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Pathways and Impediments to Peace in Sudan

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Location: Live on Zoom

The conflict in Sudan is a protracted, multi-layered crisis driven by entrenched political divisions, persistent fiscal fragility and corruption, internal ethnic and sectarian tensions, vulnerabilities to climate change, and meddling from neighboring states. This panel will delve into the pathways and impediments to peace in Sudan from the perspectives of scholars studying the region.

The panel will take place live via Zoom. To register to attend virtually, click HERE.

Smiling woman; smiling man in tan blazer; man in dark suit by Notre Dame's Hesburgh Library.
(left to right): Nikki Kindersley, Christopher Tounsel, and Michael Woldemariam.

Speakers/Panelists:

  • Nikki Kindersley works on contemporary history and politics in Africa, researching histories of political education with a special focus on South Sudan and its borderlands. Additionally, she is interested in the intellectual lives of migrant workers and refugees within 19th century slaving systems, colonial rule, and long postcolonial civil wars. Her first book, “New Sudans: Wartime intellectual histories in Khartoum” (Cambridge University press, 2024) was a finalist for the African Studies Association, Bethwell A. Ogot Prize in East African Studies.

  • Laurie Nathan joined the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies in 2018 as the director of its Mediation Program, which serves as an international center of excellence for mediation research, training, policy and practice. He has participated in high-level peacemaking efforts in Africa and helped design the mediation units of the African Union and African sub-regional bodies. He also has consulted on mediation and related issues to the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States, the European Union, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and the UN, as well as for the governments of Germany, Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland, Switzerland, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

  • Christopher Tounsel is the Walker Family Endowed Professor in History at the University of Washington, where he also directs the university’s African Studies Program. A historian of modern Sudan specializing in the functions of race and religion as political technologies, Tounsel is the author of ”Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan” (Duke University Press, 2021) and ”Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity” (Cornell University Press, 2024).

  • Michael Woldemariam is an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, and a senior fellow at the Center for International & Security Studies at Maryland. Woldemariam’s scholarly work has been published in a wide-range of peer-reviewed journals, most recently in “Contemporary Security Policy and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism.” His first book, “Insurgent Fragmentation in the Horn of Africa: Rebellion and Its Discontents,” was published with Cambridge University Press in 2018.