REMAPPING Sudan
Marhaba,
This is the 57th issue of Atar English, published by the Sudan Facts Center for Journalism. It reaches you every two weeks with reporting from across Sudan.
Maps do more than show where places are. They reveal how a country works. They trace the movement of food and goods, the circulation of money, the reach of authority, and the routes people take between safety and danger. Wars redraw those maps long before they redraw borders.
Three years into Sudan’s conflict, the country’s geography is being remapped. Agricultural heartlands have become front lines. Trade routes have turned into smuggling corridors. Commercial towns have become military hubs. New currencies circulate where the national one no longer commands confidence. Humanitarian access follows shifting centres of power, while diplomacy struggles to keep pace with realities already taking shape on the ground.
This issue traces those new maps. We begin in Al Jazirah, where the pursuit of four Toyota Tundra pickups uncovers the expanding infrastructure of Sudan’s war economy. In Habila, we examine how famine reflects not only war but decades of changes in land ownership and agricultural production. From Al-Malha comes the story of a town emptied by violence and pushed toward hunger, while Ad-Dabba illustrates how a wartime commercial boom gave way to militarization, narcotics trafficking, and fear.
Our reporting also follows the remapping of Sudan’s economy. In West Darfur, we explore how the Central African CFA franc has become part of everyday commerce as the Sudanese pound loses ground. We then turn to diplomacy, asking whether Washington’s proposed humanitarian ceasefire can become a genuine path to peace, or merely pause a conflict whose political foundations remain unresolved. Finally, our monthly Price Bulletin offers another way of reading the war, through the changing costs of food, fuel, medicines, construction materials, and currencies across Sudan.
Taken together, these stories chart a country whose coordinates are changing. The remapping underway is not only territorial. It is economic, social, and political. It determines who grows food, who controls trade, which currency people trust, where aid can reach, and who exercises authority over everyday life.
Wars eventually end. The maps they leave behind often endure. The routes opened by smuggling networks, the patterns of displacement, the collapse of old markets, the emergence of new centres of power, and the economic systems built during conflict rarely disappear overnight. They become the foundations upon which recovery, or future conflict, is built.
Atar Editorial Team
