Black Markets and Militants

“Life is a Gamble”

“…In Sudan, EU‐funded reintegration programs now invest in migrant returnees as “human capital” through vocational training (Ziai 2022, 2020). Regional scholarship that foregrounds social capital and informalized labor (Elyachar 2010; Hanieh 2022; Medani 2021) is instructive to keep in mind the itinerant and non‐waged labor of migration. Going to market, looking for opportunity, making oneself available for hire—all of these activities constitute labors of mobility that respond to market demands of social capital and entrepreneurial self‐fashioning (De Abreu 2018; Elyachar 2010), where “making it” demands stretching oneself across time and place, with the risk of stretching one's family thin.…”

“…Working night shifts, moonlighting, digging under the earth, crossing borders illegally, carrying unregistered goods, shadowing someone who doesn't want to do the job themselves, are necessary tactics for those who, like Bashir, return to a Sudan, where half of the active labor force is “precariously employed” (UNDP 2021), if employed at all, and many work in the shadows of the state economy (Bakhit 2020; Medani 2021). Shadow labor is coded by racialized and gendered terms of movement and access both within Sudan and in a transregional economy, where some bodies pass easily while others are systematically marked out as suspicious, and/or hypersexualized, and targeted accordingly through extractive and disciplinary measures by state and non‐state actors alike.…”

“…Migrants' remittances fueled a new informal Islamic banking system in the 1980s, which offered loans and money transfers to small‐scale farmers and seasonal agrarian workers (Osman 1999). This introduced finance capitalism into Sudanese rural life (Medani 2021; Young 2021). Today, Islamic banking has made mobile banking accessible across rural Sudan; several of my interlocutors send and receive money in Kordofan with a click on their phones.…”

“…The impact of the Gulf oil boom on the regional economy makes for a well‐known story in Sudan (Medani 2021). What has been less documented is that Sudanese migration to Lebanon preceded this migration by a few decades.…”

“…As things deteriorated in 2020, migrants were not the only ones who experienced the revolution as an event that did not transform the structure of living in Sudan. The former Islamic regime, which had taken power when Bashir came of age in the 1990s, had largely dismantled the social welfare contract (de Waal 2013; Kaldor and de Waal 2020; Medani 2021; Salomon 2016). The past regime never fixed the roads or upgraded the electricity supply, and shortages of fuel, gas, food, and medicine worsened during the transition period.…”