The unravelling of Sudan has revealed a painful truth: the centralized nation-state inherited from colonialism and sustained by successive military regimes — has been a source of violence rather than protection. For decades, it has served as a prize for elites, a weapon against the periphery, and a resource to be looted. The revolution of 2019 sought to reclaim and transform that state; the war that followed became the old order’s brutal answer to that dream.
And yet, even in this collapse, something new is beginning to take shape. In homes, in community spaces, and across digital networks, Sudanese people are imagining futures that no longer depend on the state’s promises. The question quietly echoing through these spaces is not how to restore what was, but how to build what should be.
What if the future lies not in capturing the state, but in creating life beyond its confines? What if belonging could be redefined not by borders or institutions, but by shared care, memory, and responsibility? This is not an abstract hope. It is unfolding in real time: in families rebuilding their lives from displacement, in artists reclaiming beauty from destruction, and in exiled communities who continue to dream of return.
Even now, as the country fractures along political and military lines, there remains a common thread a quiet, stubborn hope that binds people together. Despite distance, despite loss, despite everything that divides them, Sudanese people continue to imagine a shared horizon: a Sudan where justice replaces vengeance, where communities thrive without fear, and where every person is free to live with dignity. It is this collective hope fragile yet unbroken that keeps the idea of Sudan alive.
These visions resist despair. They insist that the end of one political order is not the end of Sudan itself. Across cities and camps, in exile and online, people are re-imagining justice as restoration, leadership as service, and freedom as a condition that begins within. Theirs is a future stitched together from fragments tender, uncertain, but alive with possibility.
The following voice notes were shared by Sudanese people reflecting on what that future means to them — what justice might look like, what change feels like, and how they imagine rebuilding a country still in search of peace.
Together, these voices remind us that even when a nation falls apart, its people continue to dream— not of what was lost, but of what might still be built. In their words, Sudan lives on, carried by those who refuse to stop imagining. As I write this, Sudan is being rebuilt, slowly, painfully, but with purpose. The journey is long, yet in every act of care, creation, and return, there is progress. There is life still unfolding.
All audio recordings are original submissions collected for this project, “Fragments of a Revolution: Stories of Struggle and Survival from Sudan.” Shared with consent by Sudanese contributors (2025).
KutubوKalam 
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