Many Sudanese intellectuals watched on with wry amusement as, in 2011, the global media announced that the popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya were the first civilian movements to overthrow military autocracies in the Arab world. Sudan is often overlooked because of its status as a gateway between the Arab and African worlds, but it has already experienced two such events - the October Revolution of 1964, which overthrew the first military regime of Ibrahim Abboud and ushered in a four year period of parliamentary democracy, and the April Intifada of 1985, which overthrew Jafa'ar Nimeiri, the country's second military dictator. Since Umar al-Bashir's coup of 1989 overhauled the short-lived democracy that this uprising established, there has been no 'Third Intifada'. This Tuesday will mark the 50th Anniversary of the October Revolution. However, in spite of a semi-liberated media churning out numerous opinion pieces linking Sudan's past uprisings to the 2011 Arab Spring, today's protestors have not yet been able to emulate the glorious past. Why has Sudan been unable to reproduce the feats of October 1964 (or April 1985) in a post-Arab Spring world, despite its particular historical experience? Part of the reason is that the current Sudanese [...]
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