Water, Civilisation and Power in Sudan (African Studies)
Cambridge University Press, 3/5/2015
EAN 9781107061149, ISBN10: 1107061148
Hardcover, 336 pages, 23.6 x 16 x 2.8 cm
Language: English
In 1989, a secretive movement of Islamists allied itself to a military cabal to violently take power in Africa's biggest country. Sudan's revolutionary regime was built on four pillars - a new politics, economic liberalisation, an Islamic revival, and a U-turn in foreign relations - and mixed militant conservatism with social engineering: a vision of authoritarian modernisation. Water and agricultural policy have been central to this state-building project. Going beyond the conventional lenses of famine, 'water wars' or the oil resource curse, Harry Verhoeven links environmental factors, development, and political power. Based on years of unique access to the Islamists, generals, and business elites at the core of the Al-Ingaz Revolution, Verhoeven tells the story of one of Africa's most ambitious state-building projects in the modern era - and how its gamble to instrumentalise water and agriculture to consolidate power is linked to twenty-first-century globalisation, Islamist ideology, and intensifying geopolitics of the Nile.
1. Prologue
the inauguration of the Merowe dam
2. State building, the environment, and the civilisation mission
3. Hydraulic civilisation and land of famine
the crafting of the Sudanese state and its sources of power
4. Mashru Al-Hadhari
the rise of Sudan's Al-Ingaz regime and its civilisation project
5. The hydro-political economy of Al-Ingaz
economic salvation through 'dams as development'
6. The geopolitics of the Nile
Khartoum's dam programme and agricultural revival in the global economy
7. Military-Islamist state building and its contradictions
mirages in the desert, South Sudan's secession, and the new hydropolitics of the Nile
8. Conclusion
water, civilisation, and power.