The first edition of this book was released only a few months after the signing of the Machakos Protocol, the framework document of what became the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) which committed the National Congress Party (NCP) government in Khartoum and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) to negotiating a peace settlement that addressed the root causes of Sudan's civil war. There is no subsequent text to indicate that both sides ever came to an agreement on what those root causes were. My own assessment of those causes presented in this book were summarized in its preface as:

• 1) Patterns of governance which developed in the Sudanic states before the nineteenth century, establishing an exploitive relationship between the centralizing power of the state and its hinterlands or peripheries, mainly through the institutions of slavery and slave raiding, creating groups of peoples with a lastingly ambiguous status in relation to the state;

• 2) The introduction of a particular brand of militant Islam in the late nineteenth century which further sharpened the divide between persons with and without full legal rights within the state;

• 3) Inequalities in economic, educational and political development within the colonial state of the twentieth century, which often built upon earlier patterns;

• 4) Britain's decision, based on political expediency, to grant independence in 1956 to the whole of Sudan before disparities in development could be addressed, and without obtaining adequate guarantees for safeguarding the interests and representation of southern Sudanese;

• 5) A narrowly-based nationalist movement among the northern elite in Sudan which confronted the issues of Sudan's diversity and unequal development by attempting to build a national identity based on the principles of Arab culture and the religion of Islam, leading to the re-emergence of nineteenth-century ideas of governance in centre–periphery relations;

• 6) Failure to obtain a national consensus in either the North or the South in the 1970s concerning national unity, regional development, and the balance of power between the central and regional governments;