War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan (Deng)

Francis M. Deng's study of Sudan's civil war as a conflict of national identity, published by the Brookings Institution Press in 1995. Deng, a Sudanese scholar and diplomat, frames the war 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 competing material interests, structured the war and its intractability. Its strength is Deng's own position as a Sudanese Dinka scholar writing on the identity questions at the war's center. Its limit is that, in centering identity and religion, it argues one identifiable side of a live debate against readings that treat political and economic marginalization as the deeper cause.