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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:A Curse from God? Religious and Political Dimensions of the Post-1991 Rise of Ethnic Violence in South Sudan
Author:Hutchinson, Sharon E.ISNI
Year:2001
Periodical:Journal of Modern African Studies
Volume:39
Issue:2
Period:June
Pages:307-331
Language:English
Geographic term:Sudan
Subjects:ethnic relations
Nuer
civil wars
Politics and Government
Religion and Witchcraft
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
Ethnic and Race Relations
Law, Human Rights and Violence
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/3557266
Abstract:Southern Sudanese civilian populations have been trapped in a rising tide of ethnicized, South-on-South, military violence ever since leadership struggles within the main southern opposition movement, the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), split into two warring factions in August 1991. This paper, which is based on field research carried out in Nuer regions of South Sudan in 1980-1983, 1992, 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2000, traces the impact of the violence on a particularly volatile and fractured region of South Sudan: the oil rich heartlands of the Western Upper Nile Province. Foregrounding the historical experiences and grassroots perspectives of Nuer civilian populations in this region, the paper shows how elite competition within the southern military has combined with the political machinations of the National Islamic Front (NIF) government in Khartoum to create a wave of inter and intra-ethnic factional fighting so intense and intractable that many Nuer civilians have come to define it as 'a curse from God'. Dividing Sudan's seventeen-year-long civil war (1983-present) into four distinct phases, the paper shows how successive forms and patterns of political violence in the region have provoked radical reassessments of the precipitating agents and ultimate meaning of the war on the part of an increasingly demoralized and impoverished Nuer population. With assistance from the New Sudan Council of Churches, civilian and religious leaders forged a grassroots peace agreement at Wunlit in 1999, which significantly defused hostilities between Nuer and Dinka groups west of the White Nile. The author argues that religious convictions will continue to play a pivotal role in regional peace initiatives. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum.
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