Agents of Change Across Borders: The Political Agency of the Sudanese Diaspora
In a rapidly changing global order, Africa can no longer be understood as peripheral to international politics. Rather, it emerges as a crucial site where local dynamics and transnational processes intersect, overlap, and mutually reshape one another. This seminar series foregrounds the concept of agency to explore how political, social, and economic actors across the continent actively produce and navigate these local–transnational entanglements.
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Abstract
The lecture looks at the agency of Sudanese diaspora in shaping Sudanese politics, and in sustaining the livelihoods of families in times of distress. It highlights the role of Sudanese diaspora in mobilizing international advocacy and support, mobilizing resources, and disseminating information during periods of civil wars and catastrophes. Moving beyond narratives that cast migrants as passive victims, remittance senders, or distant observers, the talk foregrounds the diaspora as an organized, strategic, and often visionary force in struggles over governance, citizenship, and economic survival. While the talk will provide some background historical information about the formation of Sudanese diaspora, the lecture will focus on the period that followed the political change of 2019 in Sudan and explores how Sudanese abroad have mobilized transnational networks, digital platforms, professional expertise, and advocacy in host countries to influence events on the ground, through fundraising, media campaigns, lobbying, and support for grassroots and resistance movements.
The lecture will situate the experience of Sudanese diaspora with broader debates on transnational subjectivities, revolution, and development. The talk poses the following questions: What kinds of agency are made possible by distance, and what forms of power remain constrained by it? How do diasporic practices transform not only Sudanese politics and economies, but also identities, solidarities, and imaginaries of home and belonging?
Bio
Munzoul Assal is Senior Researcher at the Chr Michelsen Institute, Norway. Before joining CMI in 2023, Assal was Professor of Social Anthropology, Director of the Peace Research Institute, and Dean of Scientific Research, University of Khartoum. He is the author of Sticky labels of rich ambiguities: Diaspora and challenges of homemaking for Somalis and Sudanese in Norway (2004) and Diaspora within and without Africa: homogeneity, heterogeneity, variation (2006). Assal is honorary fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.