War on Women in Sudan: Sharing Experiences of Displacement, Violence and Personal Struggle

War on Women in Sudan: Sharing Experiences of Displacement, Violence and Personal Struggle

Date: Wednesday June 26th, 2024
Time: 11am
Speakers: Reem Abbas (Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy)

Abstract:

In her research, Reem sought to understand war through the personal experiences and stories of Sudanese women, who she views as being faced with constant structural violence that has always been supported by a social economic and political infrastructure, and lately, also full-blown conflict . The war upended the lives of women, robbing them of personal safety, robbing them of their economic security and putting them into a situation of perpetual vulnerability. Everything was affected – all that they worked so hard for, whether it was educational opportunities, economic opportunities, political participation – suddenly it all became challenged due to the war. Moving beyond the official statistics, she used case studies to understand how war has affected women because they’re fighting personal and public wars to rebuild their lives, to make sense of their new temporary existence, to create new temporary lives to protect their dignity and maintain their bodily autonomy. The paper highlights many such examples of the various layers of disproportionate impact that the conflict is having now on women and girls in Sudan.

Biography of the Speaker:

Reem Abbas is a former Nonresident fellow at Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy focusing on land, conflict, and resources in Sudan. She is also the institute’s first Mohamed Aboelgheit Fellow. She has contributed to dozens of outlets including the Washington Post, the Nation, Al-Monitor, the Guardian, Open Democracy, and African Arguments. She has been working in the field of communications and advocacy for Sudanese civil society groups and international organizations for more than 10 years. She is active in the women’s movement in Sudan and was a former member in the coordination committee in Sudanese Women in Civic and Political Groups (MANSAM). She also spent years working with Sudanese refugees in Egypt and published a profile on a young refugee musician in the book “Voices in Refuge” published by the American University in Cairo Press. Her latest essay titles “Smuggling Books into Sudan: a Brief History from 2012 to 2016” was published in Art and Solidarity Reader: Radical Actions, Politics and Friendships. In 2022, she published “(Un)Doing Resistance: Authoritarianism and Attacks on the Arts in Sudan’s 30 Years of Islamist Rule” with her co-author Ruba El-Melik.