Second Session

Event Description
This initiative examines the condition of conflict as a space for critical thinking beyond mere reconstruction. Its aim is to confront the enduring legacies, hierarchies, narratives, and laws that continue to shape life long after conflicts have ended. Through a series of discussions, we collectively shape the conversation.
Suggestions for participation are encouraged from a diverse range of perspectives, including architects, researchers, practitioners, students, historians, anthropologists, and artists. Topics may encompass, but are not limited to, language, history, heritage, neoliberal policies, pedagogy, and the formation of urban and social spaces.

2 Agency 
Sudan stands at a critical juncture shaped by a long and unfinished history of political fragmentation, institutional erosion, and organized crime. The current war marks the intensification of conditions that have been repeatedly suppressed rather than resolved. Competing claims to authority, the afterlives of an old regime, and the reconfiguration of state power around armed force, patronage, and rent have produced a political landscape in which violence is not an anomaly but a governing business as usual. The proliferation of militias and parallel power structures signals a transformed state, one that operates as an instrument of dispossession.
This violence unfolds within an international landscape structured by unequal relations of power. Sudan’s land, resources, ports, and strategic geography are embedded in global and regional circuits of capital, security, and debt. External involvements, whether framed as investment, diplomacy, or reconstruction, are frequently mediated through local elites whose political survival depends on foreign patronage. These arrangements rarely disrupt extraction of land, resources, and wealth from local communities. Instead, they entrench it, consolidating an economy in which militarization, informality, and dependency reinforce one another.
To speak of post-war recovery under such conditions risks reproducing a narrative that treats destruction as temporary and repair as inevitable, while leaving intact the imperial and military-capitalist logics that perpetuate violence. When tragedy is reduced to the language of development, governance reform, or humanitarian management, the central struggle is obscured. What is at stake in Sudan is freedom, justice, sovereignty, and collective rights to land and resources.
This session approaches agency not as individual choice, institutional efficiency, or entrepreneurial adaptability, but as a collective practice shaped by material constraints and historical violence. It explores how agency is exercised where the state functions as an obstacle rather than a guarantor of rights, officials are compromised by external interests, and local elites collude in systems that are complicit in dispossession. These conditions are not moral failures alone, but structural ones as well, sustained through debt regimes, opaque financial flows, fragile judiciaries, absent or manipulated data, and the entanglement of capital with military power.
Against this terrain, the session examines multiple  overlapping dimensions of agency. It considers the state as an obstacle when repression, patronage, and institutional decay disable collective action and erode the capacity for collective deliberation and shared accountability. It turns to initiatives and solidarities operating beyond conventional frameworks of representation, revealing alternative modes of organization and resistance. It also addresses structural fault lines, including the infrastructures of unfreedom through which extraction is normalized and responsibility obscured.
Rather than producing insular academic knowledge or technocratic solutions, this conversation seeks to create a space for collective learning, alliance-building, and cross-border cooperation in defiance of extractive and imperial logics. At its core, the session asks what enables groups to endure under conditions designed to exhaust them, how solidarities are forged across difference, displacement, and borders, and how imagination can be reclaimed from forces invested in foreclosing alternative futures. Agency is understood not as mastery over conditions, but as a continuous practice of resistance, grounded in collective obligation and oriented toward futures that insist on justice, sovereignty, and shared possibility.