Understanding the armed conflict in South Sudan

The armed conflict that began in December 2013 in the Republic of South Sudan is responsible for the deaths of more than 1,000 people and the dislocation of another 200,000. The insurgence in the world's youngest country is rooted in the post-colonial history of Sudan, one of the world's oldest civilizations, said ASU professor Abdullahi Gallab, in an in-depth interview with Pacifica Radio of California on Jan. 6. 

In a half-hour segment within the "Letters and Politics" program, Gallab explained that the two periods of colonialism Sudan experienced under Turko-Egyptian rule (1821-1885) and Great Britain (1898-1956) created everlasting problems for Sudanese society.

During Turko-Egyptiaon rule "Sudan was divided into two parts: one was subject to taxation and one to slavery. Slavery had deep implications," Gallab notes. "Not only was the country drained of manpower by the creation of a slave army, but those enslaved territories were marginalized, and their remaining populace looked at as some kind of inferior human being by those who had not been enslaved, which I call a homo-referential form of racism. Sudan was prevented from acting as one country and this has a relationship to what happened later, when the British applied a closed districts policy, claiming that the south of Sudan was not ready to be exposed to the northern part, nor the outside world.

"These issues of marginalization were never addressed before the 2011 independence," Gallab says. "There was a failure of the Islamist government to take on nation-building and create a state able to satisfy the aspirations of its citizens. At the same time, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) should've widened political participation after indpendence. That didn't happen. The Sudan People's Army (SPLA) in the new state should have integrated its military groups into a national army. That didn't happen either."

In the interview Gallab also addressed Sudan's strategic geo-political position in the region and the misunderstanding of South Sudan's secession as somehow a conflict between a Muslim north and a Christian south. And he argued that the characterization of the present conflict in the South as a civil war was utterly false.

Gallab is the author of the books "The First Islamist Republic: Development and Disintegration of Islamism in the Sudan," "A Civil Society Deferred: The Tertiary Grip of Violence in the Sudan" and "Their Second Republic: Islamism in the Sudan from Disintegration to Oblivion," which will come out in June 2014. 

Active in the Sudan Studies Association of North America, which now has its home within African and African American Studies in ASU's School of Social Transformation, Gallab is former editor and current publisher of the organization's Bulletin. He is president of the organization for 2013-2015. This U.S.-based association of scholars promotes the advancement of research in the field of Sudan studies and facilitates the distribution of knowledge and understanding of Greater Sudan and its relationship to the wider world.