Conflict and Politics of Identity in Sudan

Idris, Amir H. Conflict and Politics of Identity in Sudan. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. 143 pp.

The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) established a framework for the National Congress Party-dominated Government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) to end decades of civil war. Arguably, the CPA is Sudan's best opportunity to build a sustainable peace, given the significant international commitment to normalizing relations between the ex-combatants. Yet, as the parties bicker over the slow pace of the CPA's implementation, and the conflict in the troubled Darfur region continues to defy resolution, Sudan's prospects for future stability are becoming increasingly uncertain, to say the least.

Although Conflict and Politics of Identity in Sudan was published prior to the signing of the CPA, the author, Amir H. Idris, explains that the peace process is destined to fail. This is because the peace process is based on a flawed belief that the cause of Sudan's wars is the clash of two rigid and incompatible ethnic and religious blocs in the north and south. Idris highlights Darfur, where groups notionally considered Arab and Muslim in the northsouth context are warring with each other and the Government, as a clear illustration that race and culture are not the real causes of conflict in this country. Instead, Idris contends that any analysis needs to refer to the twin historical legacies of slavery and colonialism. Conflict in Sudan, therefore, is caused by "the racialized state that transformed...cultural identities into political identities through the practice of slavery in the precolonial period, indirect rule during the colonial period, and state sponsored Islamization and Arabization in the postcolonial period" (p.6). The survival of this racialized state, Idris asserts, depends on its ability to use violence and oppression to control those whose ethnic and cultural origins are deemed by the state as unworthy of the entitlements and protection of citizenship.

In arguing his thesis, Idris presents a very brief narration of Sudan's history. Since the sixteenth century, Idris argues that one of the drivers of state expansion in northeastern Africa was the acquisition of slaves from Southern Sudan, and Western Sudan (Darfur) to a lesser extent. The focus on dominating other cultural groups racialized the state, with rights and entitlements awarded to the slave owning elite who defined themselves as Arab and Muslim. This view of citizenship as a group's entitlements rather than individual rights, contends Idris, was reinforced during the colonial period. In particular, through die policy of indirect rule in the 1930s the British colonial administration created an autonomous region in Southern Sudan, protecting what the British thought was an indigenous African identity against northern Arab domination.

At independence, Idris asserts that Sudan's nationalists failed to understand the racialized state that they had inherited, and did not develop inclusive policies that transcended ethnic and cultural rivalries. Consequently, the northern elites, with their traditional monopoly on power and wealth, dominated the new state and projected their Arab and Muslim identity onto the post-colonial state. Those from Southern Sudan and parts of Western Sudan did not readily fit into the national story of Sudan as an Arab and Muslim nation, allowing the state to treat them not as citizens but as subjects, vulnerable to state violence and cultural domination.

Readers familiar witii the work of Idris, an assistant professor of African stuthes at Fordham University, will recognize the thesis described above, as it was initially discussed in his 2001 book, Sudan's Civil War: Slavery, Race and Formational Identities. Nonetìieless, Conflict and Politics of Identity in Sudan builds upon mis analysis of the causes of Sudan's conflicts and advocates a new transformative political discourse mat does not force the integration orthe separation of Sudanese, but instead focuses on deconstructing Sudanese society witii the aim of restructuring "power relations and authority between groups and classes in such a way as to make ethnicity/race irrelevant as social and political criterion for entitlethent" (pp. 103-94).

Such a radical transformation in how Sudanese view each other is possible, Idris argues, and he uses his fieldwork among Southern Sudanese refugees in Egypt in the late 1990s to illustrate mis. Drawing upon dozens of interviews with Southern Sudanese living in Cairo, Idris explains how the shared experience of being a refugee in a hostile third country has broken down racial and ethnic divisions amongst the Sudanese, creating a new community empowered to reconsider identity and relationships. The insights mat Idris gives into the lives and experiences of the Southern Sudanese community in Cairo is a strength of mis book, and is a subject mat deserves greater scholarly attention man it has to date.