The Sudan War series is a joint collaboration between the Center for Economic, Legal, and Social Studies and Documentation – Khartoum (CEDEJ-K), Sudan-Norway Academic Cooperation (SNAC) and African Arguments – Debating Ideas. Through a number of themes that explore the intersections of war, displacement, identities and capital, Sudanese researchers, many of whom are themselves displaced, highlight their own experiences, the unique dynamisms within the larger communities affected by war, and readings of their possible futures.
They say revolutions turn out badly. But they’re constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people’s revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Men’s only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable. Gilles Deleuze
Since the early days of the mid-April 2023 war, Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) have emerged as a practical extension of the Resistance Committees. The latter were grassroots political groups formed during the December 2018 revolution tasked with shaping the direction of the mobilization towards change. The ERRs too are more than a coordinated humanitarian response, as their work and ethos build on the Committees’ original political vision: building a grassroots civic space that is people-centered with the aim of reconfiguring the uneven dynamic between society and the state.
Adapting the Resistance Committees’ revolutionary discourse to wartime realities, the rooms became a unique sociopolitical phenomenon. They preserved their participatory essence even as their role shifted from protest organizing to service delivery. Their concept of “popular sovereignty” manifested direct citizen engagement in decision-making processes through the diffusion of power across community institutions.
In the same vein, Women’s Emergency Response Rooms (WRRs) represent a natural extension of the feminist struggle that began with the revolution. Since 2018, female revolutionaries have worked to confront both the militarization of the state and the patriarchal nature of the regime. Their resistance took on the form of claiming public space while making women’s issues and experiences central to political discourse. Today, these efforts manifest in women’s emergency rooms, spaces that do more than distribute food and medicine. WRR create safe havens for women, promote economic empowerment initiatives, and establish accountability systems to address the rampant violence from the conflict. Protocols rolled out for addressing sexual violence reflect activists’ long experience in resisting President Omer al-Bashir’s (in office from 1989 until the 2019 revolution) security governance system. Their current humanitarian interventions deploy localized feminist knowledge as tools towards social transformation.
From streets to Crisis Rooms: The adaptation of Sudanese women’s revolutionary praxis
After Sudan’s 2021 military coup, Resistance Committees emerged as a constitutive power with transformative proposals like local councils outlined in the Committees’ revolutionary charter. The Resistance Committees proposed radical democratic reforms, such as decentralizing power, instituting popular sovereignty, and enabling grassroots constitutional participation.
With the outbreak of war, the Resistance Committees shifted their efforts from political action to relief work. They established countrywide emergency response rooms as community-based aid initiatives. These rooms served as the first and only line of defense against both the collapse of state institutions and the brutality of war. Their volunteers provided urgent assistance to those affected. Clean water, food and evacuation support were just a few interventions. They played a vital role in the upkeep of public health through maintaining the daily running of hospitals, facilitating access to pharmaceuticals and supporting medical staff – all vital services to the context of an active war. Communal kitchens were another central feature of the war effort, and by feeding millions they kept the specter of famine at bay.
The WRRs began operating in Khartoum and its three constituent cities in the early days of the war in April 2023, as an urgent response to the wave of violations against women, particularly sexual violence perpetrated by fighters from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). They quickly succeeded in establishing a practical and flexible response system in a large number of the neighborhoods where they had operated as Resistance Committees before the war.
Tama, a volunteer in a women’s emergency room in central Sudan, says: “When the war began, we were still in our revolutionary place, present within grassroots resistance systems, including resistance, political groups and unions. The war made us continue to resist by working to save the people.”
Drawing on their understanding of the local contexts, their responses were faster and more effective than public initiatives. Volunteers quickly organized themselves into independent bodies – women’s emergency rooms or women’s offices within public emergency rooms – focusing on providing integrated services.
These services included clinical treatment for rape cases, provision of health supplies, safe evacuation, and psychological and reproductive support. They also established cooperatives to empower women economically through handicrafts. What began as an emergency response quickly transformed into a unique organizational model.
Nyana, a volunteer with one of Khartoum State’s emergency rooms, recounts: “We, the resistance committees in our area, met on the night of April 15th, and our room and began operating that same day. The official inauguration came two days later, on April 17th. Our area contains 17 administrative units, served by 9 women’s offices and 12 women’s branch offices, as some units require multiple sectors of coverage. We see these offices working tirelessly to reach every neighborhood.”
Because of its revolutionary roots, the women’s emergency rooms successfully broadened their social reach to incorporate new community members, teachers, medical professionals, midwives, and housewives who had never before engaged in resistance activities. Remarkably, these rooms even gained footholds in traditionally conservative communities that had previously resisted such organizing efforts.
Nyana shares with visible pride: “Today, we’ve established women’s branch offices in areas where women couldn’t even walk freely in public before, let alone work. Many started as informal women’s gatherings or coffee circles. With support from the women rooms, these evolved into productive cooperatives specializing in soap-making, baking, and other crafts. Other groups began as psychological safe spaces. The rooms ensure each circle has female doctors or therapists when possible, though the healing continues even without professionals. Whether sharing skills or stories in groups of 12-15 women, these sessions create something revolutionary: solidarity. What began as coping mechanisms have now become official extensions of our women’s network, proof that care can be both medicine and mobilization.”
As the conflict expanded, emergency rooms spread to new areas, both those experiencing direct conflict and within displacement destinations. The ethics of care – a practice that emphasizes practical concern for others, close relationships, and adapting to each situation, rather than relying on general rules – emerged as a key organizing principle. This was embodied in the creation of safe spaces that provide women and children with psychological support, educational and recreational activities, as well as specialized healthcare such as malnutrition testing and the distribution of therapeutic foods. These spaces were designed through in-depth consultations with local women, who were asked about their needs, preferred locations, discussion topics, productive activities, and even meal preferences. When cases of food scarcity arose, the rooms began providing dates, fruits, and nutritional biscuits with meals to prevent malnutrition, while allowing the women to choose the rest of their food.
Care as revolutionary practice
The Ethics of Care presents a transformative ethical framework that centers human relationships and practical compassion as foundational to moral reasoning. Rather than treating care as a mere obligation, this approach elevates it to a primary moral value that actively shapes both thought and action.
In this setting, women’s emergency rooms translated the ethics of care from a philosophical concept to a lived reality. Their volunteers rejected artificial divisions between political organizing and humanitarian work, instead embodying care as integrated praxis. Moreover, the women’s rooms fundamentally understood relief work as political action. They created secure systems for handling sexual violence cases, thus applying lessons learned from years of activist resistance.
Mroy, a pharmacist, shared her story: “When the war started, I joined a women’s emergency room in my area and began working in a hospital in an RSF-controlled area. Because the hospital couldn’t treat sexual violence cases or even document them, a doctor friend and I worked secretly. She conducted examinations while I provided medical protocols and psychological support. If a patient was pregnant, the women’s room arranged her transfer to another city.”
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At the same time, the women’s rooms operated through a decentralized model rooted in collective decision-making, demonstrating remarkable resilience in the face of funding constraints and supply shortages. One notable example occurred in an RSF-controlled area of Khartoum where scheduled deliveries of dignity kits failed to arrive. In response, the women’s emergency rooms — after consulting with local women — improvised by sourcing materials from nearby markets to recreate the kits.
The paradox of exclusion
Ranu, a volunteer at a Women’s Emergency Room, explains: “We have no representation at the LCC [Localization Coordination Council, see below] level, so we cannot speak directly with donors about women’s needs in our area. Our office receives only 5% of funding because the Program Office prioritizes food and water above all else.”
This testimony lays bare the systemic exclusion of women’s voices in Sudan’s emergency response structures – a pattern rooted in the resistance committee era but perpetuated through institutions like the Localization Coordination Council (LCC). While the LCC governs emergency operations with representatives from various national organizations across all administrative levels, it consistently excludes both women’s offices within general emergency rooms and independent women’s emergency rooms from decision-making tables.
This structural marginalization creates a vicious cycle where women’s specific needs remain chronically underfunded, donor priorities go unchallenged, and bureaucratic systems continue to favor supposedly gender-neutral aid over targeted interventions, leaving critical gaps in services for women even as crises deepen.
Beyond relief
For Sudan’s revolutionary women, these rooms represent more than crisis intervention: they are a continuation of their struggle for full participation in civil and political life. What emerges is not temporary mutual aid, but the birth of a new lexicon for collective action, one that erases false boundaries between relief and revolution, between care and resistance.
Hana Jafar is an MA Student in Cultural Anthropology at Cairo University and editor at Farida feminist magazine.