A Year after “Futile” War: Woe to Nation that Anger is the only Energy Generator (2-2)

By: Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

This 15th April will mark one year since the outbreak of war in Sudan between the armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). It is not only a long year, nor like years similar to it, but it is also bloody and exhausting. It took us to pause and take this war to know its motives and consequences for building the state in Sudan.
It is difficult to be optimistic; however, if our political thought has the courage to take such a worthy stand. Alex de Waal, a British academic and keen researcher of Sudan, mourned it in a speech in 2009, describing it as exhausting. Politics was devoid of a big idea other than tactics that served their owners simply to remain in the political field.
What has increased our lethargy of thought is the prevalence of disgust for war among modernists, who come together in the Coordination of Democratic and Civil Forces (Taqaddum) to seek knowledge about it. Not one of them mentioned it except that he was satisfied with describing it as “cursed” or “evil” and called for its urgent halt. This is worthy of spiritual generosity. But they extinguished their search for the light of knowledge of the jurisprudence of war that destroys crops and offspring. Among the reprehensible sins of war, in their view, is sacrificing all Sudanese for the “ambition of two generals,” as the phrase was used, to rule. They are dragging the country to ruin in a war in which the citizens, who have no benefit, are harmed by the terror of occupying and looting homes, forced displacement that similar to ethnic cleansing, and artillery and air bombardment.
In their isolation from the jurisprudence of war, the modernists make a clear mistake in defining the state and what they expect from it. Their upcoming trial of the armed forces and their retirement, and even the recent call for their dissolution into a national army entity on the same footing with the “RSF” and armed struggle movements, made clear that they were behind the dictatorships that burdened Sudan for 53 of its 68 years of independence.
Perhaps these forces, in the words of Rasha Awad, a prominent leader in Taqaddum, “have been a tool for destroying democracy for more than half a century.” Modernity, in her opinion, can only be achieved through democracy. In fact, the violence that Rasha complained about is the touchstone in defining the state. It has been at the center of the study of the state since Max Weber defined it as the state that has a legal monopoly on the use of violence. It is a definition in which scholars abandoned previous theories that focused on the purpose of the state, such as that it is something that promotes the happiness of this world or the hereafter, or the happiness of both worlds. Thus, linking the benefits of modernity with democracy is clearly a mistake. Democracy is only one form of political contract in the modern state. The modern state is as modern as the people in it adhere to tradition, such as monarchy, for example, or populism and charisma, or liberal democracy, or even pure tyranny such as Nazism.
It seemed that the modernists’ doctrine of the absurdity of war was rooted in their conviction that Sudan had not yet been formed as a nation. To them, it is still tribes, destinations, and races waiting to get to know each other in an unknown or definite time. This is a great misconception about the state-building process in Sudan, which began with the rise of the national movement in its traditional and modern forms since colonialism set foot on Sudanese soil. This effort to build the national state cannot be disputed because it was promoted by an elite from the Nile North that restored the national will. Complaints about its policies did not prevent the margin itself from rising with weapons and other means to build a homeland that accommodates everyone, not a homeland that divides blood among tribes and ethnicities.
The call for a new Sudan, which sought to redistribute power and wealth, came from South Sudan, whose separation from Sudan was the first beginning of the southern nationalists’ demand since 1955. The excuse is that we have not yet reached the state of the nation due to complete ignorance of the construction of the modern nation. It is known that the first appearance of this nation into existence was from the womb of such various groups that the modernists used as an excuse and procrastinated in creating the state from them with determination and cunning. It is known that the modern state was born from the womb of feudal Europe, in which three entities prevailed, each of which had its own powers and privileges, with which the princes were restrained by the rulers. These entities were the church, the nobility, and the peasants, and each of them enjoyed certain, structured systems of rights, which the contemporary eye might see as the material of the modern state. Thus, the modern state was established in Europe to replace those scattered entities whose specializations overlapped and clashed due to their excessive living side by side.
Our modern elites are reluctant to delve into the science of war and state building because our malicious, accursed war is just the whim of two generals who have become mad at the government. There is no benefit in studying their madness. Otherwise, the war is in Sudan’s conditions and its effort is unparalleled to build a modern state, and one of the theaters in which the determination to create such a state is evident.
We withdraw from this modernist abhorrence of war due to its absurdity, as we have seen the debate taking place in the field of political sociology around the thesis of Charles Tilly (1929-2008) regarding the formation of the modern European state and the extent of its compatibility with state formation in developing countries. Tilly had broadcast from above studying the experience of the emergence of the modern state in Europe, “The state wages war and war makes the state.” Some researchers say this is identical, some of them refute the correspondence due to the world changing politically and economically, and among them there are those who walk in harmony between the two.
Tully had said that state-building efforts in Europe before its modernity began by monopolizing the means of oppression within the borders of a region of its own. In this context, the conflict erupted between those aspiring to form that state in what was called “the primitive accumulation of the fork.” The prospective ruler of the state fights his rivals in order to conquer them by accumulating the resources that he often seizes and establishing military, administrative and financial structures. The war, known as the Wars of the Thirty-Nine Years (1618-1648), was what brought the modern European state into existence.
Researchers advised that each case in the formation of the modern state in developing countries be studied separately to determine the veracity of Tully’s approach on it. Whatever the issue of this discussion about the formation of the state, the dissatisfaction of our modernist elite with the ongoing war prevents it from knowing its implications in the process of building the Sudanese state and the later ones.
It seemed to the elite of modernity that they were those who denounced the war, or protested against it, rather than those who analyzed it with the tools of science to know where it fell in the process of building the Sudanese state. This mood of protesting against phenomena without studying them is what De Waal shrewdly alerted to when he said that anger is the only motor behind politics in Sudan. He added that woe to the nation if anger is the only well of energy from which it is drawn.