Panel #8A:
"Issues on Postcolonial Sudan"
Functional Approaches to Sudan's Future: Reflections on David Mitrany's
"A Working Peace System"
Randall Fegley
Pennsylvania State College
Sixty years ago, David Mitrany published his classic essay, "A Working Peace System."
In this important work on the reconstruction of international order, Mitrany stressed
the importance of a functional approach to world peace. Writing with optimistic
confidence amid the uncertainty of the middle of the Second World War, he believed
that humanity could be best bound together by common services, rather than by
grandiose schemes of world government. This paper explores the application of
Mitrany's ideas to the current situation in Sudan, where conflict, abuse and poverty
have left a society every bit as shattered as the world of 1943. In particular,
the role of functional governmental and non-governmental organizations on national,
cross-national, and international levels will be emphasized.
Cinematic Regionalism: The Idea of Integration in Sudan
Ahmed Mohamedain Abdalla and Mohamed-Hashim ELKAREEM
University of Toronoto, Canada
There is a sense among a growing number of observers of the world today
that the present era is one in which fundamental transformation is occurring.
The concept of border in political and social thought is becoming a mythical
function. Instead, modes of media and communications are becoming
vital to political, cultural, social and trans-regional cohesion.
In this respect, the concept of cinema can become a vehicle for regional,
national, and transnational integration. The idea of cinematic regionalism
can also be seen as a serious attempt at erasing the confines set forth
by former geographical, cultural, and social boundaries in Sudan and, perhaps,
the African countries as a whole. From this perspective the paper will
discuss through the lens of cinematic imagination the idea of social, political
and regional integration in Sudan and its neighbors.
Reading in Sudan History of the Present: Colorism, Regionalism and Violence
Abdullahi A. Gallab
Department of Sociology
Brigham Young University
Within the last fourteen years several political developments have conspired
in the Sudan to dispossess the intellectual and political life from its
central ascendancy and its power of shaping of individual and group capacities
and temperament. The first and most central of these developments
is the current type of rule which combined military dictatorship, totalitarianism
with religious particularism. To turn the rallying cry of this ideology
into action, the regime used all forms of monumental and symbolic force
and coercion to reach its goal in transforming the Sudan into a model of
an Islamist state in the Muslim Sunni world. But the birth of these
ongoing political developments in the country takes on the status of wide-ranging
historical and dialectical developments in the Sudanese existential, cultural,
and political life. Thus, in our study of the history of the present,
including the current regime, we might need to investigate many intervening
factors.
This paper addresses some of the assumptions about colorism, regionalism and violence
in the Sudan and how different forms of conduct have been acting together and
separately to map out an approach to the history of the present.