If there are places of refuge left in Sudan, it is unclear how long they will last. As the increasing devastation of the present war has shown, the two sides—the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—are matched in their disregard of Sudanese life. At the time of this writing, over ten million people have been displaced. A figure which experts consider among the highest in the world. I try and fail to hold that number in my mind. I try to imagine faces, hands, names, voices. Many forced into treacherous, ceaseless flight. And just as many trapped in zones of conflict, unable to flee. I think of those who travel alone. I think of those who, without the families and friends they first fled with, are joined to others by circumstance and desperation. I think of strangers who, finding children separated from their parents, have kept them close. I also think of those who survive by theft, those who have set up small trades, others who, having little else to do, learn from them, and those who have joined medical staff and dangerous relief efforts while in need of care themselves. I imagine the spontaneous riptides of grief that might suddenly seize two or three people at the same time, and the scattering of comforting words, prayers, sighs, that might follow. I think of the Resistance Committees who have continued to facilitate mutual aid across Sudan, even as famine begins to spread in North Darfur. Without substantial resources and amidst ongoing bombardment, reaching the people of Darfur, who’ve historically been targets of the Sudanese state, has become exceedingly difficult.  

In continuously overcrowded camps, fewer than enough supplies run out quickly. And even when far from the fighting, the threat of violence remains. Under these conditions, the task of learning, in Manolo Callahan’s words, new ‘habits of assembly’, is made brutally necessary even as opportunities to do so are few and fraught with fatal risk. Brutal necessities saturate the existence of the refugee, a word whose popular usage normalizes structural injustices and neutralizes the capacity to challenge them. In the uneven distribution of global precarity, the figure of the refugee, typically racialized, stands at the edge of corporeality, marking the line that separates bodies believed to possess life from those considered mere bodies. Rendered incapable of any meaningful experience of personhood and vitality, these ‘discounted bodies’, as Achille Mbembe writes in ‘Bodies as Borders’, are ‘the most exposed to droughts, storms and famines, toxic waste and various experiences of effacement.’ In this reading, the refugee is not merely one who seeks refuge, as a dictionary might tell us, but one for whom the very possibility of refuge is indefinitely deferred.  

Having witnessed the devastating impacts of French colonial violence as both a psychiatrist and a member of Algeria’s National Liberation Front, Frantz Fanon understood this kind of dehumanization. Through forced migration, administered and arbitrary slaughter, and other policies of extraction, the oppressive state aims not merely to capture and desecrate land, or to place its targets under permanent insecurity, but rather ‘it is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction.’ If we understand the war in Sudan as a counterrevolutionary response to the popular revolt of 2018-2019, as a state of siege in which ‘the people—continuing to carry the ethos of resistance despite mass displacement, genocidal ethnic cleansing, and an imminent famine—are the common enemy,’ of the RSF and the SAF, as Lina Dohia writes, then we are compelled to view the mass production of displaced peoples, including refugees, from the Sudanese population as exactly that, a production. The refugee not as an unfortunate but otherwise natural consequence of conflict or the tragic face of a ‘humanitarian crisis’, but as a subject upon and around whom conditions of absolute vulnerability are imposed.  

In pursuing this strategy, the RSF and SAF attempt to bring about the gradual erosion of Sudan’s collective will—that ‘ethos of resistance’—smothered on every side by the varied pressures of sustenance. Relying, of course, on global economic and political systems already premised on the devaluation of African life, these military powers hope to create in the refugee a subject deprived, eventually, of all claims. Claims to land, to welfare, to functional and equitable governance structures, to a Sudan which serves its people. A subject who by virtue of staying alive has ceded all legal status and is therefore outside the parameters of ‘rights’, leaving open the path to unfettered state capture. What survives of the refugee’s political imagination must be constrained to debasing appeals for aid and asylum.