Growing up, I thought that real politics was collective struggle, but over the past decade I’d begun to fear the era of mass movements had come to an end. My political life had desiccated. I briefed diplomats and wrote angry missives for the United Nations and Swiss NGOs about brutal government military campaigns in South Sudan. Increasingly, I became convinced that the diplomats who were the primary audience for my reports were deeply uninterested in changing their positions. For over a decade, they had backed a predatory government intent on pillaging South Sudan while the country descended into a low-intensity conflict, often fought along ethnic lines. I struggled to know how to position myself—neither ethnic militias nor diplomats are my constituency—and felt expectant about my trip to Sudan. If South Sudan was a land of ethnic violence and indifferent diplomats, Sudan, I told myself, was a country of political parties and street protests—protests so effective they had brought down Bashir. It was in Khartoum, I thought, that I would find the sort of collective politics I could recognize as my own.