During a press conference on the afternoon of Feb. 27, the coordination of the Khartoum State Resistance Committees, the decentralized groups of revolutionaries at the forefront of the fight against the coup authorities in Sudan, announced the publication of their long-awaited political charter. The document sets out, for the first time, the main lines of these groups’ proposal for a way out of the crisis in which the country is mired, especially since the military takeover in October, and lays the foundations on which to build a new Sudan.

The charter puts forward a two-year transition during which a major overhaul of the state would take place. This period, as provided for in the text, would be supervised by the revolutionary forces and headed by a prime minister, of consensus among the signatories, whose functions will be defined in a transitional constitution. The announcement of the document, which aims to become a political reference that unites the revolutionary forces in Sudan, came after an extensive process of discussion and consultation among all the coordinators and their respective grassroots movements across Khartoum State.

“This is the political vision of the resistance committees in Khartoum. And what makes it important is not only that this is the first time they attempted to materialize all the ideas they have in mind into a written document, but also because of the number of people who engaged in the process,” Muzna Alhaj, member of a resistance committee in Khartoum, told Al-Monitor. “We are talking about thousands of members of the different resistance committees in Khartoum, which were all engaged in a process with a very representative, grass-roots and bottom-up approach,” she added.

With roots going back to the 1990s, the resistance committees rose to prominence during the mobilizations against Omar al-Bashir and proved to be particularly adept at dodging the regime’s repressive and co-optation tactics. Thanks to the greater space that existed during the aborted transition, this extensive network of groups gained experience and became deeply rooted in many neighborhoods. Together with its decentralized nature and strong local ties, this has allowed them to lead popular mobilizations since the October coup.