Marhaba,

This is the 48th issue of Atar English, published by the Sudan Facts Center for Journalism. It reaches you every two weeks, bringing reporting from across Sudan.

It begins, as it often does, with work.

On the railways, workers sit beside tracks that once carried the rhythm of a country. The system still exists, the lines still connect, but the people who keep it running are no longer able to hold on. Their protest is not only about wages, it is about the point at which labour can no longer sustain life.

From there, the fracture widens.

In universities, professors face a similar reckoning. Lecture halls have thinned, classrooms have shifted or disappeared, and those who remain are caught between duty and survival. The strike now unfolding is not simply about pay. It is a question of whether higher education, as a public institution, can continue to exist in its current form.

Then the numbers begin to speak.

The Central Bank’s latest data outlines an economy under strain, exports at their lowest levels in years, imports reconfigured, trade partners shifting. On paper, it is decline. In practice, it is reorganization, a system adjusting and rerouting itself under pressure.

Nowhere is that clearer than in gold.

What appears in official records is only a fraction of what is produced. The rest moves elsewhere, across borders and through informal networks, entering markets where origin dissolves and value is preserved outside the state. This is not simply leakage. It is the emergence of a parallel economic architecture operating beyond formal oversight.

But the cost of these shifts is not abstract.

In Ad-Daein, the destruction of a hospital turns structural strain into immediate crisis. The loss of the region’s only referral centre fragments care, disperses services, and deepens vulnerability. What disappears is not just infrastructure, but access, continuity, and the fragile systems that sustain life.

At the same time, another transformation unfolds, less visible but equally significant.

As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in systems of surveillance and decision-making, the nature of power itself begins to shift. Data is no longer only collected, it is processed and acted upon. For countries like Sudan, where much of this infrastructure lies beyond national control, the question is not just how these systems operate, but who ultimately controls them.

And at the most immediate level, these changes converge in everyday life.

Prices shift. Markets tighten. Goods become scarce or more expensive. The price bulletin reflects the cumulative effect of disrupted supply chains, shifting trade routes, and an expanding informal economy. It is where structural change becomes lived reality.

Taken together, these are not isolated developments. They are parts of a single process.

Sudan is not only experiencing war, it is being reorganized by it.

What holds, for now, are fragments, workers who continue to show up, professors who continue to teach, communities that continue to adapt. What slips are the structures that once connected these efforts into something coherent, a functioning state, a predictable economy, a shared sense of stability.

The risk is not only collapse. It is that a new order takes shape in its place, uneven, informal, and difficult to reverse.

That process is already underway.