Dragoman

A superb structural piece on why targeted humanitarian food aid is no longer enough: Sudan’s famine is tied to a production system where militias, export crops and commercial farms have destroyed older subsistence and solidarity systems. Its strongest move is to treat nafir, communal kitchens, Emergency Response Rooms and diaspora remittances not as charity, but as an alternative political economy of survival.

Maps gum arabic as a hidden war commodity: RSF control over much of the producing belt, SAF control over Port Sudan, and laundering through neighbouring countries keep global supply stable while making traceability collapse. The French angle is the payoff: Normandy processors sit inside the same chain that Sudanese armed actors now tax and reroute.

Reframes the RSF as more than a militia: an armed non-state actor with its own foreign relations, logistics, mercenary channels and economic diplomacy. The useful concept is UAE “network-centric statecraft,” where companies, traders, logistics firms and informal channels become the infrastructure of proxy power.

Ground-level reporting on how Sudan’s territorial split is becoming an institutional split inside humanitarian work itself. Registration demands from RSF/Tasis bodies and counter-warnings from the SAF side turn aid access, Emergency Response Rooms and local volunteers into objects of sovereignty-making and security risk.

A strong structural investigation into how the military’s post-2014 economic expansion works in practice: tax/customs privileges, direct state contracting, conscript labor, and the crowding-out of civilian contractors. Its value is that it connects macro talk about the “military economy” to testimonies from contractors and conscripts describing how markets and work were reorganized.

Argues against the familiar austerity story that subsidies are the budget’s core problem. The piece shows how subsidy support has eroded in real terms while debt service eats the state budget, making “reform” a transfer of pain to households without solving the productive weakness of agriculture and industry.

Uses 2014-2025 protest data to map how Egyptian social anger changed after the revolutionary moment: less spectacular national mobilization, more dispersed labor and social protest rooted in wages, services, and survival costs. It is useful precisely because it treats protest as a social signal, not just as political opposition succeeding or failing.

Explains how repression has moved beyond formal politics into classed and gendered policing of online life. The key insight is the state’s use of “family values” and cybercrime law to manufacture moral authoritarianism: disciplining lower- and middle-class Egyptians, especially women, in one of the few remaining expressive spaces.