Revolution and Feminist Reimaginations in Sudan, with Liv Tønnessen (Cairo, Oct. 11, 2026)

With “Scientific conversation”, the CEDEJ is launching a new format dedicated to meeting and exchanging with leading scholars about their ongoing research and recent publications. For this first session, we are pleased to welcome political scientist Liv Tønnessen from the Chr. Michelsen Institute (Norway), who will discuss her recent research on women’s political subjectivities, feminist activism and the legacy of Sudan’s December Revolution.

Ola A. Alsheikh, “Sudanese women in protests”, Khartoum, 8 April 2019, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sudanese_women_in_protests.jpg

The presentation “Revolution and Feminist Reimaginations in Sudan” will explore female revolutionaries’ political subjectivities during what is popularly known as the December Revolution. Especially young women played an important role in the revolution in ways that challenged prevailing political and social norms about what is considered ‘appropriate’. Women’s peaceful protesting was seen as so threatening that their bodies came under attack, and they were sidelined in the political settlement. Building on original interview data with female revolutionaries and feminist activists, the presentation suggests that the revolution and the subsequent backlash served as a significant force in creating a generational consciousness where young revolutionaries started to think of themselves as ‘feminists’ and distinct from the older generation of activists. Their emerging feminist reimaginations, which are now disrupted by war, are intimately entangled with the dismantling of the heteronormative, militarizing Arab-Muslim state-building project in Sudan and has exposed how political elites regardless of ideological belonging have patriarchal dividends, including the historical women’s movement.

The presentation is based on a recent article co-authored with Samia al-Nagar : “Revolution and Feminist Reimaginations in Sudan”, Middle East Law and Governance 18 (2), 2026. https://doi.org/10.1163/18763375-bja10009.

Liv Tønnessen is a research professor at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Norway and director of the Centre on Law and Social Transformation. She is a political scientist specialising in women’s rights, gender, Islam and political activism. Her research focuses particularly on Sudan, where she has conducted extensive fieldwork on women’s political participation, feminist activism, violence against women and legal reform. She has also worked extensively on gender and Islamic law across the Middle East and North Africa. She holds a PhD in Comparative Politics from the University of Bergen. More…

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· Date: Sunday 11th of October, 2026
· Time: 2 pm – 4 pm (Cairo Time)
· Location: CEDEJ, 23 Gamal Al Din Abou Al Mahasen, Qasr El Nil, Cairo, Egypt + visioconference
· Conditions: Free admission. No registration required. To receive the webinar connection details, please contact us at: contact@cedejkhartoum.fr

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