I last spoke to Muzan Alneel on 28 March. WhatsApp wasn’t working properly, so it had to be Signal. Her voice was a little tinny, but clear.
The conflict that had enveloped her place of exile following Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s assault on Iran had not moved close enough to hear. She joked that the Gulf was “a very comfortable war zone”—at least for some people. This kind of ability to laugh a little in the face of war and disaster was something I had learned to expect from Muzan. It was not the type of bravado or self-aggrandising defiance that sometimes accompanies moments of despair. It was an affirmation that life—and with it hope for a different future—would persist despite everything.
We talked about the war on Iran and its connections to the conflict that has engulfed Sudan for almost exactly three years. As usual, the conversation was wide-ranging. We touched on drone wars, the energy demands of data centres and Artificial Intelligence, the shifting dynamics of industrial production and resistance to fascism. As usual, it was difficult to finish.
Each new exchange would open a world of possibilities for discussion and analysis that needed to be savoured, teased out. In the end, I reluctantly had to leave to get to the Together alliance’s demonstration against the far right on time, with a promise to meet and talk again soon.
For the five years I have known Muzan, it has been through her voice, on a phone call, behind a slightly pixelated image, or through emails and messages. During that last call in March, we talked about the possibilities of finally meeting in person, though she was reluctant to make firm commitments in uncertain times.
We first spoke at length in early 2021, for a series of interviews commissioned by International Socialism. It was for an article to mark the 10th anniversary of the wave of revolutions that started in Tunisia in late 2010 (https://isj.org.uk/rebellious-decade). At the time, the Sudanese Revolution, which ousted the dictator Omar al-Bashir in April 2019, was as yet undefeated.
A network of thousands of neighbourhood-based “resistance committees” covered the country. The unstable coalition of the old regime’s militia bosses and the reformist politicians, who had negotiated their way into office after Al-Bashir’s fall, haggled over how to manage the state.
The article was published on 6 April 2021 (https://isj.org.uk/interview-revolutionaries-in-sudan). It was two years to the day since tens of thousands of protesters took over the square outside the military headquarters in Khartoum. They established a sit-in, resulting in a crisis in the leadership of the army and Al-Bashir’s downfall.
Muzan’s account of the tumultuous popular uprising of 2019 drew out the close connections between the struggle to end oppression and the fight against the authoritarian regime. One point she insisted on was that this was a revolution where women were in the vanguard:
They had already fought so much even before they got onto the streets. You don’t start fighting when you get onto the streets and meet the police and national security. These are not the first enemies that you have met. No, you have already fought against your family, and you’ve even fought with people walking on the street for your right to be in public spaces… I don’t just mean to protest either. Women have to fight every day in order to take public transport from their homes to their workplaces. Having to fight was not as new to the women as it was to the men.
Muzan observed how the rising movement began to change people’s susceptibility to racism, giving them confidence to reject the lies of the ruling class. The Sudanese government had long traded on Arab chauvinism and mobilised its militia in genocidal attacks on people in Darfur.
Yet, as the revolution gathered pace, that poison began to seep away. When the government tried to blame Darfuris for the protests, a new chant erupted against Al-Bashir, “You’re Racist and Arrogant! Now the Whole Country Is Darfur!”
Muzan was more than an eyewitness to the power of the movement that erupted onto millions of phone screens in April 2019. She was one of its brightest intellectual leaders and clearest analysts.
Others expected a smooth transition to civilian rule. But she was warning of the dangers posed by the entrenchment of the old regime’s militia leaders—the heads of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—in the supposedly “revolutionary government”. The diplomats from the United Nations and European Union repeatedly insisted that the SAF and RSF generals would eventually learn better behaviour. But Muzan was one of the few Sudanese voices to tell international audiences that it was only the new forms of self-organisation that offered real hope for change.
During 2021 and 2022, she mapped the dynamics of almost-dual power. She tracked the spread of the resistance committees and their radicalisation in response to the coup of October 2021. The SAF and RSF leaders had locked up their civilian “partners” in government and took power for themselves.
Muzan was driven by the imperative to analyse and understand, not simply record and describe. In another perceptive interview from 2022, she explained the limitations of the resistance committees’ geographical form and the challenges facing urban revolutionaries as they grappled with attempts by the transitional government to pit them against the rural poor (https://isj.org.uk/interview-revolutionaries-in-sudan).
She also provided a careful dissection of the differences emerging in the movement. The resistance committees in Madani had a vision for rebuilding the Sudanese state from the bottom up, incorporating ideas of economic justice. The ideas dominating the resistance committees of Khartoum focused on top-down reform of the political institutions. And they neglected the crucial dimension of who controlled production and distribution.
The fragile equilibrium between a mass movement and the forces of counter-revolution eventually broke down in April 2023. The SAF and RSF launched the war, which is still raging across Sudan, displacing tens of millions, leaving famine and devastation in its wake.
We spoke several times in the months after the eruption of war. Muzan threw herself into writing and documenting how the resistance committees were transforming into “emergency rooms”, new forms of popular organisation providing the necessities of life. “This path taken by the Sudanese people against the war is truly revolutionary,” she insisted, adding:
It is possible, by logical analysis, to trace the steps of its development from the current “firefighting”, that is, improvised forms of popular organisation, towards a vision of a new sustainable structure for the provision of services and a space for political and economic decision-making. These “people’s councils” will inevitably emerge and, in line with the revolution, will be spaces of real political debate, as opposed to the empty debates of the elites, which are detached from the lives of the people.
Muzan prefaced her article “Sudan’s Revolutionary Path Against War” with a quote from Rosa Luxemburg’s Junius Pamphlet from 1915 (https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/50527/sudans-revolutionary-path-against-war). It called for the transformation of war into revolution against capitalism. The quote had more than symbolic resonance for her—we spent hours discussing the experience of defeat in the German Revolution as she was writing the article. I also reached for Luxemburg’s words in my own analysis of counter-revolutionary militias in an era of state crisis both at the fringes and centre of the global system (https://isj.org.uk/disorder-reigns-in-khartoum).
When Muzan spoke at Marxism Festival later that year, even Zoom’s noise suppression algorithms could not entirely contain the noise of shelling in the background.
She continued to document and analyse the role of the resistance committees in the revolution and insisted on the continuation of popular self-organisation amid the horror of war. I edited a pamphlet she co-authored for MENA Solidarity with Khalid Sidahmed and Rania Obead in 2025, which brought this story to a new audience of trade unionists and activists (https://menasolidaritynetwork.com/2025/04/09/out-now-sudans-revolutionary-and-popular-movements-a-research-report).
Yet, Muzan was also speaking with growing urgency about the reality of revolutionary defeat. And she was locating its cause in the political failure of the resistance committees and the political leadership of the popular movement.
An important article in April 2024 explicitly addressed this question (https://rosaluxna.org/publications/the-sudanese-revolution-in-crisis). It pointed to the roots of that failure in a “lack of clear analysis of the state as a tool of the ruling class”. When the war broke out, too many activists were pulled towards believing somehow that the SAF could be reformed, simply because it claimed institutional legitimacy as the “national army”. “For months, the resistance committees attempted to hold together two contradicting goals: namely, the revolution’s goal of protecting and prioritising human life, and the counter-revolution’s goal of protecting the state,” she wrote.
It takes rare courage to name defeat and still resist despair. Muzan’s patient, persistent arguments played an exceptionally important role in steering the best of Sudan’s revolutionary generation away from collapse into nationalism and xenophobia.
She also deployed the same qualities in pursuing important debates with activists in the Palestine movement. She warned them against making hasty generalisations equating the experience of occupation and settler colonialism in Palestine with the war in Sudan. This risked feeding dangerous chauvinist narratives pushed by the sections of the Sudanese ruling class close to the SAF leadership about the RSF as “foreigners”. It would obscure the war’s origins as a split within an elite who fell out over the spoils of state power while engaged in a brutal counter-revolution.
None of this incomplete account can do justice to Muzan’s many-sided talents and interests, or her generosity of spirit and intellect. She wrote about industrial and agricultural policy and technology development with equal fluency and energy to her work analysing revolutionary movements.
The Sudanese revolution gave something to the world that is infinitely precious—a glimpse of the myriad possibilities created by the collective agency of ordinary people. For many of us, it was Muzan’s voice that carried their messages to the wider world. Wherever the seeds of hope she planted now lie, may they flourish and grow.