“Chanting at 1 pm Revolution Time”: Collective Action as Communal Coping in the Sudan Revolution

Abstract

In December 2018, Sudanese people took to the streets in increasing numbers to topple the Omar Al-Bashir regime. The protests were met with brutal force. People’s collective action was very costly as they risked being arrested or killed, and yet, they still stood their ground. Based on WhatsApp conversations with revolutionaries and discussions among the authors (two of which are revolutionaries), this chapter explores the Sudanese revolution. The chapter has two key aims. First, we want to highlight collective action in high-risk contexts. In settings such as Sudan, extensive, lengthy, and organized collective action was required to overthrow the regime, and this was carried out under repressive conditions. The motivations and the drivers of such collective action are potentially quite different from the ones driving collective action with few or mild ramifications for participants. Exploring real-life resistance with real-life consequences in extreme contexts is a valuable and necessary addition to the collective action literature in psychology, as different theoretical frameworks may be needed to understand such processes. Second, this chapter highlights ownership of knowledge production. This chapter attempts to learn more directly from revolutionaries, with stakeholders positioning themselves as direct knowledge producers. Through this method, the “insider-outsider” dynamics are shifted, providing new insights.