The Grief of Muzan
SUDAN IN MEMORY
The Grief of Muzan
She died on April 15, 2026 — the third anniversary, to the day, of Sudan’s war. If Muzan Alneel had been choosing the moment herself, and she was never a woman who left meaning to chance, it could not have been more precise. Three years of war. Three years of refusing to stop writing about it. And then silence, on the very date it all began. Sudan lost a thinker of rare honesty this week. Not the kind who writes from a comfortable distance, observing a country’s suffering with the detachment of the analyst. Muzan wrote from inside it — from displacement, from grief, from the specific bonedeep exhaustion of someone who understood exactly what was
happening to her country and could not stop trying to explain it to the world anyway. Born in 1986, she graduated from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Khartoum, then pursued advanced studies in development policy and systems engineering. That combination was the foundation of everything that followed: an engineer who could read a political economy, a policy researcher who understood the factory floor, a revolutionary who never stopped asking what Sudan should actually build after the fighting stopped.
The December Generation
Muzan was made by December 2018 , the uprising that toppled Omar al-Bashir after thirty years in power. She was not merely a witness to that revolution. She was one of its intellectual architects. In the streets and in her writing simultaneously, she documented what was happening with a clarity that most observers took months to reach.
When the military seized power again in October 2021 and millions returned to the streets, Muzan became the most important analyst of Sudan’s resistance committees the neighborhood-level grassroots structures that had become the organizational backbone of the revolution. She mapped their spread, tracked their radicalization, and wrote about their limitations with the same unsentimental honesty she applied to everything.
“War criminals are fighting over power, and we Sudanese are fighting just to survive.”
— MUZAN ALNEEL, 2023
That sentence — written three years ago — remains the mos precise summary of Sudan’s war that anyone has produced. Not because it is dramatic. Because it refuses to choose sides between two sets of criminals and insists on placing the Sudanese people in the center of the frame rather than at its margins. That was Muzan’s political position, stated simply: the people are not to be caught between military projects. They are the point.
The Researcher Who Built in Wartime
Muzan was co-founder and managing director of ISTinaD — the Innovation, Science and Technology Think-tank for People- Centred Development. The name reflects everything about her priorities. Not technology for its own sake. Technology and science in service of people’s actual lives. She published academic papers and wrote for African Arguments, Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, the Transnational Institute, and Al Jazeera. She was a non-resident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy and a research fellow at the Transnational Institute. She co-authored research on Sudan’s resistance committees for MENA Solidarity, launched at Marxism 2025. Her last major published work, in December 2025, drew on Nyerere’s vision of industrial development and its lessons for the contemporary Global South. She was thinking about what Sudan could become — not just what it was enduring. Even as the war entered its fourth year, she was writing about economic policy, industrial strategy, and the specific needs of small-scale manufacturers operating under wartime conditions. The future was not abstract to her. It was a set of specific, buildable things.
“It takes rare courage to name defeat and still resist despair. Muzan’s patient, persistent arguments played an exceptionally important role in steering the best of Sudan’s revolutionary generation away from collapse into nationalism and xenophobia.”
— ANNE ALEXANDER, SOCIALIST WORKER, APRIL 2026
The Voice That Refused Tribal Logic
One of Muzan’s most important contributions was her refusal to let Sudan’s war be framed as ethnic or tribal conflict. The Sudanese government had long traded on Arab chauvinism and mobilised militias in genocidal attacks on people in Darfur. When that logic tried to reassert itself during the revolution, Muzan documented how the movement pushed back. She wrote about the chant that emerged when the government tried to blame Darfuris for the protests:
“You’re racist and arrogant. Now the whole country is Darfur.”
That sentence was, for her, the revolution’s most important political achievement — a unified identity built in the streets against the state’s attempt to divide people by blood and region. When the war came, she was one of the few voices consistently insisting that both the SAF and the RSF were instruments of counter-revolution regardless of which claimed institutional legitimacy. She wrote in 2024: “For months, the resistance committees attempted to hold together two contradicting goals: the revolution’s goal of protecting and prioritising human life, and the counter-revolution’s goal of protecting the state.” The failure to resolve that contradiction, she argued, was the political root of the movement’s difficulty.
The Last Conversation
The last person to speak with her publicly was Anne Alexander of Socialist Worker, on March 28 — eighteen days before her death. WhatsApp was not working, so it had to be Signal. Muzan’s voice was a little tinny, but clear. The conflict that had enveloped her place of exile — following Trump and Netanyahu’s assault on Iran — had not moved close enough to hear. She joked that the Gulf was “a very comfortable war zone — at least for some people.” They talked about the war on Iran and its connections to the conflict that had consumed Sudan for almost exactly three years. They talked about the resistance committees. They talked about what could still be salvaged from the revolutionary movement. It was, by all accounts, a conversation like many they had had before: wide-ranging, analytically precise, alive with the specific dark humour that comes not from cynicism but from a clear-eyed assessment of reality that has not yet surrendered. Three weeks later, she was gone.
What We Lose When We Lose Muzan
Sudan is fighting the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, mostly in silence. The world looks away. The same international order that built a “Board of Peace” for Gaza has no equivalent mechanism for Sudan. The same transactional logic that treats Gaza as a real estate problem treats Sudan as a logistics problem. The people in both places pay the price of being someone else’s geopolitical variable. Muzan understood this silence as a political fact, not a coincidence. She was 39 years old. She leaves behind published research that will outlast the people who could not be bothered to read it while she was alive. She leaves behind a framework for understanding Sudan’s war that is more rigorous, more honest, and more useful than anything produced by the international think-tanks and foreign policy establishments that claimed to care about the country. She leaves behind, as her colleague Abu Obeida Al-Neel said in his eulogy, “a flame of activity, a bold voice for those who have no voice, a bridge for defending the causes of Sudanese humanity, a figure who did not bow before challenges.”
Khartoon Magazine : صوت خرطون
We are a publication born from the same moment that made Muzan. The December Revolution produced a generation of Sudanese who believed that analysis, clarity, and the refusal to accept the obvious lie could be forms of resistance. Muzan was the best of that generation.
We will not pretend we are not personally grieving. Muzan was not an abstract name in our sources. She was the kind of thinker whose work you argue with, learn from, and return to when you need to remember what honest analysis sounds like. Sudan has a shortage of that. It can afford this loss even less.
But grief is not enough. Muzan would be the first to say so. She grieved Sudan every day for three years and kept writing. The correct response to losing a voice of this quality is to amplify what it said — to ensure that the work reaches the people it was written for, and that the frameworks she built do not die with her.
She believed the people are not to be caught between military projects. She believed Sudan’s future was a specific, buildable thing. She believed that analysis rooted in the lives of ordinary people was more powerful than any weapon either side carried.
We believe the same things. We will keep saying them.
“My political position is that people should not be crushed.”
— Muzan Alneel
Muzan Alneel
1986 — 2026
إنا لله و إنا إليه راجعون
Sudan’s story must not
be told in silence.
Khartoon Magazine covers Sudan
its people, its revolution, its grief — every week on Substack