Why did Sudan Lose a small war in Southern Sudan?

ABSTRACT

When on the wrong end of an asymmetry in the projection of hard power, weaker sides countenance the grim arithmetic of avoiding direct and massed confrontations. Invariably, insurgents have over the ages tended to employ indirect tactical methods to render their stronger opponents ineffective. Ultimately – interest asymmetry, regime type, asymmetries of strategy, and external intervention – combine in a complex interplay and pattern, to militate against a strong side. In Sudan, these factors interacted throughout the civil wars to produce regional autonomy and finally an independent South Sudan in 2011. Similar strategic logic had confronted many large African states battling insurgencies in Ethiopia, Angola, Nigeria, Zaire, and apartheid-era South Africa. Oftentimes, weakening public resolve has caused these governments to accommodate, capitulate or withdraw even if they try not to blink. Notwithstanding the regime type, it can be concluded that the majority of strong actors are prone to fail in a protracted, asymmetric conflict. Hence, the notion of linking victory in counterinsurgency to the degree of openness (democratic polyarchies); or closeness (totalitarianism) – is still valid but highly contestable in the case of Africa’s large dysfunctional states.     

Coping with traps of vulnerability: a review of the impact of post-colonial issues on the independence of South Sudan

In a world virtually free of slavery and colonialism and one mainly driven by the sovereign state rationale, allusion to manifestations or the existence of some form of these phenomena within a state is often received with dumbfounding indifference or denial. However, a form of rule that had continued in South Sudan long after the departure of the British in 1956 was colonial both in its quintessence and flair in that it disenfranchised its citizens and denied them the most basic freedoms, services and development. Under this establishment, resistance against the coercive vision of the state was brutally suppressed for many decades. This state of affairs finally ended in July 2011. Nonetheless, there is a miscellany of unresolved post-colonial issues between the two countries that warrant attention. These include security and the demarcation of borders, the issue of ludicrous transit fees for South Sudan's oil exportation through Sudan, citizenship, external debt repayment, etc. These issues are part of traps inherited from the anti-colonial struggle, which have now supplanted the old ensemble of North–South conflict paroxysm. As a matter of urgency, the two countries will have to wrap up the incomplete process of negotiation on these substantive issues. The talks should be approached with a new mindset based on the new reality of two sovereign states. To the extent that it is widely established that South Sudan and Sudan must coexist peacefully in order to develop into viable entities, such mutual dependency must be based on equality and respect.     

Countering insurgency: Turkey’s policy toward the PKK’s transnational dynamics in Europe

Insurgents often develop international connections and benefit from external assistance from a variety of sources. Support from diaspora communities has long been considered one of the critical external factors in the persistence of insurgent groups. Yet how the counterinsurgent state addresses external support from transnational ethnic communities and what factors influence the state's policies remain understudied. By focusing on the transnational political practices of the Kurdish community and the PKK in Western Europe, this paper examines how Turkey has addressed the diasporic support for the PKK since the 1980s. It shows that three major factors – the composition of foreign policy decision-makers, their ideological contestation over the Kurdish question, and the European political context – have affected Turkey's policy regarding the PKK's transnational dynamics in Europe.     

Horizontal Inequalities and Sons of the Soil Conflict in China

Why are large population movements conflict-prone in some regions while they remain peacefully integrated elsewhere? I argue that clashes between ethnically distinct indigenous populations and migrants – i.e. ‘Sons of the Soil (SoS) conflict’ – erupt when there are large socio-economic and political horizontal inequalities between ‘dominant migrants’ and locals. A comparative case study of two Chinese minority regions based on ethnographic fieldwork and population data provides a vivid illustration of the mechanisms linking migration to SoS conflict. With fewer HIs between migrants and locals, Inner Mongolia avoided many of the violent clashes that were commonplace in Qinghai, a province fraught with disparities.