Marginalization or Identity? Two Readings of the War's Deeper Cause

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Historians divide over how central religion was to the Second Sudanese Civil War's causes. The historian Douglas Johnson argues that the war's deeper and more durable causes were the political and economic marginalization of Sudan's peripheries, especially the south, by successive Khartoum governments, a dynamic that predates and outlasted any single government's religious policy, so that the 1983 Sharia imposition functioned as a proximate trigger and a potent unifying grievance rather than the war's root cause.

The scholar Francis Deng, by contrast, frames the conflict substantially as a clash between an Arab-Islamic vision of Sudanese national identity promoted from Khartoum and an African, predominantly Christian and traditional-religion vision held in the south, arguing that the two sides' competing self-understandings, not merely their competing material interests, structured the war and its intractability. The 1983 Sharia imposition is recorded here as an attested trigger, without adopting either camp's account of how central religious identity was to the war's underlying causes.