Sudan and South Sudan in 2015

Sudan’s and South Sudan’s civil wars, secessionist movements, and humanitarian disasters, as well as the interest and involvement of foreign governments and NGOs in these developments, have attracted ever-increasing academic interest. In both traditional disciplines and entirely new fields, books, articles, and a proliferation of web-based ephemera have both vastly increased the amount of information and analysis widely available and made the task of sorting through it all much more difficult. Political developments have rendered certain geographical areas more important but less accessible than they were in the past as governments and other entities have restricted access to types of information and to researchers with particular interests. These policies and practices have affected the amount and quality of published results, although a review of some recent works indicates that general problems of published research on these countries derive less from their turbulent recent history than from the specific research choices and methodologies of scholars themselves, and in many cases from carelessness in the process of publication.

Many years ago Richard Hill told this reviewer of his unwillingness to update his magisterial Egypt in the Sudan, which was published in 1959. His reasons for demurring are irrelevant now, but an explanation for the reluctance of anyone else to take up the project is simple enough: Hill had all the major European languages required for the subject, plus, crucially, both Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, a proficiency that few (if any) scholars possess today. Call it the decline of Orientalism or simply “the language problem,” this limitation has afflicted historical writing on Sudan in general, and now South Sudan in particular. As the books under review make clear, even some of the best work is limited by the authors’ lack of important relevant languages, both for accessing archival material and for communicating with people on the ground. The result is too often work based on secondary sources or on translations or interpretations by others, often reflecting simple ignorance or casual neglect of otherwise accessible source material.

Even for research on northern Sudan, including Darfur, the recent huge increase in interest and published work on the part of foreigners who lack acquaintance with Arabic and European languages has resulted in blithe generalizations and journalistic impressions more appropriate in travel books. In the rapidly expanding amount of published work on South Sudan the problem is worse, because for this region some researchers lack any relevant language. With exceptions that are noted below, some writers, rather than recognizing the limits this ignorance imposes and acting accordingly, carry...