After the fall of Omar al-Bashir in 2019, Sudan saw hopes of democratic change led by a civilian revolution, later crushed by a military coup in 2021. Rivalry between the army, led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo erupted into war in April 2023. The conflict spread across the country, devastating regions like Darfur and trapping civilians in widespread violence. Both sides have been accused of atrocities, while foreign powers have remained passive.

Copyright: © Abdulmonam Eassa

Sudan has largely disappeared from international front pages. Yet the scale of what is happening there — the displacement of millions, the specter of famine, the systematic destruction of vital infrastructures — demands that we keep looking.

What makes this work particularly remarkable — and what the jury wishes to underscore — is that Abdulmonam Eassa has achieved something extraordinarily difficult in photojournalism: he has told a complete, complex, layered story in just ten frames, as this category regulations require.

Every frame carries the weight of the devastating political tragedy and there is no redundancy. After the fall of Omar al-Bashir in 2019, Sudan briefly became a symbol of civilian courage — a popular uprising that dared to imagine democracy where there had been only military rule for decades. Eassa’s lens captures both the fragile beauty of that hope and its precarious balance. Then the October 2021 coup, the collapse of the alliance between the army and the Rapid Support Forces, and finally the eruption of open war on April 15, 2023, when Khartoum became a battlefield, and the revolution was finally buried under rubble and gunfire.

Photographically, what distinguishes this work is its ability to hold the political and the personal in the same frame — to show us the apparatus of power and, simultaneously, the human beings crushed beneath it.

Sudan is collapsing and the world is not watching. In recognizing this work, the jury reaffirms the importance of recognizing photography that speaks truth to power and deserves to be seen. We thank Abdulmonam Eassa for the images he made and the risks taken, all the more significant in a country where access for journalists is nowadays among the most restricted and dangerous in the world.