The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars

The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars. By Douglas H. Johnson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Pp. 256. $54.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. This is one of the most sober books about the Sudan conflict I have ever read. Unlike most scholars who study the civil war in that country as a revolting occurrence, Douglas Johnson accepts it as a matter of fact and history, referencing the American Civil War, "the war of ten thousand nasty incidents" (p. xx). To level the field for this cool-headed approach, the author takes issue with representations of the war by the media, humanist lobbies, and academicians. Journalists cover the war in atavistic terms spelling a return to the "Heart of Darkness" (p. xiv). Humanitarian pressure groups are romantic and imbued with an ideal of justice both abstract and absolute. Academics continue to write the history of the country "from the vantage point and perspective of central institutions" of the Muslim North, relegating the rest of the country "to an exotic periphery" (pp. xv-xvi). The first victim of this reassessment of the North-South conflict in Sudan is the popular, almost revered, conception that the Sudan civil war stems from an "an age-old confrontation between 'cultures' defined by blood lines ('Arabs' v. 'Africans')" (p. xiii). Instead Johnson suggests that the root cause of the conflict is better looked for in the country's traditions of governance, particularly a tradition of governance he calls the "Sudanic state." First installed by the Turkish conquerors in 1821, this state has reproduced itself irrespective of the identity of the rulers, be they foreigner or Sudanese. This exploitative state in the North impoverished its Muslim subjects, "who passed on their losses to non-Muslims on the periphery" (p. 5). In the Nimeiri years this state invested in mechanized farming in Kordofan and Darfur, hastening the economic and social dislocation of herders and farmers. Those dislocated fought with the periphery people of the South and the Nuba Mountains over resources. According to Johnson, the IMF and UNDP are also implicated in the working of the Sudanic state; they bought the foundational politics of the state as plans for developing rural areas. Even the recurrence of slavery in the context of the civil war is attributed to the impoverished Baggara, who passed their own losses onto the Southern Sudanese. By taking Southern captives, the Baggara "add labor to their own households and increase their incomes through the trade and exchange of slaves" (p. 157). Johnson puts governance rather than identity politics at the center of any meaningful analysis of the Southern Sudan predicament. …