One friend, whom I will call Fatima, told me her answer later, as we sat in the quiet garden at the Ethiopian embassy eating decent kitfo away from prying eyes. It was a fantasy to think that the transition would have gone anywhere without the international community, Fatima told me. Revolution might sound nice to our Marxist friends, but it is a theory from another era. Name a single mass movement in the past twenty years that has successfully taken power and held it, she said. I was silent, and she continued. “When we formed the transitional government, we were facing institutions that were full of kayzan intent on blocking our plans. We needed allies.” If Mohamed thought the Sudanese elite had allied with international financial institutions to continue Bashir’s neoliberal policies, Fatima thought this same alliance was the only way to fight against the persistence of the old regime. It was an almost textbook disagreement. In what aspects of the state did the old regime persist? Was it in the combination of austerity politics and militarized economics that characterized the transitional government? Or was it in the kayzan’s continued dominance of Sudan’s institutions?