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Sudan
- University of Minnesota Press
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325 Sudan khalid mustafa medani the protests in the Middle East and North Africa that began in late 2010 highlighted a number of issues that had been obscured by longstanding ahistorical understandings of Middle Eastern and Islamic societies and Western-centered fallacies. Specifically, they demonstrated the crucial importance of bringing both political economy and identity-based politics “back in” as parts of a key framework of analysis. The conventional thesis privileging the idea of a “durable authoritarianism ” (Schlumberger 2007) in the region had been undermined by a transregional civil society confronting the power of the combined forces of international capital, domestic commercial interests, and the formidable security apparatus of the state. Those events also helped set the stage for a new analytical agenda in important ways. In the social sciences, scholarship that has long focused on grassroots political mobilization centered on the analysis of social and economic grievances has often been relegated to the sidelines across the disciplines. What these protests indicated, however, is that local-level resistance is in fact the site of grand and revolutionary politics. More specifically, they demonstrated that social networks and class- and ethnicity-based mobilization can indeed produce state-level outcomes of revolutionary potential, including democratization and secession, both of which can 326 Kahlid Mustafa Medani undermine the political monopoly of so-called persistent authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. These revolutionary movements also reaffirmed that the locus of study and intellectual attention must include the local as well as the international level. The notion that critics of economic globalization and of the scramble over oil wealth on the part of external powers represent a small and elite-centered ideological community rather than a broad-based political alliance in the region was discredited by the thousands who took to the streets articulating their own “lived” experience with decades of economic austerity measures. In Tunisia, young men and women rallied against an economic model that was geared exclusively toward European markets and dependent on regionally based low-skilled labor in manufacturing; in Egypt, both servicesector informal workers and formal labor organized against excessive austerity measures; and inYemen and Sudan, protesters revolted against the misuse of antiterrorism campaigns that had been responsible for undermining the life chances and political aspirations of a cross section of social groups. Far from a “marginal” case, Sudan stood at the very center and not at the periphery of these historic protests. In the context of the partition of the country and the unprecedented protests among its neighbors, the failure of both North and South Sudanese governments to reform their respective ruling parties and include opposition groups had been aggravating divisions and conflict and alienating marginal areas such as Darfur in North Sudan and regions such as the Blue Nile and the oilrich South Kordofan states bordering the new country of South Sudan. Taken together these developments threatened to fragment both North and South Sudan. The ruling National Congress Party (NCP) of President Omar Beshir and South Sudan’s Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) led by Salva Kir had not addressed the root causes of conflicts in their respective countries. Instead, they stifled debate about Sudan’s diversity and identity and tightened their grip on power, resulting in factionalization and the persistence not of an authoritarian monolith but of two weak states threatened by civil unrest and conflict. In the case of Sudan, any analysis of future political developments had to address both the country’s similarities and its contrasts with otherArab [44.192.75.131] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:31 GMT) sudan 327 countries that were concurrently undergoing profound political transitions . Moreover, in order to understand the challenges and prospects for a democratic transition similar to those witnessed in Tunisia and Egypt at that time, it is crucially important to examine the roots and consequences of the country’s historic partition. Sudan in the Context of theArab Uprisings At a time when the attention of theWestern andArab media focused on the historic victory of the Muslim Brotherhood’s presidential candidate in Egypt, in the summer of 2012 street protests of a scale not witnessed for two decades erupted in Khartoum and other major Sudanese cities. Antigovernment protests, initially led by students from the University of Khartoum, inspired nationwide demonstrations in al-Obeid, Kosti, al-Gadaref, Port Sudan, Wad Medani, and Atbara. They began on June 16, 2012, with female students at the University of Khartoum’s downtown campus taking to the streets chanting “No...