Re-framing Citizenship in Two Sudans

By Amir Idris

December 8, 2011 — In 2005, the North and the South signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) which ended two decades of civil war. This peace agreement gave the people of Southern Sudan the right of self-determination to vote on whether to stay in a united Sudan or to opt for separation. In January 2011, the people of Southern Sudan made clear in a referendum their desire for independence and on 9 July 2011 the largest country in Africa was split into two sovereign and independent states: The Republic of Sudan and The Republic of South Sudan. While the separation of South Sudan and the birth of two independent states change the political, economic and social map in the North and the South, both states continue to face mounting political and economic challenges that might threaten the stability of both states and the region. Critical to the future of both countries is how each state accommodates excluded populations, including in Darfur, Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan in the North, and the array of ethnic groups in the South. One of the main challenges that both states need to address is reconciling between the rising politics of identity and the quest for inclusive citizenship. Both states have to confront the burden of their shared history. That is, the historical legacies of enslavement, colonialism and exclusion.

For decades Sudan has been beset by cycles of political violence. These cycles of political violence manifested in two phases of civil wars in Southern Sudan (1955-72; 1983-2005), and ongoing war in the Western region of Darfur. Arguably, these wars have created the largest number of refugees and displaced persons in Africa. Besides the great human suffering involved, the consequences of this interminable strife have been tragic for social, economic, and political development. Indeed, the civil conflicts and political violence that have spread from South Sudan to the Western region of Darfur, and recently from Southern Kordofan to Blue Nile states are threatening to dismantle the remaining postcolonial state in Sudan.

For too long, the political violence in Sudan has been misrepresented as racial, religious and regional conflict. This misrepresentation of the conflict simplified the underlying causes of the crisis and ignored the interaction between citizenship, politics of identity and political violence. Since its political independence in 1956, Sudan has witnessed the rise of armed ethnic and regional protest movements. These protest movements challenged the prerogative of the post-independence Sudanese state constituted in 1956, with the hegemonic Arabized and Islamized elites at the pinnacle of power of the unitary state, as the legitimate basis for extending and defining citizenship rights and responsibilities. In Darfur, Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile, for instance, these armed and political movements are demanding equal rights as citizens; but they are also demanding recognition of special rights with claims to land, autonomous governments, and the rights to maintain ethno-national identities and local power structures distinct from, but formative of, a multinational state. As such, they are opening up the debate about citizenship entails particularly in a multicultural context; how the current form of state reconciles between competing claims of citizenship, and what kind of viable institutional mechanisms for effective relationship between the state and the citizens and the local power structures are require.

It would be very effective politically indeed if these armed and political groups reframe their political struggles around the question of citizenship. After all, ethnic, racial or regional identities are product of how the state was formed and structured in relations to the society. These identities are not static or unchangeable. In other words, the conflicting political identities such as ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ that produced violence could be turned into peaceful identities, if the state is redefined and restructured in a way which makes the managing of and the coexistence of overlapping identities and groups possible. The national crisis of political violence in the two Sudans requires a political solution and it is for the peoples of both countries to reinvent themselves by redefining their conflicting political identities in a manner that enables them to create inclusive citizenship and polity.

Therefore, the peoples of both countries need to reframe the question of citizenship in the two newly independent states, by re-imagining a common humanity and citizenship leads to a recognition of the fact that their futures, as two sovereign states, are linked. The impetus for resolving conflict by means of citizenship is integral to identity making and to the unmaking of legal racial and ethnic domination. That is, we need to move away from the restraining grip of nationalist history and its frozen past on our political imagination. Only then will the peoples of both countries, South Sudan and Sudan, be able to begin to reorient themselves toward a future in peace and development.

Amir Idris, is a Professor of African History and Politics, Department of African and African American Studies, Fordham University, New York City, USA. He can be reached at: [email protected]