Marhaba,

This is the 44th issue of Atar English magazine, from Sudan Facts Center for Journalism. It will be coming to you on Monday, every two weeks.

This issue assembled against a background where movement, return, and rebuilding appear everywhere, yet never without fracture. Across markets, farms, cities, and geopolitical arenas, the same question repeats itself in different forms, what does recovery mean when the conditions that produced collapse are still intact.

At the most intimate level, the economy remains the daily battleground. Our reporting on inflation shows a technical slowdown after the shocks of 2024, but it also exposes the cruel illusion of relief. Prices have stabilized only at punishing heights, wages lag behind, and the monetary expansion that kept the state afloat has quietly redistributed the cost of war onto households that already lost savings, homes, and livelihoods.

This is not recovery in any meaningful social sense. It is endurance, measured in smaller purchases, postponed needs, and a population learning to survive with less while being told that the curve is finally bending.

The same tension defines the return to cities emptied by violence. In Babanusa, return is driven less by safety or services than by attachment to place. People come back to rubble, landmines, and markets where prices are double those of neighboring towns, yet they return anyway, building shelters from scarcity and calling it home.

Libya Market in northwest Khartoum tells a parallel story, traders reopen shops and restock shelves, but without electricity, water, or purchasing power among customers, the rebirth feels hollow and fragile.

These are not failures of will. They are reminders that return without reconstruction, and revival without institutions, only reshuffle vulnerability.

Agriculture, long imagined as Sudan’s anchor, reflects the same structural bind. The interview with the governor of the Al Jazirah Scheme reveals ambition constrained by finance, law, and war damage. Cotton is promised a comeback, new cash crops are planned, partnerships are courted, yet the scheme remains exposed to the same bottlenecks that have haunted it for decades, politicized financing, weak guarantees, and farmers asked to wait for systems that rarely arrive on time.

What emerges is not simply a story of mismanagement, but of a rural economy expected to stabilize a country while itself operating on borrowed time and borrowed capital.

Hovering above these local struggles is a wider geopolitical architecture that shapes them more than is often acknowledged. Najlaa Eltom’s analysis of the UAE’s “Little Sparta” doctrine situates Sudan’s war within a regional strategy that blends military power, logistics, ports, proxies, and capital into a single project of influence.

The result is a sobering inversion, while markets, farms, and cities inside Sudan struggle to stand up again, external actors maneuver with confidence, absorbing risk outward and exporting instability inward. The distance between these scales, from a woman rebuilding her home in Babanusa to a multibillion-dollar energy and defense deal, is not accidental. It is the structure of the moment.

Taken together, the pieces in this issue refuse the comfort of simple narratives. Inflation easing does not mean households can breathe. Return does not mean safety. Market activity does not mean economic health. Agricultural plans do not guarantee food security. And regional power plays do not stay abstract, they materialize in prices, shortages, displacement, and prolonged war.

Issue 44 therefore does not ask whether Sudan is recovering. It asks who bears the cost of calling this moment a recovery at all. Until peace is more than a slogan, institutions more than promises, and sovereignty more than a bargaining chip in regional contests, recovery will remain partial, uneven, and deeply unjust.

Atar continues to document this gap, not to normalize it, but to insist that understanding it is the first step toward closing it.

Atar Editorial Team