When the “Post-War” Is Nowhere in Sight: Critically Mapping Slow Violence and Dissent in the Exhausted Geographies of Janoob Al Hizam

The ongoing war which erupted on April 15, 2023 in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, and elsewhere in the country, has (re)surfaced old and new militarized urbanisms embedded within the fabric of the city for decades. With a particular focus on Janoob Al Hizam, a contested peri-urban territory located south of Khartoum, and an urbanized agropastoral settlement within this geography, the contribution reads this current crisis as part of a multi-scalar continuum of slow violence met with slow dissent enacted in these areas over the last five decades. By mobilizing the lenses of slow violence and dissent (Nixon 2011, Pain & Cahill 2022), which centers their geographically and temporally situated natures, it aims to foreground the interplay between the two. To do so, the contribution will specifically focus on critically mapping the ways in which the structural dispossession of communal lands has led to the uneven distribution of services (such as electricity, water, healthcare) in this geography, while simultaneously leading to the emergence of creatively networked community-based mobilization to access and govern them at both a settlement and territorial level.