For a Cultural and Academic Boycott of the UAE

TAGATU3: Sudanese Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of the UAE

We, the undersigned workers and members of academic and cultural institutions, condemn the United Arab Emirates’ role in creating, funding, and prolonging the counter-revolutionary war in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since its eruption on April 15th 2023. 

This campaign is organized by TAGATU3: Sudanese Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of the UAE, a group of Sudanese diasporans and allies working to end the UAE’s patronage of the RSF militia and its political complicity in fueling the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in the 21st century. 

Emirati interventionist strategy in Sudan, though not unique, sits in a class of its own. Its significant counter-revolutionary efforts during the transitional political process foreclosed Sudanese liberatory horizons in favor of military actors, setting the stage for military rivalry that eventually tipped the country into war. As the primary benefactor of the notorious, brutal RSF militia, the UAE has provided an endless stream of funding, arms, and political cover, enabling the militia’s genocides and massacres across Darfur and Kordofan. The Emirates also plays a decisive role in prolonging the fighting through its illicit gold trade with SAF and RSF, providing their war efforts with critical financial lifelines for the foreseeable future. Allowing the UAE’s ruthless sub-imperialism in Sudan to go unchecked will continue to prevent a permanent ceasefire and make a return to the revolution’s core demand of a civilian-led government, with “the military (SAF) to the barracks and the Janjaweed (RSF) dissolved,” a receding possibility. 

As the UAE systematically destroys Sudanese universities, schools, archeological sites, cultural institutions and heritage, it continues to rise globally as a cultural and academic powerhouse. Its deliberate and well-financed global partnerships with academic and cultural institutions exist to normalize its imperialist violence in Sudan, launder its image and reputation as a repressive autocracy, and escape accountability for its global systems of violence and extraction. Herein, as a collective, we call upon all academics and cultural workers of conscience to organize for a boycott of Emirati institutions complicit in whitewashing the UAE’s human rights violations until the campaign’s demands are met.

The UAE’s Academic and Cultural Whitewashing Campaign

The UAE’s investments in Western academic institutions are long-standing and point to a trend of academic whitewashing and intellectual capture. Between February 2001 and April 2024, the UAE gifted $402,330,743 to universities based in the United States, with New York University, Harvard University, Boston University, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, UC Berkeley, and Stanford University being among the biggest recipients of these monetary gifts. Per the financial reporting of these universities to the federal government, these awards were received for undisclosed reasons, allowing unknown influence by donors and hampering academic freedom. 

The accelerated expansion of Western universities in the Emirates, particularly through sister and satellite campuses, since the 2010s has lent the UAE further legitimacy and leveraging power in economies of knowledge production. This has recently been expressed in the UAE’s attempt to control and circulate knowledge production on Africa and Sudan in ways that reinforce and enshrine its matrix of power relations on the continent via institutions such as the Global Studies University in Sharjah and NYU Abu Dhabi.

Similarly, it is no coincidence that at the same time as the UAE’s colonial expansionist project is intensifying, we see a rapid proliferation of global cultural partnerships in the country. So central is the UAE’s cultural project to its grand geopolitical ambitions that it has institutionalized this cultural diplomacy strategy in government policy by creating a Soft Power Council. Established by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum in 2017, one of the council’s main aims is to “strengthen the UAE’s foreign policy and add new tools to consolidate its role…. in the international arena.”

Since the council’s inauguration, the Emirati government has made significant contributions valued at upward of $35 billion to the fields of art, design, museums, destinations, publishing, and media. Culture and politics work synergistically here, the former providing the discursive cover for the latter, thereby shielding the UAE from any accountability measures for its destructive alliance with the RSF in Sudan. Favourable and attractive working conditions created by this Soft Power Strategy orchestrates buy-in from artists and cultural workers around the world while ensuring silence on its violations in Sudan. We see these inflated cultural budgets as a direct outcome of the wealth violently accumulated from Sudan and the Horn of Africa region, positioning the UAE as a beacon of modernity, opportunity, innovation, and high culture. 

Working with complicit Emirati institutions plays directly into the UAE’s cover and aids in manufacturing consent for its sub-imperialist project in Sudan. Inspired by the legacies of boycotts against South African apartheid, the Israeli occupation, and the role boycott has played in decolonial struggles the world over, we see this tool as the strongest and most strategic weapon we have to pierce this morbid illusion, end the systematic Emirati violence against the Sudanese people, and wrest the region’s political future back from the architects of its demise.

Demands & Call to Action

The time is now to practice a deep solidarity with the Sudanese people and firmly oppose the UAE’s imperialist agendas in Sudan. We define complicity for Emirati institutions as:

1. Financial complicity in the shape of receiving Emirati state funding or royal wealth to partially or wholly fund institutions or institutional activities and products. 
2. Ideological complicity through academic and cultural activity that whitewashes or creates misinformation/propaganda campaigns, silence, or active censorship on the UAE’s role in creating, funding, and perpetuating the counter-revolutionary war in Sudan.

We, the undersigned workers and members of academic and cultural institutions, demand the following:

1. We urge our colleagues to call attention to and acknowledge the genocides in Sudan, the man-made famines ravaging populations across the country, and the global enablers of violence wrought by the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, the United Arab Emirates being the most prominent among them.  
2. We call on academic and cultural institutions to thoroughly investigate their links with the Emirati government and royal families. We demand divestment from any investment projects made with the Emirati state, royal families, and complicit institutions.
3. We call upon academics, cultural workers, and their affiliated institutions to reject funding, collaborations, partnerships, and sponsorships from the Emirati government, royal families, and their complicit institutions (including lobby groups and corporations) or those involved in ideological work amounting to whitewashing the UAE’s violations in Sudan.
4. We call on our colleagues to boycott the UAE by refusing to teach at, attend, or collaborate with any complicit Emirati institutions until such institutions shall: (i) publicly recognize and lift censorship on the UAE’s role in the creation, funding, and perpetuation of the war in Sudan, (ii) practice financial transparency by independently auditing financial statements in line with international financial reporting standards and investigate any financial links tied to war profiteering and illicit trade in Sudan, including extractive conflict gold and weapons manufacturing/sale, (iii) end all financial and ideological complicity in the UAE’s counter-revolutionary war in Sudan.