Panel 159: The Boundaries of the State in Sudan: Engaging the Intermediaries between State and Society

In seeking ‘entry-points’ and partners, international interventions in Sudan are increasingly focused on identifying interstitial actors between state and society, categorised broadly as civil society and sometimes held to include traditional leadership. This panel seeks to advance understanding of state-society relations in Sudan by pursuing wider interdisciplinary insights to suggest that state margins are fertile political spaces, in which the state itself may be constructed, despite the limited visibility of formal institutions. The panel examines the spatial, institutional and cultural construction of the state-society interface in Sudan’s southern and western peripheries, where state power has historically taken a nodal, urban-centred form. Those who cross the urban-rural divide are seen to be transformed into ‘townese’ or ‘government people’. What might be termed ‘civil society’ is therefore understood by local people to belong to this urban sphere of government.

The urban-rural state-society boundary has become ever more porous, but the panel will explore whether it has nevertheless continued to be constituted in mobile and inter-personal ways by those who move across it, from British colonial officers on ‘trek’ in Darfur to  21st-century ‘para-vets’ visiting Southern Sudanese cattle-camps. The individuals inhabiting and crossing this fluid border have often experienced it as a space of vulnerability and transformation, as they seek to navigate the tensions of a liminal identity. They have also played a powerful role in representing the state to local society and vice versa. By exploring the interactions, relations and institutions upon and within the state-society boundary, the panel will offer new approaches to analysis of state-society relations and their mediators in Sudan’s ‘peripheries’, and beyond.