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EPL & MENA Present

Sudan's Delayed Transition: How Did We Get Here?

Evanston Public Library and Northwestern University’s Middle East and North African Studies (MENA) department present the latest in our continuing series of lectures on the region.

In 2019 the Sudanese people peacefully overthrew the military dictatorship that had ruled them for more than 30 years. This victory was greeted with joyful enthusiasm by the international community. But like in many countries hoping to transition from a military dictatorship to a democratic, civilian led government, the question of what to do with men with guns remained. This problem was particularly acute in Sudan where the military and its allied militias had become the largest source of employment in the country.  The solution that was reached was to create a transitional government in which civilians would share power with the soldiers. These arrangements lasted until October 2021, when the Sudanese Armed Forces removed the civilian Prime Minister. Less than two years later on April 15th, 2023 the country descended into its current fighting. This talk will analyze how we got to our current situation and what we as Americans might do to address what is by many accounts the largest forced displacement in the world. 

About The Speaker:

Alden Young is an associate professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University. He is a political and economic historian of Africa and the Middle East. He has written extensively about Sudan, and is writing a book on post-partition conflicts in the Horn of Africa (e.g., Sudan-South Sudan and Ethiopia-Eritrea) with political scientist Michael Woldemariam.  He is the author of Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development and State Formation (Cambridge University Press 2017), paperback release 2020. He has published numerous academic journals and writes frequently in popular forums like Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Noema Magazine. 

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