Sudan's uncivil war: the global–historical constitution of political violence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is commonplace to characterise political violence and war in Africa as ‘internal’, encapsulated in the apparently neutral term ‘civil war’. As such, accounts of political violence tend to focus narrowly on the combatants or insurrectionary forces, failing to recognise or address the extent to which political violence is historically and globally constituted. The article addresses this problematic core assumption through examination of the case of Sudan, seeking to contribute to a rethinking of protracted political violence and social crisis in post-colonial Africa. The article interjects in such debates through the use and detailed exposition of a distinct methodological and analytical approach. It interrogates three related dimensions of explanation which are ignored by orthodox framings of ‘civil war’: (1) the technologies of colonial rule which (re)produced and politicised multiple fractures in social relations, bequeathing a fissiparous legacy of racial, religious and ethnic ‘identities’ that have been mobilised in the context of post-colonial struggles over power and resources; (2) the major role of geopolitics in fuelling and exacerbating conflicts within Sudan and the region, particularly through the cold war and the ‘war on terror’; and (3) Sudan's terms of incorporation within the capitalist global economy, which have given rise to a specific character and dynamics of accumulation, based on primitive accumulation and dependent primary commodity production. The article concludes that political violence and crisis are neither new nor extraordinary nor internal, but rather, crucial and constitutive dimensions of Sudan's neo-colonial condition. As such, to claim that political violence in Sudan is ‘civil’ is to countenance the triumph of ideology over history.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".