Wednesday 30 December 2009

Grievances and the Roots of Insurgencies: Southern Sudan and Darfur

The importance of economic agendas for civil war formation has attracted attention in some academic circles and led to economic analysis of the causes of civil wars. As a result, the Collier-Hoeffler framework has emerged in the literature that considers rebel economic opportunity to be the main factor causing civil conflict. Although it has been applied to explain conflicts in Africa, the Collier-Hoeffler framework does not provide sufficient tools to analyse the underlying conditions that have led to the major insurgencies in Sudan. This paper argues that it is not principally rebel economic opportunity behind the two southern rebellions and the insurgency in Darfur, but rather socio-economic grievances derived from culturally and regionally imposed political marginalisation, which require broader analysis. This article conducts a historical analysis of the origins of conflict in Southern Sudan and Darfur, which permits a more comprehensive understanding of the emergence of conflict than an analysis based on rebel economic agendas alone.
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