An Agreement That Held Eleven Years, and Why It Broke

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Historians divide over how central religion was to the First Sudanese Civil War's causes and character. Scopas Poggo, in the dedicated history of this specific war, argues that Khartoum's Arabization and Islamization drives were the turning point: General Ibrahim Abboud's government mandated Arabic instruction and, in March 1964, expelled foreign Christian missionaries from the south, policies that southerners increasingly understood as an assault on their own religious and cultural identity and that hardened a regional revolt into a war fought substantially in religious and ethnic terms.

Douglas Johnson, whose history spans both Sudanese civil wars, argues instead that the deeper and more durable cause was the political and economic marginalization of Sudan's peripheries by successive Khartoum governments, a center-periphery dynamic that predates and outlasted any one government's religious policy. The March 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement's autonomy settlement held for eleven years, until President Jaafar Nimeiry's 1983 imposition of Sharia law and abrogation of the agreement reopened the conflict as the Second Sudanese Civil War.