Identity, Citizenship, and Violence in Two Sudans: Reimagining a Common Future

Reimagining a Common Future

A. Idris

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137371799
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The 2011 split of Sudan and the conflicts that have followed make it a case of ongoing significance for understanding state-building in Africa. Examining both the north-south divide and the spread of violence from Darfur, this study shows how colonial legacies have shaped state formation and charts out a path to inclusive citizenship and democracy.

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Citizenship, Identity, and the State: The Theoretical Interface

Abstract: This chapter is a theoretical analysis of the interface between citizenship, the construction of identity, and the state. It examines evolving discourses on citizenship and rights as well as notions of nationhood in Africa and Sudan in particular and how these notions combine to exclude and include various categories of citizens or groups.

Keywords: Africa, Sudan, citizenship, identity, rights, state, nationhood.

Idris, Amir. Identity, Citizenship, and Violence in Two Sudans: Reimagining a Common Future. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137371799.

Since the last decades of the 20th century, the world has been witnessing the rise of political and armed protest movements committed to redefining citizenship.¹ These protest movements are not simply struggling to expand the right of political participation to excluded ethnic groups. Rather, they are questioning the political and the ideological foundation of the existing nation state. At the center of their demands is the quest for redefining either the boundaries or the content of citizenship. Deborah Yashar has noted in her work on Latin America that these new protest movements for inclusive citizenship have increasingly assumed an ethnonational direction and have manifested into two broad forms.

First, in their extreme and exclusionary form, political and armed movements have risen to redefine the boundaries of citizenship by restricting membership to a given ethnonational group. Motivated by nationalist sentiments and international discourse about self-determination and human rights, groups in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have mobilized in multiethnic polities to construct their nation–states, while membership in the nation state is allocated along ethnonational lines.²

This discourse has often had destructive political consequences as non-nationals have been excluded, often violently, from the polities that they once considered homes. Hence, struggle to restrict citizenship along ethnonational lines have resulted, in many societies, in political exclusion and ethnic violence. A second form of these protest movements has occurred over the content rather than boundaries of citizenship in multiethnic societies.³ In recent decades, many ethnic groups in Africa and elsewhere have mobilized to demand a redefinition of citizenship that would not only protect their rights as citizens of a polity but also accommodate their demands to local authority, protection of ethnonational identities and land ownership. These movements have most often been discussed in studies of multiculturalism and have tended to focus on the established democracies such as the USA and Canada. However, these protest movements to redefine the content of citizenship are not restricted to these older democracies. The last decade of the 20th century has also witnessed the emergence of these movements in postcolonial Africa.

The wave of democratization in Africa in the late 1980s and mid 1990s resulted in the rise and the intensification of ethnic and communal violence as different ethnic groups competed for power and/or sought to carve out new nation states.⁴ In much of Africa, where many countries maintained colonial boundaries through the 1950s and the 1960s, independence movements developed within indigenous communities against European colonialists. Anti-colonial liberation movements sought not only to capture state power but also to refashion a postcolonial national identity. Following independence any semblance of national unity within many African states gave way to ongoing conflict between ethnic groups, as in Nigeria, Rwanda, and Sudan. At the center of these ethnic and communal conflicts is the heightening of identity politics and the existing of competing visions of citizenship. Many ethnic groups often feel that they were excluded and marginalized in the postcolonial political dispensation. Iris Marion Young argues that despite citizenship’s formal equality, historically marginalized and excluded groups do not operate on a level playing field in public debates.⁵ Citizenship grants these groups the right to vote and to organize, but it does not actually grant an equal voice. For powerful ethnic groups have defined the rules and called themselves neutral and representative of the collective. However, the rules and the associated norms reflect, if not favor, the practices, discourses, and interests of some groups over others. Therefore, historically marginalized groups come to the public sphere with distinct disadvantages—finding it difficult to speak out and be heard.⁶ Or as Foweraker and Landman have noted, “citizens may enjoy equality before the law, but the law is silent on their ability to use it.”⁷ In this manner, citizenship has historically been defined and valued in terms of those who were excluded. It was democratic for the few; it was undemocratic for the many. The demand for democratic reform in many African countries, however, poses basic questions about citizenship in Africa. What is citizenship? Who gets to be a citizen? And how was citizenship framed and experienced during the colonial and postcolonial periods?

Citizenship, identity, and state

The interaction between the state and citizenship has been the subject of a theoretical debate dating back to the classical political theorists. Although consensus exists that citizenship is a form of state-individual relationship, there are variations among scholars on what citizenship and its content mean. For social contract theorists the very basis of the “social contract,” through which the state emerged as a form of human organization, is the conferment and recognition of citizenship on those in the political community. Aristotle and Rousseau perceived citizenship as the right to rule and be ruled. According to Aristotle, for instance, a state is “a compound made up of citizens; and this compels us to consider who should be properly called a citizen and what is a citizen really is.”⁸ Although the concepts of state and citizenship have changed in time and space, the idea of contemporary citizenship is still connected with the notion of the state. Conceptually, the state is an entity endowed with political sovereignty over a clearly defined territory; that has a monopoly of the uses of legitimate force; and that consists of citizens whose terminal loyalty is to the state.⁹ In other words, a modern state is conceived as a collectivity of citizens. In this manner, citizenship is commonly viewed as the right of individual to the protection of life, liberty, property, and welfare.¹⁰ The citizens must be active figures if the state is to be able to provide for the common good of citizens. Charles Tilly, however, identifies four main components of citizenship, namely category, role, tie, and identity. As a category, citizenship indicates a set of actors—citizens—distinguished by their shared privileged position in a particular state. As a tie, citizenship identifies mutual relation between an actor and state agents. As a role, citizenship includes all of an actor’s relations to others that depend on the actor’s relations to a particular state. And as an identity, citizenship can refer to the experience and public representation of category, ties, or role.¹¹

Dipankar Gupta, quoting T. H. Marshall, argues that citizenship has a “tendency towards equality,” that tends to equalize people who may otherwise be very different in terms of wealth, power, status, or achievement.¹² Yet in Africa, citizenship is a complex concept. In his analysis of citizenship and ethnicity in Kenya, Stephen Ndegwa defines citizenship as “defining those who are, and who are not, members of a common society.”¹³ But he rejects the notion that there is only one form of citizenship. Ndegwa emphasizes the importance of recognizing the multiplicity of conceptions of citizenship, liberal, civic-republican, transitional, to mention but a few, that can and do exist in a modern state. But it is his analysis of the distinction between the liberal and republican views of citizenship that offers the most useful framework for understanding the challenges facing many African countries. The “liberal conception of citizenship holds that rights are inherent in individuals, exists prior to community, and is guaranteed with minimal obligation to the community. The civic-republican conception considers rights not as inherent but acquired through civic practice that upholds obligations to the community.”¹⁴

Therefore, citizenship in both liberal and republican conceptions is a form of social pact, constituted by the dual elements of reciprocity and exchange between the citizen and the state. The individual enjoys those rights and privileges that no other social or political organization offers, while in turn, he gives his obligations, loyalty, and commitment to the state. While citizenship sounds like an egalitarian and equalizing concept, it does not presuppose class but civic equality: equality before the law, equality of access and opportunities in state institutions and structures, and fairness and justice in the interactions between the state and individuals and amongst individuals in a political community. The liberal conception of citizenship thus has to compete in many African countries with traditional, often parochial, obligations to specific ethnic groups. Historically, in precolonial African societies, individual rights did not occupy center stage. Rather, duty to the community and to those in authority was what matters. The individual had no independent status in the context of his/her community. For instance, “the Nguni concept of ubuntu, which has equivalent in other Bantu languages, has been elevated to a creed in post-apartheid South Africa. “Ubuntu” literally means that one’s value as an individual can only be defined in relation to other human beings—a person is only a person through other people.”¹⁵

The criteria for citizenship, however, differ from country to country. Three different criteria can be identified. The first is citizenship by birth (jus soli). The second is citizenship by descent or ancestral claims (jus sanguinis). The third is citizenship acquired through naturalization. In most cases, countries adopt a combination of two or all of these criteria. The first criterion is more inclusive and liberal in nature. This is adopted in countries such as the USA and Canada. Other countries such as Germany deny citizenship on the basis of birth, permanent, or prolonged residency.¹⁶ In a country such as France, children born in the country cannot lay claim to citizenship except under certain conditions: that is when they reach the age of 18, have lived in France for five years, and have committed no crime.¹⁷ What is important is that every state stipulates rules through which it defines those who are its citizens and those who are not.

The common type of citizenship operates according to the principle of jus sanguinis. “Rooted in the 19th- and 20th-century ideas about the nation state, this type of citizenship is predicated on the notion that the main political community is based on desc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Citizenship, Identity, and the State: The Theoretical Interface
• 2  The Burden of History: Slavery and Colonialism
• 3  The Curse of Exclusive Nationalism: National Identity and Citizenship
• 4  The Rise of Protest Movements in Southern Sudan and Darfur
• 5  Reimagining a Common Future for Two Sudans
• Conclusion: The Way Forward
• Selected Bibliography
• Index