https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197 Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Transition. daily 1 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 text/html en-US Issue 81&82 (2000) - 88 (2001); issue 93 (2002) through current issue Latest Articles: Transition TWO Project MUSE® Transition 1527-8042 0041-1191 Latest articles in Transition. Feed provided by Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975375 <p></p> Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, Blues for the Martyrs, 2022. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Mohamed Noureldin Abdallah Ahmed. &#xA9; Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.Two weeks ago, as I write in September 2025, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) leader Mohamed Hamdan Hemedti appointed himself head of a parallel government in Nyala, Darfur. Twenty-two years earlier in 2003, he cooperated with the ousted dictator Omar al-Bashir (1989&#x2013;2019) to commit genocide in that same region. After war erupted on April 15, 2023, between his RSF and the Sudanese Army (SA) under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, brutalities spread nationwide. El Fasher, in Darfur today remains under siege. Genocidal acts, crimes against humanity, and engineered famine ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall Introduction: Bearing Witness to Sudan's Unraveling 2025-12-02 text/html en-US Introduction: Bearing Witness to Sudan's Unraveling 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 20290 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975376 <p></p> The following is a translation of a short fable from the 2006 book Elements: Happenings from the Presence of the Imagination (Amsh&#x101;j: Waq&#x101;&#39;i&#39; min &#x1E25;a&#x1E0D;rat al-khay&#x101;l), written and illustrated by the Sudanese painter and writer, Dr. Ahmed Abdel Aal (1946&#x2013;2008). The book was published at the end of Sudan&#39;s longest civil war (1983&#x2013;2005) between the Sudan People&#39;s Liberation Movement/Army, based in the country&#39;s South, and the government in the North. That war, which was once known as The Second Sudanese Civil War (before the violence proliferated and fragmented and people stopped counting), led to great and tragic losses. Nevertheless, though the interim period following the end of that civil war and prior to the ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall Mountains Don't Joke Around!! 2025-12-02 text/html en-US Mountains Don't Joke Around!! 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 16712 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975378 <p></p> The images in the news report feel all the more shocking for how familiar they are. These are the same streets I had once walked along as a child. My uncle Moneim would take me by the hand and lead me around, proudly introducing me to everyone in the neighbourhood. We would stop at the little corner shop where I might get a paper twist of boiled sweets, or drop by the man who kept goats where I would ruffle their floppy ears.I enjoyed spending weekends at my haboba&#39;s house in Khartoum North, which back then was a simple place of mud walls and poor sanitation. They cooked on charcoal stoves made from old jerrycans. I can remember the sizzling aubergine slices and the kisra hot from the griddle. The old string beds ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall The Murderous Bazaar 2025-12-02 text/html en-US The Murderous Bazaar 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 39354 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975379 <p></p> Why did you and your mother arrive separate to your father?What do you fear will happen to you in Sudan?What is the purpose of them taking your homes?Why did you not claim asylum the first time you were here?What is the purpose of this war?Can you describe the general effects the war has had?Even now, do you have hope the war will end?Is there a reason you wish to remain ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall Alternate answers to my asylum interview, and: our names were our names 2025-12-02 text/html en-US Alternate answers to my asylum interview, and: our names were our names 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 9341 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975380 <p></p> There&#39;s an apocryphal story about a Dutch aid worker who travels to Sudan for the first time. Taking off from Schipol airport, she looks down at the grid of canals stretching away to the horizon and falls asleep. When she wakes up and looks out of the plane window, she sees a grid of irrigation canals and green fields and wonders why the plane has turned around. Except that it hasn&#39;t. The southern approach to Khartoum airport flies over the Gezira Scheme, by some measures the largest irrigated farm in the world. It is a vast engineered sponge, squeezing the waters of the Blue Nile over an expanse of fertile soils, to grow cotton and cereals. When it&#39;s operating, it is a masterpiece of intricate central planning ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall Fictions of the Black Nile 2025-12-02 text/html en-US Fictions of the Black Nile 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 54346 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975381 <p></p> Five girls, each with a distinct appearance, circled around a rust-covered water barrel. The iron barrel stood a meter high, or slightly less, but the girls were taller, and they could easily peer into it when standing on tiptoes, their hands reaching in as they toyed with the water and the objects floating above.The water rose to three-quarters of the barrel&#39;s height. Yellowing neem leaves that had fallen from the branches above swam on the surface, and twigs from the arak tree drifted aimlessly like lost boats, stirred by the hands of the girls. The father had tossed these twigs into the barrel so they could soften enough to be chewed as miswak brushes.Imota&#39;s real name was Edo. Her mother had given her the name ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall The Eye from Ireme 2025-12-02 text/html en-US The Eye from Ireme 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 33623 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975382 <p></p> Today, the city of my childhood lies in ruins, and in the ongoing conflict, countless lives have been lost, approximately five thousand persons including my father, Eltgani Ali&#x2014;peace be upon his soul and the soul of all martyrs.El Fasher has now become a symbol of resistance and hope for Sudan&#39;s unity because of people like my father.El Fasher: This is the city where I grew up. I attended primary, middle, and secondary school there. And many of my current friends have been with me since that time. We knew our neighbors well&#x2014;they were like an extended family. We were familiar with every store and shop, often visiting classmates whose families ran businesses or spent their evenings helping their fathers and elders ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall El Fasher at the Crossroads: Conflict, Cultural Heritage, and Contemporary Creativity at Risk 2025-12-02 text/html en-US El Fasher at the Crossroads: Conflict, Cultural Heritage, and Contemporary Creativity at Risk 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 32165 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975383 <p></p> Growing up in my birthplace Omdurman, Sudan, I was surrounded by extraordinary women who defied the patriarchal order that governed most of Sudanese society. These were lives that could only have been lived in the Omdurman of then&#x2014;an Omdurman that exists now only in memory, erased from the earth by masculine competitions for power and an insatiable bloodlust disguised as politics. The women of my lineage, in their steadfastness, have shaped not only my understanding of the world but the very fabric of Omdurman itself.My elementary school cast its shadow in the presence of history. Omdurman Girls&#39; Training College positioned me daily between competing cosmologies&#x2014;a microcosm of the city&#39;s larger personality. It ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall Omdurman: A Requiem 2025-12-02 text/html en-US Omdurman: A Requiem 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 45859 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975385 <p></p> In January of 2025, days after the RSF was forced to retreat from central Sudan, I received a video of my grandfather&#39;s house situated at the edge of a rural community along the Blue Nile. The RSF had ransacked the house and had strewn most of its content on the sand-covered floors around it. They had curiously also felled some of the larger-than-life trees that had made my grandfather&#39;s house the shadiest gathering place in the village: a magical place of refuge for bats, birds and stray cats. I spent parts of my childhood, long after my grandfather had passed, climbing those trees and playing under their shade. As children, we would befriend the lambs tied to the trees before they were taken away for slaughter. ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall The Politics of Hunger in Sudan 2025-12-02 text/html en-US The Politics of Hunger in Sudan 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 47773 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975386 <p></p> Father, I want to tell your story. You are eighty-six and your memory is fading. There is no longer a beginning, middle, and end to our conversations. When I call you, you repeat the same questions. You ask me: Where are you now? I tell you I&#39;m in Berlin. Where am I? I tell you you&#39;re in Cairo. Why aren&#39;t I in Khartoum? I tell you that there is a war there. You say you want to go back home. I tell you that you can&#39;t. Where are you now? You ask again, looping, repeating. And so here are the basic facts: You were born in 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War, before the atomic bomb existed. You came of age with the end of British rule of Sudan. You traveled through West Germany when the Wall was newly built. ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall Kobar Prison 2025-12-02 text/html en-US Kobar Prison 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 27921 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975387 <p></p> During a recent roundtable discussion with students about Sudan, I observed a striking moment of collective realization. While the main presentation highlighted the remarkable humanitarian efforts of grassroots organizations, the subsequent discussion revealed a more profound frustration among the students. They recognized that despite these organizations&#39; vital work in providing aid and support, they lacked the authority to compel the warring parties&#x2014;the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF)&#x2014;to cease hostilities. The students&#39; frustration ultimately landed on the African Union (AU), the continent&#39;s principal peace and security organization. They questioned why the AU, with its mandate to ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall Walking the Tightrope: The African Union's Struggle for Peace in Sudan 2025-12-02 text/html en-US Walking the Tightrope: The African Union's Struggle for Peace in Sudan 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 47259 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975388 <p></p> During any conflict, or all-out war, all images fight. They don&#39;t hang passively on walls, on billboards, on the sides of buses, on cleaning products and other everyday items, and in the case of Sudan, on luxury goods, like perfume bottles. When an image, a piece of literature, or any act of performance or musical work captures people&#39;s attention, it becomes a political lever; it picks sides. As the Prussian officer and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz said, &#x22;War is a continuation of politics by other means.&#x22; In a similar fashion, all artistic practice becomes a battleground between opposing factions, where aesthetic, ideological, and cultural conflicts are waged not with weapons, but with forms, ideas, and ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall Warring Images in the Struggle for Sudan: Between the Image of Reality and the Reality of the Image 2025-12-02 text/html en-US Warring Images in the Struggle for Sudan: Between the Image of Reality and the Reality of the Image 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 42968 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975389 <p></p> &#x22;&#x648;&#x637;&#x646; &#x627;&#x644;&#x646;&#x62C;&#x648;&#x645; &#x623;&#x646;&#x627; &#x647;&#x646;&#x627;/&#x62D;&#x64E;&#x62F;&#x64E;&#x642; &#x627;&#x62A;&#x630;&#x643;&#x631; &#x645;&#x646; &#x623;&#x646;&#x627; ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall In Memory of Eltayeb El-Kogali, and: In Arabic 2025-12-02 text/html en-US In Memory of Eltayeb El-Kogali, and: In Arabic 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 7779 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975390 <p></p> At the end of 2018, the Sudanese people mounted a popular uprising that eventually toppled one of the most notorious autocratic and oppressive regimes on the African continent: the thirty-year rule of General Omar al-Bashir. Backed by an Islamist movement and a clique of army officers and oligarchs, Bashir&#39;s rein was marked by oppression, civil wars, genocide, and an economic crisis causing spiraling inflation. The government&#39;s fateful decision to end subsidies of basic consumer goods, such as wheat and fuel, triggered intense and sustained protests, and on April 11, 2019, following several months of persistent street demonstrations and sustained civil disobedience, Bashir was overthrown by a band of his own ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall Sudan, Past and Future: The Legacy of the Labor Movement and the Sudanese Revolution of 2018–2019 2025-12-02 text/html en-US Sudan, Past and Future: The Legacy of the Labor Movement and the Sudanese Revolution of 2018–2019 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 40436 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975391 <p></p> The closest the fighting had come to Port Sudan&#x2014;specifically in the four months spanning July to October of 2024 when I served in my detail for the UN Development Programme (UNDP)&#x2014;was sixty miles away when a drone strike nearly took out the head of the country&#39;s national military.General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the leader of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), was attending a military graduation ceremony when the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group fighting the SAF, deployed the drone strike. Burhan survived though five people were killed in his stead. The Burhan attack was drowned out by the successful killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, amidst that more widely followed conflict between Hamas and ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall The Sudanese Orchard: Chekhovian Life Far from the Battlefield 2025-12-02 text/html en-US The Sudanese Orchard: Chekhovian Life Far from the Battlefield 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 23976 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975392 <p></p> In this memoir of making Cotton Queen, a film of narrative fiction about teenage girls tending to organic cotton fields in their small Sudanese village, writer/director Suzannah Mirghani, a Qatar-based Sudanese-Russian scriptwriter, researcher, and independent filmmaker, recalls the experience of (re)building Sudan in Egypt, while documentarian Jannah Elgamal, a Georgetown University in Qatar student, who joined the production as an intern during the 2024 fall break, shares memories of the shooting location as a space of solidarity and resilience.In January 2023, I travelled from Qatar, my adopted home, to Sudan, the place of my birth and the holder of my formative memory. I was on a mission to scout for locations ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall Searching for Sudan in Egypt: Displacement Filmmaking on the Set of Cotton Queen 2025-12-02 text/html en-US Searching for Sudan in Egypt: Displacement Filmmaking on the Set of Cotton Queen 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 22900 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975393 <p></p> The nicest way to describe Mu&#39;assa Street, which used to be one of the nicest streets in Khartoum Bahri, is to say it&#39;s a hellish street, a silhouette, or the image of the old street in a broken mirror, or rather, a copy of it from a child&#39;s nightmare. Is there a nicer way to describe it? The street, which witnessed four battles with heavy weaponry, six rounds of air bombing, fifty-seven thieves roaming its stores, sixty-three starving dogs, and one hundred and fifty-seven corpses stacked by twenty men in one place after two hours of exhausting work&#x2014;this, being the most they could do. When they decided to rest a little, a skirmish erupted along the street between the army and the Rapid Support Forces that led to ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall Checkpoint 2025-12-02 text/html en-US Checkpoint 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 24272 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975395 <p></p> Fatin Abbas is the author of Ghost Season: A Novel (Norton, 2023), set in the borderlands of Sudan and South Sudan. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta, Freeman&#39;s, The Warwick Review, and Friction, and her journalism and review essays have appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, The Berlin Review, Le Monde diplomatique, Africa is a Country, African Arguments and openDemocracy, amongst other places. She teaches fiction writing in the Department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT.Ahmed Abdel Aal (1946&#x2013;2008) was born in Kassala, in the east of Sudan. He Studied art at the College of Fine and Applied Arts in Khartoum (previously the School of Design, Gordon Memorial College) and the University of Bordeaux ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall Contributor Bios 2025-12-02 text/html en-US Contributor Bios 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 32193 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396 <p></p> After almost two years of fighting, which has resulted in the world&#39;s largest displacement crisis, Sudan is coming apart as a unified nation. What caused this gloomy assessment? A press conference in Nairobi in March where the RSF, a paramilitary organization once known as the Janjaweed or &#x22;devils on horseback,&#x22;&#x2014;the group responsible for ethnic cleansing and genocide in Darfur&#x2014;announced it was forming a new government to represent the territory that it controls, mostly in western Sudan.Longtime Sudan observers couldn&#39;t have been more surprised. The RSF primarily come from the Rizeigat, a trans-Sahelian alliance of Arab pastoralists, who had been locked in conflict with many African farmers in western Sudan for ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975396">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/197/image/coversmall A Path Forward: The African Precedents for Today's International Order 2025-12-02 text/html en-US A Path Forward: The African Precedents for Today's International Order 2025-12-02 2025 TWO Project MUSE® 28523 2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00 2025-12-02