Emergency Response Rooms in Sudan: From Revolutionary Grassroots Organization to the Management of Life in a Context of Political Collapse

This essay examines the transformation of grassroots action in Sudan, tracing its evolution from the Resistance Committees that led the December 2018 Revolution, to Service Committees during the transitional period, and ultimately to Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) that emerged with the outbreak of the April 2023 war as the most capable local actors managing daily life amid the collapse of state institutions.The article argues that this transformation is not merely a temporary emergency response, but rather the result of long-term organizational accumulation and adaptive capacity, which enabled these networks to transition rapidly from protest-oriented action to survival governance without losing horizontal coordination, communal trust, or operational legitimacy.It demonstrates that ERRs arose within a context characterized by a sovereign vacuum and institutional breakdown, redeploying the ethical and social legacy of nafeer (collective solidarity) through decentralized, networked structures grounded in local knowledge, social ties, and prior experience in civic organization.These rooms developed specialized functionsincluding health response, women's protection, shelter management, and communal kitchenswhile sustaining participatory governance that prevents power concentration and ensures continuity of operations despite pervasive violence and targeted attacks.The essay further examines the tensions shaping ERRs' interactions with local authorities and international donors, highlighting the ongoing struggle to preserve grassroots autonomy while meeting legal, bureaucratic, and funding requirements.Through a limited comparison with anti-immigration enforcement grassroots movements in the United States, it shows that grassroots action, whether in contexts of institutional stability or collapse, consistently generates alternative governance practices rooted in solidarity, local security, and legitimacy derived from effectiveness.Ultimately, Sudan's ERRs represent laboratories of infrastructural democracy and models of social sovereignty, redefining politics as the collective organization of survival and the reconstruction of state-society relations from the ground up.