What can artists, activists, intellectuals, and documentarians do in a time of war? Whose voice can we look to to show us the way, when what we see, hear and experience (certainly in the Global North) is fraught with dispute, discourse, discrimination, and doom-scrolling? Individuals and communities caught up in real-time, in any conflict, are often rendered voiceless or ignored (once again by the Global North) all the while facing existential crises and anxieties unfathomable to many. People looking relatively comfortably from afar while trying to make sense of or call out the depredations of war are often told to look elsewhere, attacked, or silenced, as we’ve seen in the past few months against the backdrop of a devastating violence in the Middle East conflict and other conflicts.

For this issue, we look at a conflict receiving little international coverage, and to a diaspora uniquely placed to speak about its impact on their lives. War erupted in Sudan on 15 April 2023 and at least 6.4 million people, out of a pre-war population of roughly 46 million individuals, are now forcibly displaced. The war’s impact, while still ongoing, is likely to profoundly reshape the country, surrounding region, and the world in both foreseeable and unexpected ways for some time to come. This issue consequently gathers a small group of thinkers, activists, artists, and people from other walks of life, often Sudanese, but not exclusively, to showcase together their hopes and DREAM’s. As their stories within these pages attest, it is through the strength and resilience of ideas and art that will help us collectively remake our world for the better.

This being Boy.Brother.Friend, the community within these pages significantly falls outside of the narrow depictions of wherever the boundaries of Africa and the Middle East are drawn, both of which sometimes include Sudan. Contrary to popular narratives, there are feminist and queer Sudanese communities, which have of course created vibrant, and often defiant, spaces for themselves that intersect with thriving intellectual and artistic communities.