The First Sudanese Civil War: Africans, Arabs, and Israelis in the Southern Sudan, 1955-1972 (Poggo)

Scopas S. Poggo's dedicated political and military history of the First Sudanese Civil War, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009. Poggo, a South Sudanese historian, documents the Sudanese government's Arabization and Islamization drives, including General Ibrahim Abboud's 1958 to 1964 policies mandating Arabic as the official language and the March 1964 expulsion of foreign Christian missionaries from the south, as central drivers that turned a regional revolt into a war the southern Anyanya movement and its population increasingly understood in religious and ethnic terms, alongside the covert regional and Israeli support the rebellion drew. Its strength is a dedicated, archivally grounded study of this specific war rather than a chapter within a longer national history. Its limit is that, in foregrounding Arabization and Islamization as the war's turning point, it argues one identifiable side of a live debate against readings that treat political and economic marginalization as the deeper and more durable cause.