Having given an account of the causes leading to the first civil war, and the failure of the peace that brought it to an end, what are some of the patterns that emerge from the first half of this study that will persist through the description of the current war?

The structural divide between Muslim and pagan peoples established in the Sudan by the end of the nineteenth century was not solely religious. It was a divide that encompassed participation in or exclusion from state activities and the degree of access to economic activities, fostered or protected by the state. To the extent that the divide was territorial, identifying those who lived within state boundaries and those who lay beyond them, it also came to be perceived as racial. Those fully participating within the state increasingly identified themselves with Arab lineages, while at the same time identifying those who lived outside the state not only as unbelievers, but as slaves, or as enslavable. This social divide was formalized territorially in the administrative structures and policies of the Condominium period. Investment in the economy, infrastructure and social services was greatest in the central heartlands of the former Sudanic states, and least in the old pagan hinterlands. This had a marked effect on the economic and political integration of the developing and undeveloped regions of the country, and on the social and political integration of the peoples from the undeveloped regions, following independence (Chapters 1, 2 & 3).

The pattern established during the Turkiyya, whereby religion and racial origin influenced access to political power and economic opportunities, has intensified since independence in the mid-twentieth century. It lay behind the failure of the Addis Ababa peace, in so far as the South’s most important natural resources, oil and water, could not be allowed to remain under the control of the Southerners themselves (Chapter 4); and it underlies the economic policies of the current Islamist state. While international church groups focus on the religious issue as exclusively defined by the freedom to worship, and Western politicians see religious affiliation in terms of ‘minority rights’, the economic aspects of religious, and racial oppression in the Sudan are largely ignored, masked as they are by the language of development (Chapter 10).