Whose Knowledge Counts? Sufi Ethics, Ubuntu, and the Epistemological Rebellion of Sudanese Women’s Community Kitchens

Abstract This article advances a theory-building account of epistemic justice in humanitarian action through the case of Sudanese women’s community kitchens that have proliferated amid violence, displacement, and state fragmentation. It argues that dominant humanitarian knowledge regimes—organised around auditability, standardised evidence hierarchies, and ‘scalability’ narratives—systematically undervalue women’s vernacular infrastructures of care and survival, producing epistemic injustice. Using a critical interpretive synthesis and a qualitative document-and-visual analysis of secondary materials, the study introduces ‘epistemological rebellion’ as a concept to name patterned practices that contest epistemic authority, generate alternative criteria of accountability, and sustain life through low-visibility infrastructures in contested space. To theorise the normative logics of this rebellion, the article brings into dialogue two ethical traditions often marginalised in humanitarian theory: Sufi ethics (adab, ihsan, and maqāṣid-oriented reasoning) and Ubuntu (relational personhood, reciprocity, and interdependence). The analysis identifies three mechanisms—relational accountability, embodied ethical epistemologies, and grey-zone mutual-aid infrastructures—and synthesises them into a Sufi–Ubuntu Epistemic Justice Framework for humanitarian design. The article contributes to Journal of International Humanitarian Action debates on evidence and localisation by showing why localisation without epistemic restitution reproduces hierarchy, and by offering risk-sensitive implications for monitoring, evaluation and learning, funding, and safeguarding.