Over twenty years of civil war in predominantly Christian Southern Sudan has forced countless people from their homes. Transforming Displaced Women in Sudan examines the lives of women who have forged a new community in a shantytown on the outskirts of Khartoum, the largely Muslim, heavily Arabized capital in the north of the country. Sudanese-born anthropologist Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf delivers a rich ethnography of this squatter settlement based on personal interviews with displaced women and careful observation of the various strategies they adopt to reconstruct their lives and livelihoods. Her findings debunk the myth that these settlements are utterly abject, and instead she discovers a dynamic culture where many women play an active role in fighting for peace and social change. Abusharaf also examines the way women’s bodies are politicized by their displacement, analyzing issues such as religious conversion, marriage, and female circumcision. An urgent dispatch from the ongoing humanitarian crisis in northeastern Africa, Transforming Displaced Women in Sudan will be essential for anyone concerned with the interrelated consequences of war, forced migration, and gender inequality.
When the Sudanese civil war reaches his village in 1985, 11-year-old Salva becomes separated from his family and must walk with other Dinka tribe members through southern Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya in search of safe haven. Based on the life of Salva Dut, who, after emigrating to America in 1996, began a project to dig water wells in Sudan. By a Newbery Medal-winning author.
A Muslim scholar with extensive experience in Africa, T. Abdou Maliqalim Simone was recruited by the Islamic fundamentalist Shari‘a Movement in Sudan to act as consultant for its project to unite Muslims and non-Muslims in Khartoum's shanty towns. Based on his interviews with hundreds of individuals during this time, plus extensive historical and archival research, In Whose Image? is a penetrating examination of the use of Islam as a tool for political transformation. Drawing a detailed portrait of political fundamentalism during the 1985-89 period of democratic rule in the Sudan, Simone shows how the Shari‘a Movement attempted to shape a viable social order by linking religious integrity and economic development, where religious practice was to dominate all aspects of society and individuals' daily lives. However, because Sudanese society is remarkably diverse ethnically and religiously, this often led to conflict, fragmentation, and violence in the name of Islam. Simone's own Islamic background leads him to deplore the violence and the devastating psychological, economic, and cultural consequences of one form of Islamic radicalism, while holding to hope that a viable form of this inherently political religion can in fact be applied. As a counterpoint, he ends with a discussion of South Africa's Call of Islam, which seeks political unity through a more tolerant interpretation of Islam. As an introduction to religious discourse in Africa, this book will be widely read by students and scholars throughout African Studies, Religious Studies, Anthropology, and Political Science.
In July 2011 the Republic of South Sudan achieved independence, concluding what had been Africa's longest running civil war. The process leading to independence was driven by the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Movement, a primarily Southern rebel force and political movement intent on bringing about the reformed unity of the whole Sudan. Through the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005, a six year peace process unfolded in the form of an interim period premised upon 'making unity attractive' for the Sudan. A failed exercise, it culminated in an almost unanimous vote for independence by Southerners in a referendum held in January 2011. Violence has continued since, and a daunting possibility for South Sudan has arisen - to have won independence only to descend into its own civil war, with the regime in Khartoum aiding and abetting factionalism to keep the new state weak and vulnerable. Achieving a durable peace will be a massive challenge, and resolving the issues that so inflamed Southerners historically - unsupportive governance, broad feelings of exploitation and marginalisation and fragile ethnic politics - will determine South Sudan's success or failure at statehood. A story of transformation and of victory against the odds, this book reviews South Sudan's modern history as a contested region and assesses the political, social and security dynamics that will shape its immediate future as Africa's newest independent state.
Focusing on the relationship between gender and the state in the construction national identity politics in twentieth-century northern Sudan, the author investigates the mechanisms that the state and political and religious interest groups employ for achieving political and cultural hegemony. Hale argues that such a process involves the transformation of culture through the involvement of women in both left-wing and Islamist revolutionary movements. In drawing parallels between the gender ideology of secular and religious organizations in Sudan, Hale analyzes male positioning of women within the culture to serve the movement. Using data from fieldwork conducted between 1961 and 1988, she investigates the conditions under which women’s culture can be active, generating positive expressions of resistance and transformation. Hale argues that in northern Sudan women may be using Islam to construct their own identities and improve their situation. Nevertheless, she raises questions about the barriers that women may face now that the Islamic state is achieving hegemony, and discusses limits of identity politics.
After the 1989 Islamist coup in Sudan, the National Islamic Front under General Omar al-Bashir and Dr. Hasan Turabi attempted to institutionalise, codify and implement Shari'a law throughout the country. However, by 2005, with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement ending 22 years of civil war, the government agreed to halt its policy of Islamisation in the South. Shari'a and Islamism in Sudan explores how Sudanese society has been transformed by this period of implementation of Islamic Law, and furthermore asks, what are the continuing effects of this policy? And what are the implications of the Peace Agreement for the future of Islamist politics in Sudan and of the country? With data drawn from Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban's most recent research in the region, this book is a vital and unique examination of the nature of the Sudanese state and society, offering invaluable insight for all those interested in the politics, society, and the future of Sudan and the nature of political Islam.
Gender, Race, and Sudan’s Exile Politics examines the gendered and racialized discourses and practices of the Sudanese opposition in exile through the opposition movements of the 1990s and early 2000s, and discusses the history through which these discourses evolved. The military coup that brought the National Islamic Front (NIF)—now National Congress Party (NCP)— to power in 1989 not only forced most political parties, trade unions, and activists in Sudan into either exile politics or underground activism; it also urged many of Sudan’s political forces and activists to rethink the meaning of belonging and of the “Old” Sudan. In the mid-1990s, this involved a rethinking of the relationship between religion and politics, acknowledging Sudan’s diversity, acknowledging the need to restructure Sudan’s economy and politics to ensure equal access and participation for the historically marginalized, and committing to self-determination for the people of South Sudan. The concept of the New Sudan broadly captured this rethinking. This book interrogates the relationship between women’s organizations and activisms in exile on one hand, and nationalist, transformative, and other political movements and processes on the other. It further discuses transnational coalition building across difference, including racial difference, between women’s organization seeking to transform gender relations in Sudan and South Sudan.
Using more than a decade's worth of fieldwork in South Sudan, Clémence Pinaud here explores the relationship between predatory wealth accumulation, state formation, and a form of racism—extreme ethnic group entitlement—that has the potential to result in genocide. War and Genocide in South Sudan traces the rise of a predatory state during civil war in southern Sudan and its transformation into a violent Dinka ethnocracy after the region's formal independence. That new state, Pinaud argues, waged genocide against non-Dinka civilians in 2013-2017. During a civil war that wrecked the region between 1983 and 2005, the predominantly Dinka Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) practiced ethnically exclusive and predatory wealth accumulation. Its actions fostered extreme group entitlement and profoundly shaped the rebel state. Ethnic group entitlement eventually grew into an ideology of ethnic supremacy. After that war ended, the semi-autonomous state turned into a violent and predatory ethnocracy—a process accelerated by independence in 2011. The rise of exclusionary nationalism, a new security landscape, and inter-ethnic political competition contributed to the start of a new round of civil war in 2013, in which the recently founded state unleashed violence against nearly all non-Dinka ethnic groups. Pinaud investigates three campaigns waged by the South Sudan government in 2013–2017 and concludes they were genocidal—they sought to destroy non-Dinka target groups. She demonstrates how the perpetrators' sense of group entitlement culminated in land-grabs that amounted to a genocidal conquest echoing the imperialist origins of modern genocides. Thanks to generous funding from TOME, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
This book tells the story of the collaborative efforts of missionaries of the SIM, an international Christian mission founded in North America, and African Christians to evangelise in the wider Sudan (generally meaning countries spanning from Senegal to Ethiopia).