Second Sudanese Civil War

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

The Second Sudanese Civil War reignited in 1983 after President Jaafar Nimeiry imposed Sharia law nationwide under the September laws and abrogated the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement that had ended the First Sudanese Civil War's regional autonomy settlement. It was fought between the Arabized, Muslim-majority government in Khartoum, led by Nimeiry and, from 1989, by Omar al-Bashir's National Islamic Front backed government, and the Sudan People's Liberation Army and Movement, led by John Garang and based chiefly among the mostly Christian and traditional-religion populations of southern Sudan.

It became one of the longest running civil wars of the twentieth century, marked by famine and mass displacement and by a war within the SPLA itself after its own 1991 split along Dinka and Nuer lines. The January 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, mediated internationally over more than two years of negotiation, ended the war, granted southern Sudan a six-year period of autonomy, and provided for the January 2011 referendum in which the south voted overwhelmingly for independence, leading to the creation of South Sudan later that year.

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.