Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms Should Win the Nobel Peace Prize This Year

A grassroots network is saving lives in the world’s largest humanitarian crisis

It’s no secret that Donald Trump really wants a Nobel Peace Prize. He’s been touting the wars he claims to have ended — some real, like between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and some entirely imagined, like a supposed war between Ethiopia and Egypt. At the same time, he’s started new ones: bombing Iran and launching extra-legal military operations in the Caribbean that killed an unknown number of people labeled as drug smugglers. There’s also the renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, the deployment of troops to American cities, and masked federal agents abducting people off the streets, sometimes rendering them to far flung locations around the world.

So no, the Nobel Committee won’t be honoring Trump on Friday. But it may — and should — recognize a group that is genuinely laying the foundations for peace amid the world’s largest humanitarian crisis: Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms.

These grassroots networks sprang up almost immediately after war erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The two generals who had once joined forces to topple Sudan’s fragile civilian-led government quickly turned their guns on each other. In the two and a half years since, Sudan has plunged into chaos. Famine is spreading in parts of the country and there are credible accusations of genocide in Darfur. By the numbers, it is the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. Some 12 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes, and over 30 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance.

Yet even as the country unraveled, ordinary Sudanese citizens mobilized. Many were young professionals who had led the peaceful 2018 protests that toppled a 30-year dictatorship and briefly ushered a transition to democracy. When war came, they organized Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) across the country. These Rooms run schools, soup kitchens, pharmacies, medical clinics, even restore downed power lines. They adapt to whatever their communities need most, and with limited resources these volunteer groups are saving lives in the most difficult conditions imaginable.

“The terrifying diversity of this conflict demands a diversity of approaches,” Hanin Ahmed, External Relations Officer for Sudan’s ERRs, told the Clinton Global Initiative this year. “In one locality, a Room is a telemedicine hub. In another, it’s a women-led collective distributing seeds and tools. In a third, it’s youth volunteers providing lifesaving activities. This hyper-local, agile model is our strength. We saw early on that the most effective response wasn’t coming from outside. It was rising from within — from the courage of local volunteers: teachers, engineers, students.”

Mutual aid after disaster is nothing new. Neighbors tend to help neighbors in need. What makes Sudan’s ERRs remarkable is their scale and coordination. A national network connects these local initiatives, and so doing sustains a fragile social fabric in defiance of warlords determined to rip the country apart. The ERRs are not only delivering aid in the darkest circumstances, but also building the architecture of peace from the ground up. The ERRs are both saving lives and laying the foundations for peace that can help bring this awful war to an end. They are beyond deserving of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

If this sounds familiar to longtime readers, it’s because I made a similar argument last year. But now the stakes are much higher. Sudan’s civil war has only worsened, and the entire edifice of the international humanitarian system is rapidly crumbling under massive cuts in foreign aid from the United States and other key donors.

The mutual aid model pioneered by Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms is suddenly more urgent — and not just for Sudan.

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