This book project begins from the assumption that the study of "exceptionally normal" men and women has radical implications for the understanding of Sudanese politics and history. Against a historiography enchanted by elite actors and international agents, this book examines how ordinary people have induced the most important political shifts in the history of the country, including the last 2019 Revolution; but also how they have participated to the construction of consensus that regimes needed to survive. The two volumes of the book follow an organization according to discipline: the first is mostly on social history and the second on ‘politics from below’. Volume 1: Towards a new social history of Sudan Edited by: Mahassin Abd al-Jaliil, Iris Seri-Hersch, Anael Poussier, Elena Vezzadini In the historiography of Sudan, there is a notorious scarcity of works on social history, and all the more on the history of gender and women (which is surprising if one thinks at the exceptional importance of the women movement in Sudan, past and present). The field is dominated by political history, or by an institutional colonial history with no actors inside. It is as if the scholarship had missed the radical impact of social history, be it in its Marxist or French culturalist understanding, in re-envisioning the question of agency in history. With its original and unpublished research on women history, micro-history and subaltern history, this volume hopes to be an important addition to the scholarship on Sudan Studies, and more generally to African and Middle Eastern studies. Volume 2 Power from below: ordinary doing and undoing of the establishment Edited by: Mahassin Abd al-Jalil, Lucie Revilla, Elena Vezzadini In a similar way, the second volume wishes to explore the role of ordinary people in the making and unmaking of the various Sudanese regimes, and in particular of the Ingaz (1989-2019). If much attention in Sudan Studies has been given to the role of civil war and the peripheries in bringing about change, there are very few studies that focus on ordinary people and everyday routines where politics is made and unmade (marriages celebrations, the meaning of police ethos in a context of authoritarianism, or the role of women in the last regime). Thus, this volume aims to contribute to a political anthropology of consensus in violent regimes, something that in the case of European history has been well studied, but it is almost absent in African studies, where ordinary citizens are seen as powerless. weiterlesen