Sudan: The Failure and Division of an African State by Richard Cockett details the modern history of Sudan, and its rapid descent into a malfunctioning state. It is hard to summarize quickly why Sudan is failing; many factors have come together to create this situation.
The classic colonization borders are at work: the country has an elite “Arab” population that sees itself as the natural rulering class of Sudan’s other Muslim and “African” groups in the west Darfur and along the coast. There is no sense of being Sudanese in the nationalist sense of the word.
Cockett does an excellent job showing the people and players in this complex geo-political mess. The book was finished in 2010, and unfortunately, a civil war much like the one in the early 2000s is in progress. This is from today’s (1-8-24) news:
“The east African nation of Sudan is in the midst of a devastating civil war that has killed over 12,000 people and displaced more than 7.3 million within the country since fighting began in April, according to data from the United Nations.”
This is happening now, and the world seems to only care about the Hamas/Israel war and Ukraine.
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