Abstract: Sudan’s December revolution gained momentum and mass participation thanks to the convergence of decades-old grievances against state violence and marginalization in peripheral areas, with rural demands for land reform and urban calls for justice and economic security. At the center of these demands and grievances is land, the right to live on and off it, the right to return to it and the right to benefit from the resources that lie above and beneath it. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the agricultural Gezira region of central Sudan, this talk will explore the different political strategies landless and landholding constituencies are using to reclaim lands that have been seized by the state and leased to Saudi and Emirati agri-business investors. Through this exploration it will attempt to outline some of the ways smallholder farmers, pastoralists, agricultural workers and war-displaced people in rural parts of central Sudan are defining and articulating what land justice looks like to them. What becomes clear through this exploration is that the consolidation of land in the hands of elites is nothing new and that land justice will require not only a restructuring of Sudan’s legal system but entirely new ways of thinking about land ownership, belonging and environmental sustainability.
Bio: Nisrin Elamin is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Bryn Mawr College. She is an anthropologist who researches land rights, extractive industries, foreign land grabs, the climate crisis and the militarization of borders in East Africa and the Sahel. Nisrin received her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from Stanford University in 2019, where her dissertation focused on the ways landholding and landless communities are negotiating and contesting changes in land ownership prompted by a recent wave of Gulf Arab investments in Sudanese land. Before joining Bryn Mawr College, she spent over a decade working as an educator, organizer and advocate on issues related to migrant justice, de-militarization and resource rights through various organizations including Grassroots International, African Communities Together, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. Her writing on current affairs in Sudan and on migrant justice has appeared in Al Jazeera, the Washington Post’s academic blog, OkayAfrica, and the Egypt Independent.