The division of Sudan into two countries on 9 July 2011 following the self-determination referendum of 9 January represents a rare development in Africa. Few examples exist of new state formations in the continent after the end of the colonial period. Answering the call of the IJMES editor to reflect on what this event will mean for our understanding of Sudan might take us in several directions. Let me use this opportunity to comment on two themes that have concerned me lately: the role of the state and the possibility that multiple national identities will evolve in North and South Sudan.

While providing southerners with pride and a feeling of self-rule in a new public space free from the Islamization and Arabization characterizing the northern one, the establishment of the new state will not automatically provide them with other rights such as democratic freedoms, human rights, and respect for cultural identities. The right to self-determination in this case has meant a right to establish an independent state and to be recognized by the international community. It is this principle that was confirmed through the referendum of 9 July 2011. However, in the multicultural situation of South Sudan it is not certain that the liberal ideals advanced by the international community will prevail. Nor is it certain that the new state will represent the only form of sovereignty within its borders. Thus, rather than having two territories with clear systems of sovereignty and historically based “nations” with “national consciousness,” we have a more confusing situation on the level of both state and society.

Let me start with the state. A major transformation is occurring, and to understand it we need to break away from classical Weberian terms. The two states do not control the means of violence, and they do not control all of the territory within their borders. They are thus forced to operate in a similar way to the nonstate institutions with which they compete. The point is not that this necessarily indicates the weakness of the two Sudanese states but rather that such competing organizational forms can become part of the state apparatus, both on a central level, as happened with the Sudan People's Liberation Army in the South, or on a peripheral level, as happened with the Janjawid in the North. Hence, the states can no longer be seen simply as hierarchical organizations, aimed at and based on a contract with the people. Rather, their structure is increasingly becoming what Bruce Kapferer and Bjørn Bertelsen call a “corporate entity” struggling to control and exploit its own people.Footnote ¹ The combination of rule by presidential decrees and the operation of networks at the margins of the state helps keep things in place more than traditional state institutions might do.

The situation is similar to what Jakob Rigi calls “a chaotic mode of domination,” in which a crisis of hegemony leads to a penetration of the coercive apparatus of state into the legal and illegal, the formal and informal, the legitimate and illegitimate networks of influence.Footnote ² In the absence of consensus, violence is used to achieve certain goals, taking over where power is not defined. But through violence and war, a new consensus can be reached as the basis for a new sociopolitical organization built on a new sovereignty. This is precisely what we saw during the civil war between the North and the South and what we see in the current crisis in Darfur, as well as in reports about continuous violence in the South. In this sense, violence and war are very creative forces. Hence, we academics should be careful with our prophecies. The use of violence in the contemporary world also helps transform the participants, and, instead of the state conquering rebels, we see the emergence of a transformed state that contains both the traditional, Weberian elements based on hierarchy and more decentralized and Deleuzean “nomadic” elements that resonate with aspects of the rebel groups with which they fought. Violent action is said to be “necessary” and its sphere is enlarged, bringing nation–states into phases of decay and new ethnic sovereignties into being.

The previous discussion suggests we face a situation in the two Sudans wherein there will be alternative sovereignties in both states and wherein the battle between these sovereignties will lead to continuous violence, which was also the situation in the united Sudan. Political subjects in the new states have not ceased to be tribal, racial, gendered, or any other designation of the post-Enlightenment anti-universal political subject we might think of. And violence might be as relevant a political tool as democratic participation.

The second question, then, is whether or not there is a way out of the spiral of violence. Or, to use the state-focused language from above, can we locate sovereignty in bodies other than the state? Is it possible to delink the right to self-determination from the nation–state and its territory and link it to new developments through which a new politics of nationalism is invented, opening new sorts of sovereignty? Of importance is thus the ways in which nationality underpins political order and the fact that nationality is plural, contested, and shifting. Another challenge is how to develop an understanding of the concept of “plural nationalities.” This issue was key to developments in the earlier, united Sudan, and the issue seems to remain important within each of the two new states that have emerged. As my previous discussion of the state dynamics indicate, this might lead to continuous violence. The alternative is to develop possibilities for a political order in which plurality is recognized, authority dispersed, and sovereignty shared—what Michael Keating calls the “plurinational” state, a new form of asymmetrical state in which “stateless nations” also find a place.Footnote ³

But in this quest for pluralism we have to deal with conceptual problems. Anthropologists, to speak for my own discipline, have tended to stretch concepts such as identity, ethnicity, and nationalism in ways that have confused rather than clarified issues. We have underestimated the explosive power of nationalism by equating that concept to other forms of collective identities, thus ignoring its normative underpinnings and claims to self-determination. By equating “nationalism” and “ethnicity” we have helped foster a rather naïve understanding of “multiculturalism,” underestimating the need for a radically new conceptualization of the links between territory, identity, and political institutions and functions. Equating nationalism and ethnicity will lead to “Balkanization.” The challenge is how to accommodate nationality claims within the existing political order without privileging a national culture. Doing so opens up space for a continuous process of “politics of negotiation” in which rights can be formulated on the basis of identities but without the language of nationhood. Thus we also need to keep the concepts of “self-determination” and “self-rule” apart. In the case of the Sudan, the former is the right to have a state, while the latter is closer to the rights envisioned within the “popular consultations” that were offered people in the so-called “marginal areas” (Nuba, Blue Nile, and Abyei). For these societies, national self-determination was out of the question. Their only option was to achieve more self-rule, in the sense of more personal autonomy and more democratic participation within an existing nation–state. Because the process ended in violent chaos, we shall not know how it might have evolved. This time the drama unfolded in the North, but the problem remains in both the North and the South.