Emergency Response Rooms and Collective Action in Sudan

In this youth roundtable, Catherine Nzuki, Associate Fellow with the CSIS Africa Program, is joined by two Sudanese scholars to discuss Sudan's Emergency Response Rooms, a grassroots network of young volunteers delivering food, medicine, and essential services across all eighteen states in Sudan. Noaman Mousa is a political science PhD student at UCLA, where his research focuses on civil wars and state-building in Sub-Saharan Africa. Yasir Zaidan is an adjunct lecturer at Seattle University and a PhD student at the University of Washington, where his research examines the expanding influence of Middle Eastern states in the Horn of Africa. Together, they trace the ERRs' origins in the neighborhood resistance committees that drove Sudan's 2019 revolution and explore what a day in the life of an ERR volunteer looks like across different regions and frontlines. Yasir and Noaman also reflect on the deepening of ethnic and tribal cleavages in Sudan since the outbreak of war in April 2023, the role of Gulf states in prolonging the conflict, and the difficult question of what a path to peace might look like. Reading Recommendations from Noaman Mousa: The Coup-Civil War Trap, Phil Roessler Ethnic Armies, Kristen Harkness Warlord Politics and African States, Will Reno Sudan: The Historical Predicament and the Horizons of the Future, Muhammad Abu al-Qasim Hajj Hamad (in Arabic, currently under translation by Prof. Alden Young). Reading Recommendations from Yasir Zaidan: Sudan: The Historical Predicament and the Horizons of the Future, Muhammad Abu al-Qasim Hajj Hamad (in Arabic, currently under translation by Prof. Alden Young).