THE SUDANESE STATE: VIOLENCE AS A MODE OF GOVERNANCE

Given that the country has barely known a year of peace within its territory since independence, any student of Sudan needs to tackle, directly or indirectly, the question of why structural and physical violence are part of the everyday realities of so many communities. The books under review share this concern, but vary widely in their ambitions, historical range and selected unit of analysis. While Johnson focuses on the high-level talks she helped broker between Khartoum's military-Islamist regime and the SPLA/M, Keen and Komey offer histories of the horrific fighting in the North–South border areas of the Nuba Mountains, Bahr al-Ghazal and South Darfur between 1983 and 2002. By contrast, Grawert's edited volume draws together interdisciplinary views from a dozen Sudanese and other African authors on the challenges of peace in the post-2005 era. Finally, the Sudan Handbook presents a series of contributions that, inter alia, give macro-perspectives on the politico-historical roots of many of Sudan's wars.

Much of the literature on Sudan has settled on the nature of the Sudanese state and the centre–periphery dynamics it produces as the root-cause of endemic conflict. The concentration of wealth and power in Khartoum and the adjacent riverain areas in the hands of the Awlad al-Bahr – the ‘children of the river’, namely the Ja'aliyyin, Shaigiyya and Danagla tribes – sits at the heart of the problem. As Justin Willis elegantly explains in the Sudan Handbook, successive Sudanese regimes have been deeply authoritarian and interested only in concentrating power at the centre, interacting with the peripheries through a mixture of repression and the cooption of ‘traditional’ leaders and local authorities. The governments of Ibrahim Abboud (1958–64), Sadiq Al-Mahdi (1966–7 & 1986–9), Ja'afar Nimeiri (1969–85), and Hassan Al-Turabi and Omar Al-Bashir (1989–present day) have all followed an extractive logic, asymmetrically integrating the useful elements of remote regions (labour, oil, water, and so on). The state acts, like so many of its African counterparts, as a gatekeeper skilled at manipulating the possibilities of extraversion in a complex international environment. While operating as suppliers of primary commodities, different Sudanese regimes have cleverly inserted their own interests into wider geopolitical dynamics, enabling them to reap substantial benefits from partnerships with more powerful international actors, from America to Egypt and from the Gulf states to China, Malaysia and India.

However, the Sudanese state is not all-powerful, and seldom controls all the processes it sets in motion: Sudan's sophisticated elites have recurrently pushed forward radical projects of transformation and portrayed their country as poised for an era of ‘civilisation’ and peace, but the outcomes of these plans have continuously failed the high modernist ambitions of their proponents. The internal contradictions of such visions and the fundamental limitations of the state – seen most clearly in its failure to realise planned political-economic and social shifts – help to explain why Sudan has failed to live up to its trumpeted potential, generation after generation.

Keen and Komey powerfully illustrate the local fall-out of one such grand design of top-down political and social engineering. The big push in Central Sudan for mechanised rain-fed agriculture, associated with President Ja'afar Nimeiri's idea that Sudan could become the world's breadbasket, had strongly disempowering effects at the micro-level. The land of smallholders, many living in the Nuba Mountains, was expropriated by Nimeiri's cronies, while pastoralists like the Baggara saw their migration corridors blocked as the president and his bureaucracy nationalised land-ownership. This undermined intricate local arrangements for co-existence, and deepened the marginalisation of millions of people. It also laid the foundation for internecine fighting between marginalised locals, and for the insertion of South Kordofan and Bahr al-Ghazal into the 1983–2005 civil war, as mass starvation and the attempted genocide of the Nuba people by Khartoum became integral aspects of the conflict. While Nimeiri boasted of a new nation that was capable of feeding the Middle East and Africa, famine returned to Sudan with a vengeance.

This example is important because it demonstrates that Sudan should not be understood as a ‘failed state’, in the standard meaning of one of the most overused terms in political science. The fundamental problem is not that the territory is inherently ungovernable or that the concept of meaningful central authority is doomed by a mismatch between state resources, ethno-cultural diversity and territorial scope, as has often been suggested for Chad, Somalia or Afghanistan. Rather, the Sudanese state consciously and intentionally fails large swathes of its population. Ruling elites – whether socialist, militarist or Islamist – have continually deployed specific narratives of cultural and racial supremacy that have been designed to legitimate the exploitation and repression of the peripheries. All too often the state has failed its people, not because it lacked capacity, but because those in power genuinely believed in the inferiority of other Sudanese communities.

At the same time, one should be careful not to exaggerate the influence of the state, which has continually struggled to penetrate society and implement its grand designs. As underlined by Willis, James and Sidahmed in the Sudan Handbook, Sudanese history is replete with failed development and social engineering schemes. Khartoum rules the peripheries through coercion and patronage, but this is both cause and effect of the weakness of the Sudanese state: while ruling cliques are able to manipulate this situation for their own benefit, their lack of legitimacy, and the failure to fully integrate local populations, undermines the prospects for their transformative agendas. Neither Nimeiri nor today's military-Islamist rulers had the political support, societal control or solid understanding of the peripheral regions required to re-engineer Sudan in-line with their modernist dreams.

WARS WITHIN WARS: THE MULTIPLE REALITIES OF CONFLICT

The brutal logic of governance developed by the Sudanese state is the root-cause of endemic violence, but, as argued by most of the books under review, conflict in Sudan, as elsewhere, is complex and multilayered, and can only be fully understood through inter-disciplinary engagement. Famine – that is, prolonged periods of extreme hunger but also mass starvation – has been a key subtheme running through Sudan's wars, both in the nineteenth century and today. Thus Douglas Johnson's preface rightly hails David Keen's The Benefits of Famine as ‘essential reading’: even though it covers the years between 1983 and 1989, it remains an invaluable contribution to the literatures on famine, relief, Sudanese history, and the economic drivers of conflict in Sudan. Keen, who helped pioneer a new wave of research on the causes, triggers and consequences of war, continues to provide scholars with a useful framework of analysis for understanding how complex emergencies produce not just tragic victims, but also many winners.

The Benefits of Famine highlights the functions of discourses of ‘humanitarian crisis’ that posit straightforward biophysical explanations – mass starvation as a result of a deficit of food brought on by drought – and in doing so have allowed successive Sudanese governments, in Bahr al-Ghazal in the 1980s–1990s as well as in Darfur and South Kordofan today, to mask the structural reasons and active agency that made people vulnerable in the first place. Such a framing of the causes of famine also enables international organisations to steer clear from the messy world of politics they so detest, in order to focus on ‘technical’ questions about how to get the policy ‘right’ – often with disastrous consequences. Yet Keen's argument is not restricted to this important Foucauldian macro-level critique; he also provides fascinating empirical material on how the death of hundreds of thousands of Dinka cattle herders along the North–South border in the late 1980s was the logical – and, for some, intended – consequence of the conflictual political economy which characterises the Sudanese state, and state–periphery relations in South Kordofan and Bahr al-Ghazal in particular. In other words, Sudan's conflict–hunger nexus is both historically embedded and the product of deliberate, economically rational choices.

Keen's book is an important reminder that commerce, violence, displacement and famine have long been intertwined; Kordofan and Bahr al-Ghazal were at the heart of the nineteenth-century slave trade, when Northern Sudanese merchants, foreign adventurers and (forcibly recruited) Nuba troops penetrated into the South to capture human labour. Entire swathes of the territory were depopulated, with hunger a big killer. As a key link in the slave trade, and slave owners in their own right, the Baggara benefited substantially from the exploitation of the Dinka, South Sudan's largest ethnic group. After the defeat of the Mahdi's followers in 1898, the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium repressed the trade, and both the Dinka and the Baggara were subsequently politically and economically marginalised throughout the twentieth century. Given their key role in the Mahdiyya and their traditional support for the Al-Mahdi dynasty (and later their political party, Hizb al-Umma), this was a bitter pill for the Baggara to swallow.

In the 1970s, a perfect storm began to gather as ecological changes in North Kordofan pushed pastoralists and their herds southwards, putting increasing pressure on scarce resources like land and water just as Nimeiri's breadbasket strategy was getting into full swing, claiming millions of acres of land for mechanised farming. The Benefits of Famine skilfully describes how local actors differed in their reactions to both deepening marginalisation and the growing involvement of riverain elites in the local political economy. As Khartoum pushed economic transformation and an increasingly aggressive Islamic agenda, Baggara leaders began to bandwagon and formed militias, the infamous Murahalin, through whom successive governments would wage war in the South and, after 1983, against the SPLA/M along the tenth parallel. The Murahalin were not paid, but, in an eerie parallel with nineteenth-century cattle raids, were given carte blanche to attack Dinka communities, a licence they used to kill men, steal cattle and, less frequently, to carry off children to be used as slaves in the North.

The famine decimated the Dinka population in south-western Sudan in the second half of the 1980s; aid workers reported some of the worst starvation rates ever recorded in Meiram, West Kordofan. Importantly, this episode of mass murder needs to be understood in light of what African Rights (1997) has called ‘the coalition for famine’. Local unemployed Baggara youth experienced upward social mobility through the raids; Baggara leaders cemented their ties with Khartoum by using their youth in the anti-SPLA/M counterinsurgency; owners of mechanised farms could employ displaced, famished Dinka as ultra-cheap labour on their schemes; and army generals and Northern merchants were able to use the war as a pretext to block or manipulate humanitarian relief, which both suited their military goals and kept grain prices artificially high, and in turn pushed up profits, especially when people were starving. Keen's analysis shows us that we need to analyse the whole commercial chain that linked local events in Abyei to processes of accumulation in Khartoum and regional food markets in the Middle East, if we are to fully grasp how famines in Sudan have been underpinned by conscious political choices motivated by an exclusionary economic logic. The conflict–hunger nexus operates on multiple scales, serving specific functions: the Dinka were not coincidental, apolitical victims dying due to abject poverty; it was their relative wealth – their water points and labour resources – that ensured they were singled out by the coalition for famine and subjected to extreme violence.

Gunda Kunda Komey's book builds on some of Keen's work. He echoes the importance of multiple causes in explaining conflict, and proposes a dynamic engagement with sub-national actors and their initiatives, concentrating mostly on the plains and hills known as the Nuba Mountains. His focus is on identity and culture, and the way in which they relate to land and conflict, as key dimensions of war and peace. Historically the relationship between the Baggara and the Nuba has been complex, but in the pre-colonial period it was characterised mostly by cooperation, inter-marriage and pragmatic arrangements that allowed both to pursue their respective livelihood strategies. Conflict has always been part of the relationship, but for most of history was local and not beyond reconciliation. Colonialism by the British and the riverain Sudanese elites changed this picture and ultimately culminated in the collapse of inter-communal relations in the 1990s, as the central government launched an all-out offensive against the Nuba, many of whom had joined John Garang's SPLA/M.

The Baggara were intermediaries between colonial officials and the Nuba, Komey writes, but British fears over growing arabisation led to the segregation of the ‘Arab’ Baggara and ‘African’ Nuba. Though this didn't have the same detrimental impact as in South Sudan, it aggravated existing inequalities, placing the Nuba on the defensive, losing ever more land to ‘development initiatives’, such as cotton production, run by Arab groups. However, while as a broad sketch this is not inaccurate, Komey's analysis is relatively weak on the underlying political economy of these processes, particularly in the more recent period. His discussion of mechanised farming (and associated grabbing of Nuba land) in the 1970s and 1980s lacks detail and a broader context, and fails to contribute to our understanding of the complexities of Nimeiri's land reforms, while his unnuanced criticism of the faceless Jillaba – the Northern riverain merchants characterised as the bad guys at every stage of economic change – illuminates little.

By contrast, Komey offers a strong account of the relationship between narratives of land rights, Sudan's confusing legal pluralism, shifting political power (locally and nationally), and ethno-cultural identity. While marginalisation and loss of livelihoods is one consequence of the Sudanese state's mix of violence and neglect, Komey argues that the Nuba have responded to their inability to reverse existing centre–periphery dynamics by developing a more assertive Nuba identity, complete with ‘harder’ discourses concerning Nuba land and history. Years of forced Islamisation attempts by the Islamist Al-Ingaz (‘Salvation’) regime and a sense of betrayal at the hands of their Baggara cousins – who by and large sided with Khartoum – have led to profound changes in how the Nuba see themselves, their neighbours and the prospects for political and socio-cultural change in Sudan. Both the author himself and his people explicitly link the essence of Nuba identity – and thus their survival as a culture – to conceptions of land-ownership: both past and possible future assaults on land rights are understood through the lens of attempted ethnocide. Komey persuasively illustrates how changing perceptions of the link between land and identity at the local and national level are both causes and consequences of violent conflict in Sudan.

UNDERSTANDING THE COMPREHENSIVE PEACE AGREEMENT

Hilda Johnson's book on the negotiations that ended the conflict between Al-Ingaz and the SPLA/M differs from most studies of war and peace in Sudan. Johnson, Norway's Development Minister between 1997 and 2005, has written a unique first-hand account of how the Machakos (2002) and Naivasha (2004) Protocols were negotiated, and aims to comprehend why a deal was signed at the macro-political level to end the fighting. Though Waging Peace is disappointingly uncritical of the international community's role (both historically and during the negotiations), many of its anecdotes reveal a fascinating picture of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA)'s main protagonists, and shed light on issues that continue to electrify Sudanese politics, such as the disputed border region of Abyei, the sensitivities of security sector reform, and the uncomfortable trade-offs that international actors have to make when engaging with deeply authoritarian political movements.

While Johnson has managed to write neither a political page-turner nor a landmark self-critical reflection on peacemaking in Africa, the often dry enumeration of meetings and deadlines ultimately succeeds in demonstrating that the CPA required an extraordinary effort from a number of parties, including the Islamists of the National Congress Party (NCP), the SPLA/M, the IGAD mediators and the Troika (the US, UK and Norway). Talks between the Salvation government and its nemesis started in July 1989, mere weeks after Hassan Al-Turabi's coup, but political calculations, geostrategic influences, economic interests in war, and diametrically opposed visions of what Sudan should be, inhibited serious breakthroughs for more than a decade. Waging Peace essentially depicts the CPA as an against-the-odds battle to break out of this cycle led by two brave individuals, SPLA/M chairman Dr John Garang and Sudanese vice-president Ali Osman Taha (NCP), ably supported by the international community who helped to build momentum for peace.

Johnson attempts to explain negotiating strategies and how these shaped the final peace agreement, analysing the internal faultlines that Garang had to navigate in the SPLA/M. One such headache was the status of the ‘Three Areas’ – Abyei, the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile – regions of socio-cultural transition between North and South. The Three Areas are legally attached to North Sudan, but were and are mainly politically allied to the SPLA/M, fighting alongside Southerners for Garang's ‘New Sudan’ project. Garang's vision was of a united, democratic and secular Sudan in which the stranglehold of the Awlad al-Bahr over political and economic power would be broken, and projects of religious, cultural or ethnic hegemony could no longer be imposed on the South and other marginalised regions, such as the Three Areas. This view was anathema to the Islamist new Sudan of Turabi, Bashir and Taha, but was also not very popular within Garang's own movement, as demonstrated by the immense tensions that arose between his intellectual framework and the personal convictions of most of the illiterate (Southern) SPLA/M fighters, for whom the casus belli was simple: to keep out the ‘Arabs’ for good. Most notably, while many in the SPLA/M leadership cherished great ambitions within the context of a New Sudan, and commanders from the Three Areas and Southern border regions hoped to emulate and possibly beat the old masters in Khartoum at their own game, those at the grass-roots typically demanded secession. As Johnson rightly argues, it was this clash of aspirations that ultimately led Garang to adopt a virtually immovable stance on the issue of Southern self-determination in the negotiations.

Thereafter, self-determination became a non-negotiable demand of the movement, recognised for the first time by international partners in the IGAD Declaration of Principles and, vis-à-vis the SPLA/M, by the Salvation regime in the Machakos Protocol. For SPLA/M leaders, pushing for self-determination was both a political necessity and a handy tactical fallback. Particularly after Taha rejected Garang's offer to drop the idea of a Southern referendum on secession in exchange for a fully secular Sudan (and also rejected the idea of a North-South confederation), the SPLA/M hierarchy realised that self-determination was a necessary prize if rank-and-file rebels were to be persuaded to follow their leadership and walk towards peace. Self-determination also kept open the opportunity for the SPLA/M to push for secession, and hence to become the sole government of a separate country, in the event that reforming a united Sudan proved to be impossible. Of course, this is what ultimately transpired in the CPA interim period, to the disappointment of many in Sudan (not least in the Three Areas) and the international community.

While Johnson highlights Garang's towering personality and his iron grip on SPLA/M decision-making, she is less sharp in analysing the politics of the Al-Ingaz regime. Although the Khartoum's military-Islamist rulers (and the enigmatic Ali Osman) are clearly a difficult subject for study, Johnson's explanations for why they ultimately signed the CPA are insufficient. Waging Peace rightly draws attention to the growing interest of the Bush administration in Sudan and the geopolitical earthquake of 11 September 2001. The collapse of the Twin Towers set off alarm bells in Khartoum, where the government recalled the 1998 American cruise missiles strikes on the Al-Shifa factory, and feared it would be targeted in the Global War on Terror. Spymaster Salah Gosh thus offered the CIA valuable information on the Al-Qaeda network, while President Bashir indicated that he was ready for serious negotiations to end the civil war. For Johnson, the stance of Taha, and thus the NCP, was essentially determined by fear of America, hawkish ‘spoilers’ (General Bakri Hassan Saleh is frequently named) notwithstanding. In other words, ‘none of these [internal] political developments was decisive. External factors were’ (p. 18).

Johnson's overriding focus on the international environment means that the book contributes little to our understanding of the way in which the gradual change in identity of the Salvation regime that followed the removal of Al-Ingaz' godfather Hassan Al-Turabi played into the negotiations and the CPA. While the palace coup had more to do with individual power struggles than policy differences, Turabi's eclipse not only consolidated the shift in foreign policy, but also meant that the regime ceased to rely so heavily on the ideological claim that it, and only it, had the right to rule. Economic growth and the delivery of jobs and services to key constituencies became central to the NCP's political strategy in the post-Turabi era; the first petro-exports in 1999 are not incidental to this story, as they allowed Bashir and Taha to expand their patronage networks and ‘oil’ their move towards a new identity.

As the first petro-dollars poured in during wartime, some in the regime argued that a stable production environment would generate even bigger profits. Peace thus acquired important economic advocates who argued with the inner-core of Al-Ingaz that a deal with the South would free up the resources that could then be invested in infrastructure and services. Ending the war also promised to facilitate the lifting of American sanctions and the normalisation of Sudan's status in the international community: rich pickings not to be ignored for a leadership that was seeking to consolidate its hold on power by establishing new patronage networks. Moreover, Ali Osman seemed keen, possibly sensing a historic opportunity to resolve the Southern question where his political father, Turabi, had failed. Ali Osman's voice carried huge clout inside a regime that urgently needed to foster cooperation between the security hawks and what remained of the Islamist Movement, of which he was now the undisputed leader. These internal developments, along with the realities of military stalemate on the battlefield, and the minority view of those who actually advocated a break-up of Sudan (to shed the costly Southern ‘ballast’), were arguably just as important as Johnson's ‘external factors’ in bringing Al-Ingaz to the negotiating table and paving the way for the signing of the CPA.

PEACEBUILDING IN THE VILLAGES: GENDER, LANGUAGE AND COMMUNITY

Waging Peace concludes that even if the CPA turns out to represent more of a cease-fire between Khartoum and the South than a permanent settlement of Sudan's fundamental problems, the merits of a (flawed) deal should not be underestimated. But as shown by Komey and a handful of worthwhile chapters in Grawert's otherwise forgettable edited volume, addressing the multiple forms that extreme violence has taken in Sudanese history, and building peace in the deeper sense of the term, will require broader transformations of values and practices.

Several authors in After the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan analyse the regional and local levels, a strategy which adds layers of complexity to peacebuilding but also offers more space to experiment with pragmatic ways forward. Marilyn Ossome and Joseph Lodoing Lubajo concentrate on the cultural dimension of greater human security from two radically different angles. Ossome's focus is on the displacement of people and new forms of insecurity that have emerged beyond the scene of conflict in Kenyan refugee camps. She highlights how fleeing warzones in Upper Nile and Bahr al-Ghazal has not brought physical safety for many Southern Sudanese girls and women, who face sexual violence through a distortion of Nilotic cultural practices and traditional authority structures. Camps, with their twilight legal structures, their lack of employment opportunities and their internal politics, are violent environments where forced marriage, abduction and rape are rife.

Ossole is particularly critical of the ‘Lost Boys’, orphaned children who, in the midst of intra-SPLA/M fighting in 1991–3, trekked to Ethiopian and Kenyan refugee camps. Many were resettled to the US, where they were beatified by some as victims who had courageously resisted Islamic fundamentalism. She describes how many Lost Boys now return to Kenya and/or South Sudan to demand young virgin brides, invoking Dinka or Nuer traditions to obtain them without consulting the girls or their mothers about their marriage proposals. These social conflicts often escalate into physical confrontation including beatings, forced incarceration and the rape of the selected ‘brides’. Ossole situates this hidden legacy of conflict in a set of cultural, political and economic factors that were heavily shaped by the civil war, rightly calling attention to the plight of women in the two Sudans, which remain dominated by men.

By contrast, Lubajo emphasises education, culture and language, highlighting the challenges that nation-building faces at the macro-level, and the importance of working towards greater tolerance of diversity at the regional and local levels. South Sudan is typically characterised as linguistically diverse, but with English as an emerging lingua franca. But Lubajo shows that such a depiction ignores the prevalence of Arabic, which is widely spoken in commerce and politics, and is also used as a language of education in Upper Nile, Unity, Bahr al-Ghazal and Jonglei states. The use of Arabic is partly the result of previous islamisation and arabisation projects, but also reflects these areas' geographic proximity to the North, the high quality educational services provided by Dawa Al-Islamiyyah, and patterns of voluntary or war-induced migration to Khartoum, Gezira or Kordofan. Variations in language and culture within South Sudan also roughly coincide with the politico-cultural distinction between the old regions of Bahr al-Ghazal and Upper Nile (Dinka and Nuer dominated, SPLA/M heartland), and more Anglophone Equatoria (closer to Kenya and Uganda than Khartoum, and weary of Dinka dominance). Lubajo's chapter reminds us that in South Sudan, where until recently only 500 girls a year completed primary school out of a population of 8 million, enduring links with North Sudan and the continued importance of Arabic in public life present challenges to nation-building, but need not be threats to the identity of the new state. While linguistic and cultural diversity and complexity are often politically and administratively inconvenient, such realities should not be rejected as an alien residue from the past, but rather should be embraced as part and parcel of South Sudan; this is important both for the quality of education received by South Sudan's impoverished young population, and because an attempt to eradicate Arabic would most likely be politically destabilising.

Whereas Ossole and Lubajo concentrate on the challenges of healing a traumatised Southern Sudanese population, Wassara and Komey reflect on peacebuilding in South Kordofan. Wassara rejects the notion that the conflict can be understood as a battle for supremacy between the Nuba and the Baggara, and analyses a range of local disputes and conflict resolution efforts to show that the faultlines cannot be reduced to communal identities or economic interests: most notably, some Nuba farmers joined the government's side, while some Baggara pastoralists crossed over to the SPLA/M. While genuine and successful ‘peace dialogues’ are occurring on the ground, continued interference, mainly from the NCP, is inhibiting fundamental progress. Khartoum has reorganised its patronage networks and given an Islamic veneer to Native Administration in the region, strengthening its political grip through the proliferation of new positions of authority. Power politics and economic marginalisation – as well as the outbreak of renewed large-scale conflict between the SPLA/M and the Sudanese armed forces in June 2011 – continue to harm the reconstitution of South Kordofan's social fabric, but local initiatives that try to escape the NCP-SPLA/M straitjacket offer some hope for the future.

This last point is echoed by Komey, who finds historical precedents for cross-ethnic partnerships even in the hardest of times, such as when Nuba and Baggara leaders decided to open ‘peace markets’ in the midst of bloody fighting in the 1990s. Based on a mutual recognition of conflict-induced hardships, and the potential for mutual gain (medicine and salt for the Nuba, grain and access to pastures for the Baggara), traders circumvented military restrictions and revived patterns of Nuba–Baggara interdependence. Despite attempts to repress these aswaq al-salam, some Nuba and Baggara continued a clandestine, highly mobile trade that saved lives and eased the suffering of many in South Kordofan. Thus, while Baggara–Nuba relations continued to feature real inequalities during this period, the markets and related local peace agreements that emerged demonstrate the on-going necessity of cooperation between these groups – something that even genocidal war appears unable to change.

STRUCTURE AND AGENCY IN SUDAN

Taken together, the five books reviewed illuminate many of the deep structural reasons for the extreme violence that the Sudanese polity has reproduced throughout the decades, with the Khartoum–SPLA/M war as its darkest nadir. The nature of the state itself, and the associated centre–periphery tensions it has generated, sit at the heart of the problem. However, a multitude of political, economic, ecological and cultural factors have also contributed to the violence at the local and regional levels, where insecurity is not solely directed from above.

But, as Komey's more optimistic analysis of the Nuba and Baggara demonstrates, most of the authors considered here refuse to sink into hopeless pessimism. So while these texts analyse the protagonists who have consciously worsened conflict and humanitarian crises, they also highlight the sorts of agency that can (potentially) break the vicious cycle. The international community is one possible key player, but few of the contributors apart from Johnson put much faith in regional partners, Western donors, or Sudan's Asian suitors. The local and regional levels might be a better place to start. Many accounts associate South Kordofan with endless violence, yet the examples from the Nuba Mountains underscore the way in which, even in such an extremely difficult environment, economic interdependence creates incentives for communities to engage in dialogue, creating opportunities to rebuild what has been broken so many times.

Reading these five books on 9 July 2011, the eve of the birth of the two new territories, was a sober reminder of the massive challenges confronting the elites and populations of both North and South. The old unified Sudan, which often deliberately failed its people, is dead. Let us hope that the two new Sudans develop a very different logic of war and peace in the future.