The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars (Johnson)

Douglas H. Johnson's history of Sudan's First and Second Civil Wars, published by James Currey and Indiana University Press in 2003. Johnson, a historian of Sudan, argues that the wars' deeper and more durable causes were the political and economic marginalization of Sudan's peripheries, especially the south, by successive governments centered in Khartoum, a center-periphery dynamic that predates and outlasted any single government's specific religious policy. On this reading the 1983 imposition of Sharia law that reopened the war functioned as a proximate trigger and a potent unifying grievance rather than the war's root cause. Its strength is a wide comparative view across both wars and multiple governments in Khartoum. Its limit is that, in de-emphasizing religion as a root cause, it argues one identifiable side of a live debate over how central religious identity was to the conflict.