From unpaid care work to social reproduction: observations from the war on Sudan

In a women-only Facebook group, a Sudanese woman living in Saudi Arabia shared her struggles after her mother and mother-in-law moved in with her small family. The shift in household authority, loss of control, and rising tensions resonated with many displaced Sudanese women in the group. A common response was *”Allah Yel3an al-Burhan Wa Hemedti”* (“الله ينعل البرهان و حميدتي”), reflecting a collective experience and a common understanding of who is to be blamed for their suffering not just in the grand story of displacement but in the minute changes of their day-to- day life. The discussions revealed a shared understanding that the war has created a disruptive moment in their lives, the outcome of this moment is incomplete and these women’s agency in it cannot be ignored. A similar issue arises in social media groups for Sudanese in Egypt, where posts frequently feature lost children unable to find their way home after playing or spending time outside cramped apartments. A typical reaction is “الأولاد ديل أمهاتهم وين؟” (“Where are these children’s mothers?”), criticizing mothers for letting kids roam instead of keeping them indoors. These examples highlight the crisis of social reproduction faced by Sudanese women amid displacement.
Since the war in Sudan erupted, the narrative surrounding Sudanese women has centered on the immense hardships they have endured from systemic sexual violence to mass displacement. The conflict has shattered the country’s socio-economic and political systems, of which social reproduction- including provision of care work to children, the elderly in the family, through all housework and outside work which is related to both the reproduction labor power and the socialization of society, all of which serves as a fundamental pillar (defined more clearly below). While highlighting women’s suffering remains crucial and this article, to some extent, does the same, we go further to argue that understanding both the impact of this crisis on women and their response to it requires moving beyond framing care in place of social reproduction, or as merely a neutral, passive, or “harder” or more ‘exploitative’ process under duress. Instead, we must examine how the crisis itself reproduces conditions that give rise to new and specific methods of performing this labor of care. These methods generate new learning and tensions while simultaneously responding to them all in service of the broader, relentless goal: the reproduction of life and labor.
Over the past few years, care work has surged – specifically in academic and journalistic writings as well as advocacy- propelling the question of care into mainstream discourse within the international feminist community, particularly during the COVID-19 lockdowns and the accompanying crisis. The pandemic brought social reproduction and care into sharp focus, sparking much needed discussions. Two key points emerged from these conversations: first, the importance of unpaid care work , whose necessity became undeniable during lockdowns; and second, the fact that this labor continues to fall overwhelmingly on women, even in Global North countries, where traditional gendered roles are often assumed to have weakened. Both of these observations are undeniably true. However, the pandemic-era discourse as it has evolved within feminist circles, NGOs, and institutions (including the World Bank and others) has largely framed care work in terms of a binary distinction between unpaid and paid labor. In this piece, we hope to illustrate that this framing is too limited, and also unapplicable to the Sudanese context.
The “unpaid care work thesis” highlights how patriarchal structures enforce a gendered division of labor, relegating care responsibilities (childcare, domestic work, elder care) primarily to women. This creates power imbalances between men and women, restricting women’s freedom and limiting their opportunities for paid employment and financial independence. Within this framework, redistributing care responsibilities whether between spouses or siblings could alleviate some of the burden. Alternatively, women’s outright rejection of these imposed duties might also be a path to liberation. Shifting the focus from care work to social reproduction expands the discussion: social reproduction is not just about material tasks – whether paid or unpaid – but also encompasses structured beliefs, practices, and values that sustain and reproduce a specific structure of society. Social reproduction is often invisible, undocumented, and undervalued. It includes not only the maintenance of labour power through food, shelter, etc., but also shapes labor market dynamics and interpersonal relationships. Crucially, social reproduction is adaptive and indeterminate, and not simply something to be ‘free’ from.
Perhaps the framing of women’s liberation through the lens of liberation from this role (unpaid care work) has been the reason behind the fact that domestic workers have never featured within the demands of women’s rights since the inception of the Sudanese women movement. In fact, the urbanized women of Sudan have only been able to realize the fleeting moment of ‘equilibrium’ of maintaining presence inside and outside the home was through the existence of secured supply of low-wage women workers. This was part of the intensification of privatization and the retreat of the state from public provisioning, as well as the rise of inequality due to conflict and displacement and economic decline in the periphery and a growing urban middle class following the oil-boom.
The shattering of this schema due to the war and the forced displacement of people necessitates that we question the usefulness of this framing and to shift towards a broader understanding of this labor as a profound effort, inextricably linked to production, accumulation, and the very making of life. Social reproduction, then, acts as a bridge between life and ‘production’. It is not merely a site to be manipulated by policy or popular discourse (the patriarchal system) or one that passively responds to the formal or economic domain. Rather, it is an active process and method in which its practitioners are themselves agents, shaping and reshaping the world alongside macroeconomic and geopolitical forces.
A casual observation of the day to day of Sudanese women in Sudan and abroad, shows that the processes of maintaining and creating life for families by mostly women has been significantly transformed. Through the movement and the increased stress on local economies and institutions, the dynamics, the knowledge, and the function of social reproduction have been significantly altered. Of course, how these changes manifest are determined by Sudan’s exciting dichotomies central to its political economic model. While the migration of urban upper and middle-class women within Sudan and to regional countries has in many cases redefined the boundaries of the household – both materially and socially. The larger bulk of Sudanese women already living through depleted social provisioning before Sudan’s April war as members of households engaged in subsistence economies in the rural, or as part of the army of urban periphery dwellers, are witnessing a sustained attack on their ability to survive, pushing them further into the economies of war, implicating the social reproduction of their lives in the process.
As the war in Sudan has produced one of the largest modern-day displacement and migration disasters in the world, this movement of people and the reshaping of the family in the process has also constituted new boundaries of social reproduction and care. Changing family structures as entire extended families migrated together has in most cases temporarily diminished the small window of control over the household which women have gained through the process of urbanization initiated in earnest in the 50s and onwards. Stories of Sudanese women in Egypt for example reveal persistent tensions between additional responsibilities for family members as a whole, and changing social obligations and norms, under strained resources. In one case shared in a women’s advice group on facebook, a mother of two seeks support on how to mitigate the relationship between her mother and mother-in-law both living now with her in a small family home sustained by her husband’s income. Here the tension between the expectations of appeasing the mother-in-law, her own obligation to her mother, and their mutual dependance on the income of the husband give way to conflict, and now add a new dynamic to manage on top of existing household management duties. Rather than only sustain their own families, Sudanese women migrants and refugees continue to join the market of commodified care. In Uganda, women are engaged in maintaining the scent and feel of the Sudanese household by providing everything from kisra to bakhour , while in other locations such as gulf state newly migrating Sudanese women previously employed in the formal and informal sector are further entrenched in the expansive child care and housekeeping economies of Gulf states, as nannies, private homework tutors and domestic workers.
The necessity of migration has also functioned as a safety net for many Sudanese families and communities as a whole. Remittance, a historical pillar of the Sudanese economy, has only expanded in scale and strain. Newly or previously migrating household members – often by forgoing their own comforts – continue to contribute generously and voluntarily to sustain their families, often more than one family at a time. We all experience this in the multiple consultation and calculation meetings between family members, not only deciding where everyone will live but often who to sacrifice- or who will sacrifice themselves as the mughtarib of the family. This sometimes overwhelming sense of interdependence, resilience, and frailty all constitute a reorganization of the home where remittance directly to family members or to neighborhood and community kitchen schemes maintains the family but also creates a new layer of hierarchy over the organization of day- to-day life. More often than not to be able to sustain this added responsibility families are split between earners and care takers in order to save, leaving mothers alone to manage all care duties inside and outside the home.
Within Sudan, communities which have been forced or opted to remain in urban conflict areas are also facing a changing and more strenuous process of reproduction. Within Sudan’s rural landscape the war has had overarching and dramatic effects such as the collapse of food systems, health services, and the current displacement of people as violence moves from one area to the other. Focusing on the granular dynamic of the extended family, we find that the distress in local economies either through the collapse of vital sectors (for example the agricultural sector was compromised as a result of lack of funding and support from the government, and the destruction of water and power plants) or the influx of relatives and refugees from different parts of Sudan has increased the strain on rural economies and the social order itself. This process of reverse migration has inhibited the household, and its mechanisms of maintenance. Rural families and women, by opening their doors to sisters, brothers and strangers, have taken on the responsibility of providing food, care and shelter, reversing dynamics of dependency between urban and rural relatives causing tensions around already limited resources.
Urban periphery communities previously dependent on income from Sudan’s limited middle-class by contributing to their subsistence through menial labor, or maintaining their home and life as domestic workers, drivers, cooks and more are now forced to strip their social reproduction further. In the everyday hustle of securing food, women are the noticeable hunters and gatherers of basic needs in conflict and non-conflict areas. Similar to women outside of Sudan, this has also meant fast learning of community kitchen locations, aid distribution cites, and all the procedures necessary to obtain them. In one area in North Khartoum, women have taken advantage of windows of free electricity to move all food making into electric burners and ovens, selling some of these goods such as kisra, bread, and khabiez for additional income. As entire families experience strain, men are also now more actively engaged in the day to day life through securing water, mending and building family infrastructure, and the direct maintenance of life through either joining the military or in the least establishing social relations with whatever military force is in control. In the time consumed by now more complicated access to necessities, the reproduction of entire communities is stripped to its most basic level, as women and men become immediately adept in service of survival. , further implicating them in the war economy and its processes of social reproduction, placing them at greater risks.
This embrace of risk and proximity to violence is not only found amongst those remaining in Sudan or a feature of post war Sudan, it is merely the reality of survival and life when confined to its bare necessities. Whether in the streets of Cairo or in the mining fields of Blue Nile, children fend for themselves in adult and risky environments. The example of ‘missing’ children now familiar on Facebook pages illustrates the changing limits of care within the family. Children stuck in small apartments have no escape but to play in the streets of their new and temporary home, away from what and who they know. In Blue Nile before the war and across Sudan, children in mining locations forced to work are exposed to toxic pollutants, military conscription and ultimately the loss of any semblance of childhood. These are not choices taken by caregivers or lack of feeling when children are exposed to these risks, these are the available means left for sustaining life, and part of the recalibration in social reproduction we are now witnessing.
While social reproduction is often conflated with care, the function of social reproduction in totality serves the maintenance of societies, including their social and emotional bonds. In Sudan this is no more clear than in the social process of grief, how communities come together to mourn while sharing the financial burden, either through direct payment in Al-Kashif but also through the many material acts of helping erect the tent, washing the dishes, cleaning the house, making tea, gossiping and changing the mood through humor and often the constant supply of distracting drama. As the home shrinks either physically or through the increase in the number of people, the practice of grief and mourning has also been stripped down. Families outside of Sudan living in urban dwellings or in refugee camps no longer have the luxury to mourn as a whole for the passing of their loved ones, there is no al-khamsa, al-arbain or al-murog, all these rituals are either forgone, and with it time and support to grieve. In a direct link to Sudan’s main war economy, observations from researchers working on gold mining, report that women in areas where men have migrated to mining sites are now taking over social responsibilities previously performed by men even in the processes of grief. This of course is not novel, Sudanese women in war zones have taken over not only the social but also all duties such as building, farming, and petty trade, as men migrate for work or join fighting forces. All of these social changes are now occurring more rapidly and widely, at a time where death seems the constant.
Linking these changes to our definition of social reproduction, these transformations in how society cares for each other in the minute day to day dynamics does not function in isolation but functions under a larger political and economic project. We can see this through forcing communities through the militarised state apparatus through voluntary, tribe-based, or fear-based conscription of men, women and children. As well as manifesting more directly through the reliance on armed actors to sustain subsistence through the control of aid flows, trade routes. Implicitly these reconfigurations serve to reorganize the household and social reproduction. This political awareness has not escaped women, who are witnessing the parallel relationship between their lives and the continuity of the war. The expression “ الله ينعل البرهان و حميدتي” or الله يلعن الجنجويد و in times of strife, summarises the link between the