Anthropology and History

This paper explores the history and ongoing transformation of the South Sudanese Sudd marshlands as a buffer zone in a variety of subsequent projects of domination and their sub-version. Its argument will be that the contemporary geopolitics of the Sudd cannot be understood properly without unwinding the historical layers of contestation and conflict around these projects of control and their reversal, projects which have sought to shape and have been shaped crucially by the area’s specific ecology. For more than a century, different external ventures – colonial, nationalist, secessionist – encountered in the southern Sudanese marshlands a formidable buffer to the realization of their various projects of control. Ambitions of making the Nile water flow, establishing effective state author-ity, or building lines of communication, get stuck in the Sudd’s difficult terrain. Building on the political ecology and wider social theory on terrain, resistance and warfare, The authors conceptualize the Sudd as a lively political ecology – one characterized by constant struggles and accommodations between the centripetal logics of state-making and the centrifugal propensities of vernacular political culture.

African borderlands – such as those between South Sudan, Uganda and Congo – are often presented by analysts as places of agency and economic opportunity, in contrast to hardened, securitized borders elsewhere. We emphasize, however, that even such relatively porous international borders can nevertheless be the focus of significant unease for borderland communities.
Crossing borders can enable safety for those fleeing conflict or trading prospects for businesspeople, but it can also engender anxieties around the unchecked spread of insecurity, disease and economic exploitation. Understanding this ambiguous construction of borders in the minds of their inhabitants requires us, we argue, to look beyond statist or globalizing discourses and to appreciate the moral economies of borderlands, and how they have been discursively and epistemologically negotiated over time. Narratives around witchcraft and the occult represent, we argue, a novel and revealing lens through which to do so and our study draws on years of fieldwork and archival research to underline how cartographies of witchcraft in this region are, and have long been, entangled with the construction of state political geographies, internal as well as international.

The Sudan Handbook, based on the Rift Valley Institute's successful Sudan Field Course, is an authoritative and accessible introduction to Sudan, written and edited by outstanding Sudanese and South Sudanese scholars and recognized international experts.

The Handbook covers Sudan, South Sudan and the North-South borderlands though a set of essays by leading specialists, including Abdelrahman Ali Mohammed, Peter Woodward, Gerard Prunier, Jerome Tubiana, Derek Welsby, and Ahmad Sikainga. It offers an authoritative introduction to both countries, rooted in a historical account of the development of the state.

The book is not limited to history and politics. It includes chapters on Sudanese popular music, the oil industry, and the archaeology of the early states on the Nile. The text is accompanied by purpose-drawn maps, a glossary, capsule biographies, a chronology. and a bibliography.

The Sudan Handbook grew out of the RVI’s annual Sudan and South Sudan Course. According to Randall Fegley, writing in African Affairs, it is one of ‘a tiny minority of rare reference works that can be pulled off the shelf as a compendium of facts or read cover to cover as a collection of well-written narratives’. He notes the Rift Valley Institute's ‘tremendous influence on academics, policy makers, activists, and field workers’. Tom Porteous of Human Rights Watch, writing on the Lawfare website, welcomes the RVI’s efforts ‘to collect, preserve, and transmit knowledge and understanding of Sudan’s ground-truth’. A reviewer from South Sudan, Peter Run, writing in the Australasian Review of African Studies, comments on what he describes as a 'succinct and comprehensive text'. He highlights the ‘insightful analysis’ of oil and its influence on the Sudanese political economy and notes the timeliness of the discussion of ‘the clash between the traditional mechanism of conflict resolution and the state’s judicial system’.