The politics of hunger in Sudan

The ongoing war in Sudan has produced the world’s largest humanitarian and hunger crisis—devastating a country that could easily feed itself and its neighbours.

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 fuelling and sustaining the war.

Meet our speaker and chair

Nisrin Elamin (@minlayla77) is an assistant professor of anthropology and African studies at the University of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2020. She is currently writing a book tentatively titled, Stratified Enclosures: Land, Capital and Empire-making in central Sudan which focuses on Saudi and Emirati land grabs and community resistance to land dispossession in the Gezira region of Sudan.

Sara Salem (@saramsalem) is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at LSE. Her main research interests include political sociology, postcolonial studies, Marxist theory, feminist theory, and global histories of empire and imperialism.

More about this event

LSE Human Rights (@LSEHumanRights) is a transdisciplinary hub for cutting-edge, critical research, teaching and scholarship on human rights. It is based within the Department of Sociology.

LSE Sociology (@LSEsociology) provides outstanding education in the changing social world, and state-of-the-art, public-facing research on social issues. Our areas of international expertise include: economic sociology; politics and human rights; social inequalities; knowledge, culture and technology; and urban sociology.

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