern hegemony from the ashes of the NIF’s project. Recognising how subaltern, intermediary, and dominant groups were incorporated into hegemonic relations in complex and contradictory ways under the NIF can also help us move beyond the binaries of ‘are you with your country’ that proved crucial to mobilising but are now uttered by revolutionary and counter-revolutionary groups alike, to instead explore contradictions within the current ruling bloc and between subaltern groups, and the ways multiple competing superstructures reproduce or contest relations of subalternity. The value of the recent philological turn (‘return’ to Gramsci) comes less from its fidelity to his original notebooks, and more from how such readings – in redefining relations between subaltern and dominant groups – can open up space for exploring how subaltern groups begin to build their own organisations, alliances and notions of ‘good sense’ in the struggle towards full autonomy (Gramsci 2021; Green 2002; Thomas 2009, 2018; Morton 2007). Sudan provides an alternative vantage point of how the contradictions of the global economy and regional markets play out acutely in a country situated at the periphery of both the global capitalist system and what is commonly described as the ‘Arab world’, and how the resulting class, ethnic and regional inequalities shape the possibilities and limits of hegemonic projects. The emergence of the RSF – intimately tied to how Sudan remains a source of labour (more recently in the form of mercenaries), land and primary commodities for Gulf countries – alongside resistance committees and independent unions illustrates how revolutionary upheavals can give rise to reactionary groups that also have a significant subaltern base. In tracing social transformations under the NIF and ending with current attempts to form subaltern alliances in the wake of Bashir’s overthrow, I argue that Sudan provides an example of how different forms of hegemony are continuously contested, reproduced and theorised across social groups in a deeply fractured postcolonial state where the challenges for building a national-popular will are immense and continue to be disproportionately shaped by international conjuncture.