Today’s episode of the MERIP Podcast features an interview with Niema Alhessen, a Sudanese researcher based in Cairo who is focused on urban conflict and displacement. She is the author of “Burri Under Siege—How War Remade Everyday Life in a Sudanese Neighborhood” in our Winter 2025 issue of Middle East Report, “Reconstruction and Ruin.” Burri, a neighborhood in central Khartoum that houses key political and military institutions, was under siege by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) from the beginning of its war with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in April 2023 until the SAF regained control of the city in March 2025. Alhessen spoke with residents of Burri about living in their neighborhood during the siege, how they sustained life through makeshift institutions and mutual aid and negotiated with both the RSF and SAF in order to procure aid. Alhessen’s article also delves into the deeper colonial history of Khartoum’s urban fabric, detailing how the militarization of Khartoum’s streets has its roots in the colonization of Sudan under the Anglo-Egyptian condominium in the late nineteenth century.

For this episode, MERIP’s Executive Director James Ryan was joined by co-host Deen Sharp, an LSE Fellow in Human Geography in the department of geography and environment at the London School of Economics, a member of MERIP’s editorial committee and an editor on the issue “Reconstruction and Ruin.” 

This interview was recorded on March 4, 2026

Niema Alhessen, “Burri Under Siege–How War Remade Everyday Life in a Sudanese Neighborhood” Middle East Report 317 (Winter 2025).

Further reading:

Ali Al-Arash, “Bread, Books, and Bombs: Burri’s Spirit of Resistance, Knowledge, and Solidarity,” ATAR Network 28 (May 19, 2025).

Marina D’Errico, “The Urban Fabric Between Tradition and Modernity (1885–1956): Omdurman, Khartoum, and the British Master Plan of 1910” in Vezzadini, Seri-Hersch, Revilla, Poussier & Abdul Jalil (Eds.), Ordinary Sudan, 1504–2019: From Social History to Politics from Below (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2023).

Khartoum podcast by Studio Urban.

Khalid Mustafa Medani, “The Struggle for Sudan” Middle East Report 310 (Spring 2024).