Sudan Uprising — reading list
Just my recommended reading list — last updated 14/01/2019
I don’t know much about Sudan yet; that’s why I compiled a reading list. However, I do know the Syrian conflict, and from that experience I have some general advice and pleas for more care and attention about how we find, share and decide on information about this and any other conflict:
The Sudanese uprising now is likely to be the beginning of the reemergence of the Middle East popular uprisings since the Arab Spring round 1. As the causes of the Arab Spring uprisings have not been resolved and have gotten even worse in every country, except Tunisia and maybe Libya (revolution is never a smooth ride or a quick solution), it is inevitable the uprisings will reemerge. The tyrannical regimes around the region and their international patrons with UNSC Permanent Member or ‘Great Power’ status have normalized massive atrocities that blatantly target civilian political opposition more than since the 1940s, stockpiled more weapons, and have developed their information warfare capacities much more since Arab Spring round 1. The situation for people’s right to resist oppression is even more dangerous now. The country I’m most afraid for intuitively is Egypt — friends think it won’t get as bad as Syria, but people also thought Bashar al-Assad was more moderate than his father, and look how wrong that guess turned out to be.
Information warfare by authoritarian regimes tends to be more against civil society associations emerging in the information space or public sphere in ‘their’ territories than it is really against other, more democratic States. War is not just about bombs and soldiers, but the meaning of ‘war’ includes any non-consensual means of gaining (or defending) political control of a territory. In that sense, disinformation and mass trolling campaigns are a form of warfare.
Assuming the Sudanese uprising continues and the al-Bashir regime will not succeed at totally crushing the civilian opposition back into silence again soon, the regime and its international patrons will probably resort to more information warfare, probably e.g. calling Sudanese civilian political opposition and armed resistance ‘Islamic terrorists’— that’s how it goes nowadays, so please please please be careful and circumspect, check sources, and be ethically responsible for what you believe and share and interact with.
In WW2 there was a poster in the UK which said ‘Careless talk costs lives’ — nowadays we should update it to say: ‘Careless sharing and believing things on social media (and broadcast media, if you have a platform) without really knowing directly or at least checking sources carefully first, costs lives’.
Please be more careful, let’s not repeat all the same mistakes again.
In principle, besides being vigilant about bad sources and sources pretending to be independent which are actually associated with violent authoritarian regimes or armed groups which also commit too frequent IHHRL violations, please positively look for and follow more sources that are either: a) the people who are most directly affected speaking for themselves; b) civil society associations and organisations in the areas affected advocating for ordinary civilians there; c) international media, selectively if and and when they show that they are really close to and advocating for the people most directly affected, not just narcissistically preoccupied with their own ideological or geopolitical narratives (age of the journalist statistically is a predictive factor).
I much sooner trust a journalist who openly says they are associated with and advocate for civilians and civil society in the area that they’re specialised in than one who pretends to be “independent” — no-one is or truly can be ‘independent’ in that sense. I believe it’s much better in this networked environment to be open about your real associations and let people filter and weight what you say accordingly. If someone isn’t open about their associations and pretends to be “independent”, I suspect more about why.
I cannot guarantee that everything in the articles below is accurate or fair reporting, but to the best of my knowledge and belief now they are.
I’ll update this as and when I can.
