Social Science Research Council

Speaking in a focus group discussion reported by the National Democratic Institute’s study of the “three areas” of South Kordofan, Abyei and Blue Nile, a Nuba man complained that “The peace is now three years and there is supposed to be tangible things. The government should have expressed its presence, but for us here there [...]

Many thanks to Alex de Waal for posting my briefing on land issues in Sudan on his blog last month and for stimulating so many interesting contributions on such a critical topic. I have just returned from Juba where I have been carrying out research on the reintegration of IDPs and refugees returning to the [...]

Overview
1. The NCP-SPLM partnership for the CPA stands at a critical juncture. The NCP sees the 2009 elections as its route to internal and international legitimacy and is hoping that problems with the census and elections can be pinned on others (the SPLM, the Darfurians). Both parties have failed to find a compromise to the Abyei [...]

In the Sudanese context of prolonged conflict, mobility of pastoral groups into the transitional areas such as South Kordofan and Blue Nile and the drive for compensation for the dispossession of lands where petroleum is found, rural land is being gradually and consistently transformed from communal use to private possession. The lack of a land [...]

Posted on behalf of Michael Kevane
Sudan’s land issues are big and dangerous. Let’s gingerly walk around this growling cur with a big stick and not be too optimistic about what land tenure interventions can do to promote peace and stability.
Sara Pantuliano’s paper seems targeted at the UN administrator who needs a set of talking points [...]

Land is a central issue in both rural and urban Sudan and contests over land claims have been a recurrent cause of unrest and conflict in the country. Successive reforms of land law have not resulted in a unified framework for land tenure across the country, but to the contrary strengthened the hand of the [...]

Two new scholarly books help us understand how people in Sudan’s peripheries survive—or don’t—and place the frontierland governance in a deep historical context. One is Wendy James’s ethnography of the Uduk people of Blue Nile during the last two decades of war and flight, and the other is Martin Daly’s history of Darfur.
Wendy James’s three [...]

Moments of crisis are also moments of opportunity. Sudan at the present has all the dimensions of an imminent crisis that could unravel the major achievements of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the uncertain progress towards democracy.
The sharpest manifestation of the crisis is the SPLM’s suspension of its participation in the Government of National Unity, [...]

War in Darfur and the Search for Peace is a collection of 15 essays by six Sudanese and eleven non-Sudanese scholars and specialists, published in September 2007 by Harvard University Press. This is the first of two postings that provides an outline of the origins of the book, its significance, and some of the main threads of the argument. This posting focuses on the "turbulent state" framework for understanding Sudan’s persistent dysfunction.

In the coming year, Kordofan is at serious risk of large scale violence—and any such violence could have disastrous ramifications for the whole of Sudan. Here’s why.
The central political issues in Sudan today are the 2009 general elections and the 2011 referendum on self-determination for Southern Sudan. If either of these were to fail, the [...]