Matthew LeRiche and Matthew Arnold's timely South Sudan: From Revolution to Independence sets out to ‘describe the transformation of Southern Sudan into South Sudan’ (p. 20), and in this task it succeeds admirably. It is an ‘excellent guide’, as Alex de Waal puts it in his blurb, to the new country's difficult and ongoing transition, illuminating it from a series of different angles: economy and foreign policy, militias and militarism, John Garang's death and Salva Kiir's leadership, the CPA and the referendum. As such, the book may be most useful for a policy audience looking for a ready, comprehensive account of the current political and economic landscape in South Sudan, or for those seeking clear introductions to particular aspects of today's conjuncture. The one drawback is that some of the later chapters may become dated in a few years, but it seems probable that the book will remain the go-to source for assessments of South Sudanese politics for some time to come.

The book's success in reaching beyond description to engage in academic debates around Sudan is more mixed. It does effectively show the roots of some of today's dilemmas in particular episodes of the past, as well as the persistence of those dilemmas over the decades. It is less effective, however, in providing a convincing treatment of what is presented as the central analytical question of the book: ‘Why did a First Civil War aimed at secession result in a form of semi-autonomy, while a Second Civil War fought in the name of national revolution ended in secession?’ (p. 2). It is the latter part of this question that most concerns the authors. Unfortunately, it does not receive an adequate answer.

This question is important within the authors' account because, according to them, southern Sudanese were overwhelmingly and consistently in favour of secession, even though the SPLA had as its stated objective a unified New Sudan. Thus, the story they tell is one of Garang, committed to a New Sudan for ideological and pragmatic reasons, nearly single-handedly struggling to overcome an ‘almost universal leaning’ (p. 26) among southern Sudanese for secession. Garang's centrality to the pro-unification agenda is such that, according to the authors, with his death ‘the revolutionary character of the SPLA changed overnight’ (p. 116).

The authors recognise that, if antipathy to national unity among southern Sudanese was universal, a tough question arises about popular political agency: ‘How a mass of people can fight, suffer and die for a cause not apparently in line with wider popular opinion’ (p. 25). Their immediate answer is to declare that ‘this ability to reconcile two seemingly contradictory goals is typical of the South Sudanese, who possess an impressive capacity for survival and pragmatism’ (p. 25). Another side of the same question is why Garang was unable to build popular support for national unity; in answer to this, the authors invoke Robert O. Collins, who writes that ‘the principal characteristic of Nilotic … society during the past hundred years has been its hostility to change’. Thus, they argue, the ‘intensely conservative nature of Southern Sudanese societies … was perhaps the single biggest reason Garang could never overcome the popular preference within the South for secession over his New Sudan vision’ (p. 233). It is left unclear why so many people were willing to give up their lives for a political project in which they apparently did not believe – the reader is pointed towards Garang's charisma or towards the suggestion that, for most SPLA fighters, the war was a matter of ‘personal and community survival’ (p. 82), not ideology.

Instead of explaining the apparent disjuncture between the SPLA's New Sudan project and the popular demand for secession by reference to a character trait of southern Sudanese, the book would have profited from an account of the contentious, complex debates and controversies within Sudanese society, south and north, over political identity and the question of unity versus secession. These debates occasionally receive passing mention: for example, the authors invoke the support that Garang expected for the New Sudan from ‘youths, unions and intellectuals throughout the country’ (p. 40). Here we see a glimpse of the rich organisational, associational and intellectual life of Sudan out of which the demand for a New Sudan and an army committed to that ideal emerged as one of many demands and many political and military organisations. Unfortunately, that glimpse is the last that is seen of these Sudanese political actors, and, instead of an analysis of the reasons that intellectuals, youths, unions or different communities had for supporting or not supporting the SPLA, it is a ‘Relief Worker and supporter of SPLA/M’ who declares simply that Garang ‘was the glue that held everything together’ (p. 40) – begging the very question that needs to be answered.

The supposition of unanimity within the south on secession hides the internal debates over the question, as well as the nuances of and rationales behind different positions. Indeed, the stark dichotomy offered in the referendum in no way defined the options available to the Sudanese over the decades, but rather was a reduction of those many political possibilities to two in order to meet the exigencies of peace. Also left unaddressed are the complexities of what the New Sudan project itself was, and is. Other analysts have argued that New Sudan meant different things to different audiences, and that many of the political forces and actors aligning behind the SPLA saw themselves as in fact fighting for secession, despite Garang's reassurances to international audiences. These possibilities, and their consequences, are not accounted for.

These problems derive from a more general methodological limitation of the book, namely its focus on the agency of a few political elites, particularly within the SPLA, to the exclusion of most of the Southern population. This is not to say that elite politics are not important – much of the war did indeed take shape through the machinations of ‘Domineering Personalities’, in the authors’ phrase. However, the lack of an account of the social bases for the demand for secession, the internal conflict over that demand, or the popularity of the SPLA despite its apparent espousal of unity, creates a problem for a narrative that makes popular agency the main motive force for secession, and thus for the transformation of southern Sudan into South Sudan.