Speakers:
Mohamed Bakhit (University of Khartoum)
Valerie Hänsch, (LMU Munich/Ethnological Museum Berlin)
15 January 2025, 18:00 – 19:30 CET (registration see below)
On April 15, 2023, violent clashes erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, resulting in the displacement of more than 10.2 million people, including internally displaced people (IDPs), asylum seekers and refugees, by October 2024. Sudanese people have been confronted with insecurities, war and economic crisis for decades. They have responded to this by being mobile and creating translocal livelihoods. With the outbreak of war in Sudan in April 2023, the situation has deteriorated dramatically for many people who have been forced to leave Khartoum and other zones progressively affected by military operations to look for a safe place in urban and rural areas of central and eastern Sudan or in neighboring countries. Moreover, the war in Sudan altered the migration policies toward Sudanese people not only in neighboring countries, but also of the European Union and international organizations. Based on a long-term engagement in anthropological researches about forced mobilities dynamics and artistic responses to political changes in Sudan, our intervention examines these processes by looking at the people’s lives and agency on the one hand, and the ways in which national governments, communities, NGOs and international stakeholders influence different contexts of war-driven displacement on the other.
Mohamed BAKHIT, PhD in Anthropology (Bayreuth University), Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Khartoum, is a postdoctoral researcher with Alexander von Humboldt Foundation based at the School of Social Sciences in Friedensau University. He was Director of the Department of Anthropology, University of Khartoum (2018-23). His research focuses on identity, urbanization, forced migration, minority groups and citizenship.
Valerie HÄNSCH is a postdoctoral researcher at the Anthropological Museum in Berlin. She holds a PhD from the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS) and held positions at the University of Bayreuth and LMU Munich. In her work, she explored technologies, large infrastructures, socio-environmental transformations and displacement in the Sudan. Her latest research investigates the links between activism, artistic practices and affects in the Sudanese revolutionary process. Currently she works in a collaborative research project on audiovisual heritage in the Sudan.
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