Chapter Five
Oil and Water in Sudan
Paul Goldsmith, Lydia A Abura andJason Swiizer
introduction
What policy and legal measures, among other interventions, may help to
resolve the seemingly endless conflict in Sudan? A nation of 36 million peo-
ple, wracked by conflict for 34 of the last 45 years, it has generated some four
million displaced people during the course of its war. it is estimated that over
two million Sudanese people have died as a result of fighting and related star-
vation and disease.'
According to the International Crisis Group, "there will always be abun-
dant excuses to justify the continuing war in Sudan ... However such justifi-
cations sound increasingly hollow in the face of decades of suffering ... The
time has come for a concerted international peace effon to break the logjam
of violence in S~dan."~ Indeed, the reordering of global relations in the so-
called 'War on Terror' and Sudan's historical harbouring of its suspected
architect, Osama Bin Laden, has created an opening for peace building.
This chapter seeks to distinguish itself from many other analyses of
Sudan's long-running civil war. Our primary concern, in contrast to other
anatomies of the war which trace their roots to Arab-African, Muslim-
Christian, and other essentially identity-based dichotomies, is to identify how
environmental and ecological variables contribute to the war and how it is
waged in Sudan.
Departing from conventional wisdom requires a novel framework for
analysis. Our analysis is guided by a hypothesis linking five ecological vari-
ables to the conflict cycle. We expect that competition for scarce resources
will emerge as a causal factor. We also anticipate that an important determi-
nant will be the struggle to exploit and control the ecological sources of sur-
plus value - oil in particular.
Our framework tests three additional factors. One is the role of disnibutive
agents, referring to those demographic, tenurial and physical factors that
determine the distribution of natural resources for particular social actors or
groups - the framework document cites population growth and unequal
resource access. The second is ecological trends - the decrease in quality or
quantity of renewable resources. The third issue requiring research is the
question of ecological outcomes, defined here in terms of the net gain or loss
of a natural resource for different actors involved in conflict.