Ruling Elite, Frontier-caste Ideology and Resource Conflicts in the Sudan

The ruling elite of central-northern Sudan has maintained a split land tenure system – a system that guaranteed the right to private ownership of ancestral lands to farming communities in the Nile Valley region and denied that right to the majority of farmers and pastoralists in other regions. Central to this tenure inequality was the emergence of an agricultural lobby which was politically encouraged by colonial and post-colonial administrations through facilitation of modern irrigated farming and was therefore economically the earliest to accumulate capital and invest further in irrigated agriculture and mechanised farming in rain-fed areas. The agricultural lobby – acting on the perception that the whole landscape of Sudan is a ‘wasteland’ that should be developed – has claimed vast tracts of this land for mechanised farming, displacing large numbers of traditional farmers and pastoralists and causing several localised conflicts. The feverish expansion of mechanised farming coupled with recurrent droughts since the early 1980s has widened the regional scale and increased the intensity of these conflicts, and the belligerents have increasingly justified their participation in the conflicts in terms of racial and religious ideologies.