The Sudan Handbook

islamism & thE statE 179

imposed mandatory military service among government employees

(those who escaped the dismissal axe) as a manifestation of loyalty.

By and large, the civil war and the government’s approach to it seemed

to have strengthened the oppressive dimension of the regime as many

human rights violations were committed within the context of the war

and/or under its pretext.

Peace on the other hand produced new dynamics and triggered a

process that could have significantly transformed the regime and opened

the way for the rise of a new and more participatory political system. The

2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) created a constitutional

and political framework that was geared towards democratic transfor-

mation. Yet, when elections were finally held in April 2010, they were

hardly a manifestation of the democratic transformation envisaged by the

CPA. Rather, elections simply returned the ruling NCP-SPLM coalition

brought about by the CPA, and paved the way for the 2011 referendum

on self-determination for southern Sudan.

While the CPA process has been under way, the Darfur conflict has

caused a realignment of factions within the inner circle of the ruling NCP

in favour of the ‘militarist’ tendency within the regime, which in its turn

led to the government’s intransigence and complicated the prospect of a

political settlement to the crisis.

The Authoritarian State and the Clientelist State

The Islamist regime came with the ideological vision of radical trans-

formation and restructuring of the state on Islamic grounds (known as

al-mashru‘ al-hadari – which literally means ‘civilizational scheme’, but

could also be translated as ‘cultural authenticity scheme’). As alluded

to earlier, the first phase – geared towards consolidation of Islamist

control of the state – witnessed extreme repression and a heavy-handed

approach directed against all other political forces and was accompa-

nied by systematic layoffs of civil and military personnel. The Islamist

regime sought to replace the secular state structure with an ideologically

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors committed apparatus that could be trusted to pursue the movement’s

(www.riftvalley.net).