HATE SPEECH AND THE ETHNO-RACIALIZATION OF SUDAN’S APRIL 2023 WAR: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF ANTI-ʿARAB AL-SHATĀT DISCOURSE

Abstract

This thesis examines how selected social media excerpts in Sudan’s wartime digital discourse reframe the April عرب ( war through an ethno-racial lens. It focuses on discourse organized around ʿArab al-shatāt 2— ) الشliterally “scattered/dispersed Arabs” and used in the data as a label implying transborder Arab groups and contested belonging. The study argues that the issue cannot be adequately understood through the language of hate speech alone. Rather, it analyzes a broader process of ethno-racialization through which a political and military conflict is re-described in terms of a racialized collective, so that violence, motive, and threat come to be explained through presumed group identity rather than through institutions, command structures, strategy, or historically specific political conditions. To address this problem, the thesis asks how selected social media excerpts ethno-racialize the war through the construction of ʿArab al-shatāt, and through what linguistic and discursive mechanisms this process is accomplished. Methodologically, it adopts a qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis approach, drawing primarily on the Discourse-Historical Approach, with Fairclough and van Dijk used in supporting roles. The analysis is based on a small purposive corpus of six Arabic-language excerpts reproduced in A Year of Hate in Sudan and is concerned with discursive mechanism rather than prevalence. The findings identify four recurring discursive functions: reclassification, boundary-making, essentialization, and remedy authorization. Taken together, these show how wartime discourse can reorganize the intelligibility of conflict by shifting explanation from an armed organization to a population category, turning belonging into a moral problem, and making punitive or exclusionary responses more thinkable. The thesis concludes that in war, naming is never neutral: the categories through which violence is interpreted help shape the social and political reality in which that violence is understood, justified, and contested.

Date of Award	2026
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Humanities and Social Science