Harry Cross’ Undoing a Revolution takes on a tough topic: the politics of sovereign debt. More often than not, this topic is discussed at the global level rather than that of an individual country. In the process, it describes how Sudan, as a state in the global South, navigated a global economy in which it was and is at a serious disadvantage.
Cross frames the book by asking: why did bonds for Sudanese debt, taken out when Gaafar Nimeiry was in power in the 1970s, begin to be traded on the global market in the aftermath of the revolution that deposed dictator Omar al Bashir in 2019?
The answer, he explains, links to the ways that sovereign debt serves as a tool for enforcing global hegemony. Individuals who find themselves mired in debt they can never repay can declare bankruptcy; the debt of states cannot be relieved through a similar mechanism. Meanwhile lending countries in the Global North derive a steady income not from the repayment of the debt, but through the payment of interest and the long-term extension of loans. These creditors deliberately keep loan deadlines as a looming condition for indebted countries, with a tactic to “extend and pretend” that the loan might have been demanded in full had the country not met its policy conditions.
These forces indebted states to abide by policy prescriptions determined in the Global North through institutions like the IMF and World Bank in order to assure that that their debts remain in good standing.
The opening chapter describes the different strategies that successive governments in early independence Sudan pursued to deal with their foreign exchange shortages. This was a period in which the globe was more tolerant of economic innovation, with greater flexibility in debt policies. The dominant parties of independence, the National Unionist Party (NUP), whose supporters were involved in close trade relations with Egypt, and the Umma Party, heavily invested in cotton export to the UK, disagreed on these strategies.
When the NUP split into two parties, the People’s Democratic Party dominated by the sectarian Khatmiyya and old merchant families and the rump NUP composed of trade unionists, nationalists and civil servants, the respective factions made alliances with the Umma Party, itself internally divided, according to their economic interests.
A coalition government made up of the Umma Party and PDP prioritized big business, that of cotton exporters and merchants and traders, but faced economic challenges that placed their interests in tension. In particular, cotton crop failures in 1958 placed Gezira cultivators in debt and requiring foreign exchange support for the state, even as renewed debates rose about Nile waters use, placing in tension Sudan’s relationship with Egypt and cotton growers’ access to critical irrigation.
The Abboud regime, (the six-year military dictatorship in Sudan led by Lieutenant General Ibrahim Abboud) which took power in 1958, split the difference by accepting US aid, improving trade relations with Egypt, and removing a reserve price for cotton exports, improving Sudan’s foreign reserves by forcing private cotton growers to sell at a discount. Ensuing governments that followed him, made up of factions of the Umma Party, the NUP and PDP, dealt with the need for foreign exchange by either raising development spending or limiting capital outflows or by cutting public expenditure and depressing wages. The chapter concludes by pointing to the ways that Nimeiry, upon coming to power, operated a nationalist economy, nationalizing businesses but agreeing in principle to compensate their former owners.
The following section dives into the pivotal moment for Sudan in terms of debt accumulation: the latter years of the Nimeiry regime. Following the Communist Party supported attempted coup of 1971, Nimeiry’s regime drifted gradually rightward, establishing first centre left, then centre-right, and finally far right governments.
In the process of attempting development programmes, these governments accumulated significant debt which would prove impossible to repay. Cross pushes back on predominant narratives of this process that explain the debt accumulation as a result of corruption. While the book acknowledges the presence of corruption, it emphasizes that Sudan also faced structural realities afflicting many countries in the Global South. Foreign exchange markets accumulate surplus when exports’ value are greater than imports. In the context of a volatile oil market in the 1970s, declining value for Sudan’s major export, cotton, and rising interest rates set to combat inflation in the Global North, such a deficit was difficult to avoid. Sudan’s defaulting on its loans in 1984 by this reading was a mistake, not because it happened at all, but because it did not occur sooner, allowing the state to restructure and renegotiate with lower debts.
From this point on, the state attempted to placate international markets by instituting massive austerity measures, including the removal of subsidies to bread and sugar and the devaluation of the Sudanese pound. This policy, the “Washington Consensus,” was theorized to stabilize foreign reserves by making imports more expensive and exports more inexpensive. Yet this only works when the scale of imports and exports are flexible. If the demand for cotton is fixed at a certain amount or if the need for industrial parts or energy products cannot be avoided, then this move gives exports to buyers at a bargain while ramping up costs and increasing deficits in both the public and private sector.
These cycles of austerity gutted the savings of the middle class and prompted mass protest and social upheaval, ultimately culminating in the ouster of Nimeiry in 1985. Yet ensuing governments continued these policies in an attempt to resume good relations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank following the 1984 loan default.
When Omar al Bashir’s Regime of National Salvation came to power, it attempted to continue these policies, but its domestic and foreign policies and the diplomatic and economic isolation they prompted made that impossible.
The US imposition of sanctions and the label of “State Sponsors of Terrorism,” effectively made it impossible for Sudan to trade world-wide since any country or business relying on trade through the medium of US currency (effectively all countries) would be punished for business done in Sudan. This was accompanied by a collapse in foreign aid following the coup, meaning that most non-state measures to support the population ceased.
In response, the Ingaz regime developed a set of new economic policies. It first heeded international advice to further devalue national currency, gutting the remaining savings of groups supporting the previously dominant parties. It also provided small business loans for social groups that supported its ideological project and installed supporters in key positions in government and the financial sector. This was done while pursuing trade for consumer goods done through the Emirates and China, bypassing sanctions to provide rewards for riverine communities that supported and benefitted from these and funding the creation of a divided security apparatus with proliferating paramilitary groups, including the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
It was only after the separation of the South, which ended the bloody civil war that had proceeded for over twenty years, that the regime sought to reconcile with western finance institutions. To do this, the regime gradually devalued the currency yet again while removing subsidies on bread and fuel. Minister of Foreign Affairs Ibrahim Ghandour even floated the idea of normalizing relations with Israel.
These efforts at normalization, ironically, may have created the conditions allowing for the 2019 December revolution. The removal of subsidies caused protests in September of 2012 and 2013, and this organizing culminated in protests that became the 2019 December Revolution, which removed Bashir and initiated a transitional government, a compromise government composed of half security apparatus and half civilians.
The book truly shines in its analysis of economic policy during the transitional period, 2019-2021. Cross explains how, in the wake of this revolution triggered in partly by austerity policies, the transitional government faced immediate pressure to implement those same measures.
Debt accumulated in the 1970s became a mechanism for international finance institutions to condition currency exchange and aid on policy reform, demanding reductions on state spending and the lifting of further subsidies.
The book examines the justifications the international community gave for these demands, pointing out a disconnect between these justifications and their own data. The international community characterized control mechanisms on the price of fuel as consumer subsidies, but they actually involved the state buying fuel at a discount then selling it to consumers at a markup, with that revenue contributing six per cent to the GDP. The IMF instead claimed that the consumer protections cost the state 8.4 per cent of the GDP in “lost revenue,” despite these calculations being theoretical and unguaranteed. Similarly, a 2020 IMF analysis classed Sudan as “debt distressed” because its debt was 200 per cent of its GDP. Yet 86 per cent of those debts were contracted prior to the 1984 default and only 14 per cent of Sudan’s debts, making up 28 per cent of the GDP, were being serviced, with an annual burden of only four per cent of the GDP, hardly a state of distress. Through selective analysis of its own data, the IMF and international institutions demanded austerity measures that were unneeded and that ultimately proved damaging for the transition.
The book is not without flaws. At times, its narrative verges on the mechanistic, implying that all politics in Sudan can be attributed exclusively to economic policy. This risks removing the element of contingency from both government officials competing within heterogeneous regimes and unsure whether their agendas would become state policy and average people who chose to go out to protest. Popular uprisings in this context come off as automated responses to poor living conditions rather than mass action created through the complicated motives of normal people who had no way of knowing what would happen. Similarly, policy makers seem to have implemented economic and social policies knowing exactly the risks and benefits of their policies, even when facing new conditions, as with the Covid-19 pandemic.
Moreover, in delineating the economic interests of different political parties, the book misses the social relationships that connect party supporters. The sectarian parties of independence all had their origins in Omdurman reading groups, and politicians also related to each other as neighbours and colleagues.
The Islamic Charter Front and the Umma Party had distinct agendas, but their leaders were connected by marriage, and their members maintained close connections. Islamists went to Aba Island in 1969 prior to Nimeiry’s bombing, and both the ICF and the Umma Party were part of the National Front. These connections thread the Sudanese political sphere and are essential to understanding the alliances and political reconciliations that occurred, not just its fractures.
This oversight can be accounted for by the book’s reliance on English language sources for issues of politics unrelated to economics. So too does this account for several minor errors on political discourse.
The book is not the first to make arguments regarding dependency, sovereign debt, or the ways that these undermined the December revolution, despite the book’s dearth of citation of Sudanese economic analysis.
Ali Abdelgadir was critical of debt dependency since the 1970s. Abbas Abdelkarim’s 2022 book points to economic policy as essential to counterrevolution, both domestically and abroad following the December revolution, while Muez Ali, Muzan al Neel, and Mayada Hassanain describe at length the way western pressure to implement austerity measures undermined the revolution.
Yet the book remains important because it refutes a western economic consensus whose hegemony is still in place and does so for a western audience using a historical framework that explicitly links past injustices that created the debt in the first place to the austerity pressures that were so damaging to Sudan’s politics in the 2020s.
In doing so, it produces a forceful counter narrative, showing how western economic policies undermined democratic movements in Sudan for reasons more ideological than real.
As Sudan faces an uncertain future with a need for rebuilding, more neoliberal ideologues will push for similar policies, this book will be useful for pushing back, pointing not only to the real demands of the Sudanese people but also ways forward to meet them.
