Since its emergence in December 2018, and during its impressive course, the Sudanese revolution resembles in my mind Deleuze’s description of Foucault: “A new cartographer.” Sudanese revolutionaries created a new, metaphorical space that allowed the revolution to take root. They rejoiced in the space, reconfigured, redefined, and re-demarcated it, closing it off partially or completely according to what these space poets saw fit.

The first exultation with space came on December 19, 2018, via viral videos transmitted on social media. These videos were effectively a livestream of the ruling party’s headquarters set ablaze in the working-class city of Atbara, turning it into pure creosote in Sudan’s nervous system, expelling fear and instilling hope for restructuring solidarity after thirty years of national mass depression. Signs flooded the space and the revolution began to rediscover a power that connected action to a collective existence.

To achieve a sense of solidarity, the Sudanese re-discovered traditional tactics in the form of guerilla urban warfare and attrition maneuvers, but all under the banner of a nonviolent revolution. It was difficult, if not impossible, to directly confront a regime that had in the September 2013 uprising killed hundreds and locked up thousands in its notorious prisons well known for their torture methods. Still the events of September 2013 were an opportunity to lay the foundations of the Sudanese Resistance Committees, which came to be known later as the Neighborhood Committees, playing a leading role in the #Tasgot_Bas (Just Fall) revolution six years later.

In their pamphlet book “Declaration”, the Marxists, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, drew the common features and characteristics of the 2011 cycle of struggle that began in Tunisia and then Egypt, and eventually spread to the squares of Western metropolises:

These movements do, of course, share a series of characteristics, the most obvious of which is the strategy of encampment or occupation. A decade ago the alter globalization movements were nomadic. They migrated from one summit meeting to the next, illuminating the injustices and antidemocratic nature of a series of key institutions of the global power system: The World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the G8 national leaders, among others. The cycle of struggles that began in 2011, in contrast, is sedentary. Instead of roaming according to the calendar of the summit meetings, these movements stay put and, in fact, refuse to move. Their immobility is partly due to the fact that they are so deeply rooted in local and national social issues.