Sudan's uncivil war: the global–historical constitution of political violence

Abstract

It is commonplace to characterise political violence and war in Africa as ‘internal’, encapsulated in the apparently neutral term ‘civil war’. As such, accounts of political violence tend to focus narrowly on the combatants or insurrectionary forces, failing to recognise or address the extent to which political violence is historically and globally constituted. The article addresses this problematic core assumption through examination of the case of Sudan, seeking to contribute to a rethinking of protracted political violence and social crisis in post-colonial Africa. The article interjects in such debates through the use and detailed exposition of a distinct methodological and analytical approach. It interrogates three related dimensions of explanation which are ignored by orthodox framings of ‘civil war’: (1) the technologies of colonial rule which (re)produced and politicised multiple fractures in social relations, bequeathing a fissiparous legacy of racial, religious and ethnic ‘identities’ that have been mobilised in the context of post-colonial struggles over power and resources; (2) the major role of geopolitics in fuelling and exacerbating conflicts within Sudan and the region, particularly through the cold war and the ‘war on terror’; and (3) Sudan's terms of incorporation within the capitalist global economy, which have given rise to a specific character and dynamics of accumulation, based on primitive accumulation and dependent primary commodity production. The article concludes that political violence and crisis are neither new nor extraordinary nor internal, but rather, crucial and constitutive dimensions of Sudan's neo-colonial condition. As such, to claim that political violence in Sudan is ‘civil’ is to countenance the triumph of ideology over history.

Keywords:

• Sudan
• ‘civil war’
• conflict
• global political economy

Acknowledgements

The article has benefited from discussions with Liz Blackwood, David Evans, Siba N. Grovogui, Branwen Gruffydd Jones, Rebecca Kumi, Murray Martin, Julian Saurin, Marc Williams, and friends and colleagues in Sudan. Liz Blackwood, Leon Liberman and Paige Mackenzie provided invaluable research assistance. Thanks are also due to participants at the Sudan panel of the African Studies Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans, 19–22 November 2009, to the editors of ROAPE and to an anonymous reviewer for detailed and constructive comments. The usual disclaimers apply. The article is dedicated to the memory of the late Mario Muor Muor.

Notes

The violent exploitation of south Sudan in the nineteenth century was, ‘as the Dinka remember it, “when the world was spoiled”’ (Markakis 1987, p. 29).

The term dar is commonly understood as ‘tribal homeland’. The ‘conventional understanding of historical Dar Fur … [as] a collection of tribal homelands (dars)’ is challenged by Mamdani, who argues that land in the Dar Fur Sultanate was held under different arrangements, from tribal and communal to individual, with various forms in between (2009, p. 114). The issue of land use, access and ownership within Darfur remains highly contested, cf. the debates on ‘Making sense of Darfur’, http://blogs.ssrc.org/darfur/category/darfur

Khalid (1990, p. 69).

Within Islam, the ummah is understood as the world community or diaspora of Muslims.