Examines the commodification of land rights and the effect of
international licences for resource extraction on the pastoral
communities of Sudan.
Nowhere has a range of case studies of Sudan been brought together in a
single volume. Given the concern with the growing number and complexity
of conflicts in Sudan and South Sudan there is a significant readership
in academic circles and from those involved in humanitarian
organisations of all kinds. Professor Peter Woodward, University of
Reading
"A timely contribution to an important set of debates ... tackles
questions emerging from discussions about modernisation, urbanisation
and globalisation from an explicitly local angle with regards to Sudan."
Dr Harry Verhoeven, University of Oxford
Sudan experiences one of the most severe fissures between society and
territory in Africa. Not only were its international borders redrawn
when South Sudan separated in 2011, but conflicts continue to erupt over
access to land: territorial claims are challenged by local and
international actors; borders are contested; contracts governing the
privatization of resources are contentious; and the legal entitlements
to agricultural land are disputed. Under these new dynamics of land
grabbing and resource extraction, fundamental relationships between
people and land are being disrupted: while land has become a global
commodity, for millions it still serves as a crucial reference for
identity-formation and constitutes their most important source of
livelihood.
This book seeks to disentangle the emerging relationships between people
and land in Sudan. The first part focuses on the spatial impact of
resource-extracting economies: foreign agricultural land acquisitions;
Chinese investments in oil production; and competition between artisanal
and industrial gold mining. Detailed ethnographic case studies in the
second part, from Darfur, South Kordofan, Red Sea State, Kassala, Blue
Nile, and Khartoum State, show how rural people experience "their" land
vis-à-vis the latest wave of privatization and commercialization of land
rights.
Jörg Gertel is Professor of Economic Geography at Leipzig University;
Richard Rottenburg is Chair of Anthropology at the University of Halle;
Sandra Calkins is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for
Social Anthropology in Halle
