The Politics of Hunger in Sudan with Dr. Nisrin Elamin

As millions of Sudanese face starvation, global markets are also experiencing a surge in the value of key Sudanese commodities such as gold, gum Arabic and livestock that are smuggled out of the country to places like the UAE, Egypt and Kenya.
This talk situates Sudan’s current famine within a broader historical context of neoliberal economic restructuring, US aid policies, foreign land investments and resource extractivism. It traces how this history is connected to the current dismantling of rural livelihoods and agricultural infrastructures and to the ongoing resource extraction facilitated by this war. Using food insecurity and hunger as a lens, the talk examines the role of foreign-particularly Gulf-actors in fueling and sustaining the war.
Nisrin Elamin is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and the African Studies Program at the University of Toronto. Her work investigates the connections between land, race, belonging and empire-making in Sudan and the broader Sahel region. She uses land and struggles over land as a lens through which to examine state surveillance of Sahelian migration as well as Gulf Arab corporate investments and political interventions in Sudan and neighboring countries.
She is currently working on a book project based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in central Sudan, where she conducted research in local courts, farming communities, investor conferences, agribusiness farms, government ministries, and in the zawiyas of Sufi religious leaders mediating land disputes in the aftermath of large-scale land enclosures. Before pursuing a PhD, Elamin spent over a decade working as an educator, researcher and organizer in the United States and taught for several years in Tanzania. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, she taught at Bryn Mawr College and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University.
[All JWAC speaker events are free and open to all]