Review of The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars. Douglas H. Johnson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003, 254 pp. $24.95

By Michael Kevane

Department of Economics

Santa Clara University

Santa Clara, CA 95053

mkevane@scu.edu

The intent of this book is to provide non-Sudanese journalists, policymakers, and aid workers (of the Emma McCune variety) with a concise, analytical review of the history of Sudan's civil war. As a concise review of the war, this is an excellent and highly recommendable book. As an introduction into the dilemmas confronting the intended audience of 'outsider actors', again the book is excellent. As an analysis of 'root causes', I am more skeptical, as I explain below.

The book begins with a brief review of the pre-colonial and colonial eras, and finds a commonality with the post-independence present: Kingdoms and states based along the Nile have used hinterlands as places to loot. They have had little interest in 'ordering' or 'developing' these hinterlands, nor have they had interest in extending full rights of citizenship to hinterland residents. The colonial administration, for example, deliberately refused to 'develop' the South, and so the region continued to lag with less education, less infrastructure investment, less liberty, land fewer common cultural understandings.

Johnson continues with a nice summary of the unfolding of independence. The parliamentary regime that took over the colonial state lacked much legitimacy, because the haste of British withdrawal (taking place in the context of British concerns with Egyptian sovereignty over Sudan) anticipated and usurped local nationalist movements. Independence, Johnson argues, was granted to northern Sudanese, and this social group was itself divided over fundamental constitutional questions.

The bulk of the book covers the first and second civil wars, with a thorough review of the actors, parties, issues and strategies involved from the Torit mutiny of 1955 through the Machakos peace talks of 2002. This is Johnson's milieu and his writing is confident and informative. The reader is introduced to all the major players in the South, from Joseph Oduho to Joseph Lagu to Joseph Garang to Yusif Kuwa. That is just the Josephs. Abel Alier, Bona Malwal, Paulino Matip, Kerubino Bol, Riek Machar, and other leaders are given their day and due.

Johnson shows how the first civil war was quite different from the second. Despite their differences, the northern political and social movements that dominated political power immediately after independence were committed to programs of Islamization and Arabization of southern populations. The first civil war is plausibly seen as a direct response by the southern elite to this attempt at hegemony by an illegitimate state. Their armed struggle, though, was largely uncoordinated and lacked deep ties into southern society.

The SPLA leadership learned from the experience of Joseph Lagu, who was able to negotiate the Addis Ababa accords from a position of strength after consolidating the many small militias that constituted the Anyanya movement. The second civil war started early on, then, with a unified command. This may have been one of the reasons why local economic factors began to play such an important part of the war. With centralized command, much more attention is paid to longer term planning. Both the military in Khartoum and the SPLA focused after 1983 on securing revenues and targeting livelihoods of civilians as a weapon of war. This local orientation was intensified from the early 1990s: the SPLA lost its Ethiopian bases and backing, and the northern military was sanctioned by much of the western world.

The current war is laid out in all its complexity in a number of chapters, including a thorough description and analysis of the ill-fated Nasir 'coup' and subsequent Nuer civil war. Indeed, Johnson argues that it is proper to speak of multiple civil wars. (Though not, in the views of this reviewer, including a 'civil war' in the north itself. While some northerners have joined the SPLA, and the NDA does have a small armed wing, there has yet to be anything more than occasional demonstrations in major northern towns. The north is a repressive dictatorship, yes, employing torture and intimidation, but that is not equivalent to a civil war.)

As a review of the history and current politics of the war, this book is excellent. One of the best in the field. Especially useful to the novice are extensive cross-references, where the equivalent of hyperlinks draw attention to related sections of the book. An extensive chronology in the appendix is also a tremendously useful reference, as is a thorough index.

As an analysis of 'root causes', however, I find myself less convinced. The preface gives a list of ten 'factors', and Johnson reiterates items from this list at various moments throughout the book. Two items on the list note the emergence of militant and intolerant versions of Islam. Two others stress the impact of foreign involvement and interests, which have rewarded actors with little regard to their criminal actions. Three lament the lack of institutions or consensus over institutions, especially among northern elites, whereby the will of the majority can be tempered by rights for the minority, specifically via guarantees of regional self-governance. Three others note the importance of unequal economic development and distribution of natural resources. Left out and implicitly rejected are other candidate 'root causes' of racism, tribalism, and innate propensities towards warlordism. As a laundry list of root causes, this is perfectly adequate, though hardly novel. Johnson occasionally summarizes the ten factors as: "internal tensions exacerbated by external involvement." But at that level of generality, is anything being said? Is there a war that is not described thusly?

It is worth pausing and asking, in a comparative way, what a root cause of a war might actually be, at a more abstract level. By root cause, Johnson presumably means a source of war or an origin of war, in the sense that war 'grows' from this cause, unless actively impeded. That is, a root cause differs from a proximate cause. Proximate causal explanations involve specific people and actions (who fired first, who intended to fire first, who was preparing to wage war and so provoked the other side, who didn't go far enough in compromising, who compromised too much). Root causes instead must deal with features of society that changed to make practically any leader think that waging war would be better than not. These features may involve the costs and benefits of war to populations and elites, as well as the propaganda techniques available to enable a small group of leaders to more easily manipulate a population into acquiescence. Some social situations might be said to lead 'structurally' to war. All wars have histories, but not all wars have root causes.

One kind of root cause would then be a situation where populations with incompatible world views find themselves occupying the same geographical space, either as one polity or as neighboring polities. They cannot ignore each other, they cannot be tolerant of their differences. In the United States, some revisionist historians argue that the real root cause of the U.S. Civil War was a fundamental ideological conflict over states' rights. Northerners were willing to accept Big Government, southerners wanted local control. Slavery, they say, was a dying institution anyway, so it could not have been the real cause of the war. Samuel Huntington's famous thesis of the "clash of civilizations" locates future wars in the border/frontier zones of empires (Afghanistan, Turkey, Israel/Palestine). Recent research by Pierre Englebert and other political scientists shows that the "straightness" of boundaries is strongly correlated with conflict (the more a boundary was imposed, the more it placed populations in conflictual situations).

Another kind of root cause dealing primarily with civil wars and insurgencies involves a structural propensity towards looting of natural resources. This is Jeffrey Herbst's analysis of the African situation, where colonial boundaries created states with isolated capitals and inaccessible hinterlands. Colonial armies backed by the metropoles were able to maintain order, but the withdrawal of these international security arrangements has led to the proliferation of looting wars. Many reform proposals call for more emphasis on regional Rapid Deployment Forces as the solution to this root cause. It is important to note here that, contra Johnson, looting is not the root cause of the war, rather the root cause is the absence of 'entangling-able' outsiders who can commit to enforcing order (to use the mangle-able dictum of George Washington for the newly independent United States to avoid 'entangling alliances').

Now one can see cases of wars without any real root cause, or any reason to search for root causes: the U.K.'s war with Argentina over the Falklands and the U.S. invasions of Grenada and Panama. Pretty clearly, the causes there are all proximate causes rather than root causes.

The Sudanese case has some of these elements, but I am not fully convinced that it cannot also be viewed as a 'rootless' civil war. The boundaries of the country clearly bring together two peoples (speaking very broadly indeed) with incompatible views about constituting a society. There is a real war of visions, as Francis Deng put it. The Herbst analysis is also applicable. Very clearly, there is a looting war going on, for cattle, labor and oil, because all of these resources are located quite far from the central place of power, the confluence of the Niles. Successive central governments have had tremendous problems projecting power over large distances.

But Johnson's detailed review of the events of the war suggest how important proximate causes are, and suggests how broad is agreement among many of the actors over what peace might look like. As in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the eventual resolution is easily grasped by anyone with common sense. And agreements or resolutions have been tantalizingly close, except for the missteps of many key personalities. What if Nimairi, Turabi and al-Mahdi had been a little less pathetic, and a little braver? What if Machar had not been so stupid?

One of the paradoxes of the Sudan's civil war is that the hinterland problem can be solved, because the north's Islamic identity can enable it to establish 'entangling alliances' with more powerful Middle Eastern neighbors, and thus forestall attempts to loot natural resources, but this 'solution' exacerbates the 'war of visions' problem, in that Muslim hegemonists can make more headway. In this regard, the strategic analysis of President Bush's team is dead on, in theory: Sudan's civil war might be much easier to solve if current Middle Eastern regimes give way to more open societies that do not have to placate or repress extremism (through 'export'). An 'entangling alliance' with a democratic, secular, human-rights-oriented Egypt and Iraq might be acceptable to the SPLA, and this would solve the looting problem. But pinning hopes on a theory sounds like a long-shot. Better to keep hammering away at the proximate causes.

Finally, a few points on the writing. On the whole the prose is clear and the ideas presented sharply. But numerous instances of clunky phrasing remain, as this mouthful from p. 29 on the Torit mutiny of 1955: "There is little evidence to suggest that later guerilla and exile leaders sought to draw any conclusions from the disorganized planning of the mutineers and their lack of widespread popular support; these weaknesses continued throughout the early armed struggle of the 1960s." What could this sentence possibly mean? They did not try to draw conclusions? Not draw any conclusions? Not try? Not seek together? This last seems initially plausible: what Johnson means is that he finds no public record of a meeting or conference of exile leaders where they discuss how to better coordinate their actions. What then to make, then, of the formation of the Federal Party in 1957 (just one page later, p. 30) and then SANU (two pages later. p. 31)? No, what Johnson must mean is that they never reached the right conclusions, at least not until 1983, when John Garang's circle resolved to first dominate the various actors in the South before taking on the North.

Another small critique is the use of "Sudanese" in Chapter 3 and elsewhere, where often it is not clear who the label is being applied to (sometimes it seems to refer to the British administration, sometimes to northern political parties, sometimes to northern populations, and sometimes to the military battalions largely composed of southerners and Nuba).

If members of the Sudan Studies Association had big egos, one might observe some shrinkage at our upcoming annual meeting. Douglas Johnson takes well-aimed potshots at quite a few scholars. But SSA members don't have big egos. The problems and tyrants of Sudan are too nasty for that. So the academic community will take Johnson's 'interpretive history' for the timely and useful volume that it is.