Emerging Orders in the Sudans

Emerging Orders in the Sudans
Author: Sandra Calkins
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2014-10-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9956792063

This book explores the emergent character of social orders in Sudan and South Sudan. It provides vivid insights into multitudes of ordering practices and their complex negotiation. Recurring patterns of exclusion and ongoing struggles to reconfigure disadvantaged positions are investigated as are shifting borders, changing alliances and relationships with land and language. The book takes a careful and close look at institutional arrangements that shape everyday life in the Sudans, probing how social forms have persisted or changed. It proposes reading the post-colonial history of the Sudans as a continuous struggle to find institutional orders valid for all citizens. The separation of Sudan and South Sudan in 2011 has not solved this dilemma. Exclusionary and exploitative practices endure and inhibit the rule of law, distributive justice, political participation and functioning infrastructure. Analyses of historical records and recent ethnographic data assembled here show that orders do not result directly from intended courses of action, planning and orchestration but from contingently emerging patterns. The studies included look beyond dominant elites caught in violent fights for powers, cycles of civil war and fragile peace agreements to explore a broad range of social formations, some of which may have the potential to glue people and things together in peaceful co-existence, while others give way to new violence.

Gender, Protests and Political Change in Africa

Gender, Protests and Political Change in Africa
Author: Awino Okech
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2020-07-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030463435

This book brings together conceptual debates on the impact of youth-hood and gender on state building in Africa. It offers contemporary and interdisciplinary analyses on the role of protests as an alternative route for citizens to challenge the ballot box as the only legitimate means of ensuring freedom. Drawing on case studies from seven African countries, the contributors focus on specific political moments in their respective countries to offer insights into how the state/society social contract is contested through informal channels, and how political power functions to counteract citizen’s voices. These contributions offer a different way of thinking about state-building and structural change that goes beyond the system-based approaches that dominate scholarship on democratization and political structures. In effect, it provides a basis for organizers and social movements to consider how to build solidarity beyond influencing government institutions. Chapters 3, 5, and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Disrupting Territories

Disrupting Territories
Author: Jörg Gertel
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2014
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1847010547

"Nowhere has a range of case studies of Sudan been brought together in a single volume. Given the concern with the growing number and complexity of conflicts in Sudan and South Sudan there is a significant readership in academic circles and from those involved in humanitarian organisations of all kinds." Professor Peter Woodward, University of Reading "A timely contribution to an important set of debates ... tackles questions emerging from discussions about modernisation, urbanisation and globalisation from an explicitly local angle with regards to Sudan." Dr Harry Verhoeven, University of Oxford Sudan experiences one of the most severe fissures between society and territory in Africa. Not only were its international borders redrawn when South Sudan separated in 2011, but conflicts continue to erupt over access to land: territorial claims are challenged by local and international actors; borders are contested; contracts governing the privatization of resources are contentious; and the legal entitlements to agricultural land are disputed. Under these new dynamics of land grabbing and resource extraction, fundamental relationships between people and land are being disrupted: while land has become a global commodity, for millions it still serves as a crucial reference for identity-formation and constitutes their most important source of livelihood. This book seeks to disentangle the emerging relationships between people and land in Sudan. The first part focuses on the spatial impact of resource-extracting economies: foreign agricultural land acquisitions; Chinese investments in oil production; and competition between artisanal and industrial gold mining. Detailed ethnographic case studies in the second part, from Darfur, South Kordofan, Red Sea State, Kassala, Blue Nile, and Khartoum State, show how rural people experience "their" land vis- -vis the latest wave of privatization and commercialization of land rights. J rg Gertel is Professor of Economic Geography at Leipzig University; Richard Rottenburg is Chair of Anthropology at the University of Halle; Sandra Calkins is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle

Networks of Knowledge Production in Sudan

Networks of Knowledge Production in Sudan
Author: Sondra Hale
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2016-09-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1498532136

This is the first book of its kind on Sudan, and arguably one of the first in North Africa. We are part of an emerging, more cosmopolitan approach that calls for a reassessment of ideas about not only the concept of identities, but also about migration and technology, especially social media. Our essayists engage in redefinitions, the broadening of our key variables, the linking and intersecting of concepts, and the investigations of methods and ethics, and opt for an approach that is, at once, culturally specific to Sudan (one of the most fluid social landscapes in the world) and transnational. Our essays address the narrowness of studies of migration and note the almost total neglect in the broader Sudan literature of the rise of technology—mobile telephony and social media, in particular. Furthermore, our essayists address the near neglect in the Sudan literature of certain categories of people, such as youth, or certain diverse spaces, such as neighborhoods or gold mines. We have also been attempting to move away from the nearly stereotypic descriptions of Sudan to deal with topics that align Sudan with transnational issues and themes, knowledge production among them. This multidisciplinary collection of essays is the first comprehensive work to grapple explicitly with the question of knowledge production in such a diverse social landscape. We discuss the impact of current trends in information technology and contemporary forms of identity and mobility on knowledge production. These issues are pertinent for different sectors such as academia, government or business, and, as we demonstrate, reveal a myriad of possibilities for studying diverse population groups like youth, women, diaspora, or specific political contexts such as conflict or oppression.

Who Knows Tomorrow?

Who Knows Tomorrow?
Author: Sandra Calkins
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2016-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1785330160

Although uncertainty is intertwined with all human activity, plans, and aspirations, it is experienced differently: at times it is obsessed over and at times it is ignored. This ethnography shows how Rashaida in north-eastern Sudan deal with unknowns from day-to-day unpredictability to life-threatening dangers. It argues that the amplification of uncertainty in some cases and its extenuation in others can be better understood by focusing on forms that can either hold the world together or invite doubt. Uncertainty, then, need not be seen solely as a debilitating problem, but also as an opportunity to create other futures.

There is a Country

There is a Country
Author: Nyuol Lueth Tong
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: American literature
ISBN: 9781938073748

There Is a Country collects eight engrossing pieces by South Sudanese authors--the first collection of its kind, from the youngest country in the world. Wrestling with a history marked by war and displacement, the work here presents a fresh and necessary account of an emerging nation, past and present. In vivid, gripping prose, There Is a Country's stories explore youth and love, life and death: a first glimpse of what South Sudanese literature has to offer.

Ordinary Sudan, 1504-2019

Ordinary Sudan, 1504-2019
Author: Elena Vezzadini
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 686
Release: 2023-07-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110719614

This book starts from the premise that the study of "exceptionally normal" women and men - as conceived by microhistory - has radical implications for understanding history and politics, and applies this notion to Sudan. Against a historiography dominated by elite actors and international agents, it examines both how ordinary people have brought about the most important political shifts in the country's history (including the recent revolution in 2019) and how they have played a role in maintaining authoritarian regimes. It also explores how men and women have led their daily lives through a web of ordinary worries, desires and passions. The book includes contributions by historians, anthropologists, and political scientists who often have a dual commitment to Middle Eastern and African studies. While focusing on the complexity and nuances of Sudanese local lives in both the past and the present, it also connects Sudan and South Sudan with broader regional, global, and imperial trends. The book is divided into two volumes and six parts, ordered thematically. The first part tackles the entanglement between archives, social history, and power. The second focuses on women's agency in history and politics from the Funj era to the recent 2018-2019 revolution. Part 3 includes contributions on the history and global connections of the Sudanese armed forces. In the second volume, part 4 intersects the themes of urban life, leisure, and colonial attitudes with queerness. In part 5, labour identities, practices, and institutions are discussed both in urban milieus and against the background of war and expropriation in rural areas. Finally, part 6 studies the construction of social consent under various self-styled Islamic regimes, as well as the emergence of alternative imaginaries and acts of citizenship in times of political openness.

China’s New World Order

China’s New World Order
Author: Li, Hak Y.
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-12-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1786437333

This discerning book examines China’s newly developed soft-intervention policy towards North Korea, Myanmar and the two Sudans by examining China’s diplomatic statements and behaviours. It also highlights the Chinese soft-intervention policy in economic manipulation and diplomatic persuasion in the recent generations of Chinese leadership under Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping.

Security Governance in East Africa

Security Governance in East Africa
Author: Kennedy Agade Mkutu
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2017-12-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1498553664

This collection of cases from East Africa, contributed largely by locally-based authors, explores the increasing security governance phenomenon in the region: that is, the mix of state and non-state actors, including private entities, volunteer auxiliaries, homegrown vigilantes and gangs, and the relationship between police and communities. Local dynamics brought by globalization, liberalization, the new scramble for resource wealth, inequality, and international terrorism are observed in detail, superimposed upon the well-known development challenges, ethnopolitical divides, and patterns of government and security provision which continue to reflect their colonial past. This book raises both practical and theoretical ethical dilemmas of the increasing fragmentation of security functions within Uganda, Kenya, South Sudan, mainland Tanzania, and Zanzibar. It is a vital contribution to the “non-state,” “plural policing” debates and is of both local and global relevance.