The current civil war has intensified in complexity the longer it has been fought. Multiple local grievances have created numerous motives for armed confrontation, and shifting alliances within the wider conflict have produced a pattern of interlocking civil wars, now being fought on different levels.

By 1991 the war in the Sudan could already be described as a network of internal wars, whether within sub-regions or among specific peoples. Some Nuer tribes provided recruits simultaneously to the Anyanya-2 and the SPLA, and other Southern peoples such as the Mundari and Toposa were similarly divided between the government and the guerrillas. Misseriya groups sought military patrons in the political parties, the army and Chevron oil company. One thing which clearly distinguishes the current war from the civil war of the 1960s is that it has not been confined to the South: fighting has taken place in Darfur, Southern Kordofan, Blue Nile and, most recently, Qallabat, Kassala and Red Sea – all parts of the ‘Muslim’ North. In each regional case internal tensions have been exacerbated by the intervention of external interests. With the introduction of violent sectarian politics at the national centre, this war has also served to fracture, perhaps irreparably, the Northern Muslim consensus.

Since 1991 the number of internal civil wars has multiplied, paralleled by a deepening involvement of the Sudan government in the internal politics of neighbouring countries, whether in pursuit of its policy of Islamic expansion or for reasons of military expediency. These multiple civil wars have each fed into and intensified the fighting of the overall ‘North–South’ war. The longer the war has been fought without hope of resolution, and the more entrenched the North–South cleavage has become, so other fractures within the Muslim North have proliferated.

The civil war within Islam: redefining the community of Believers

The Sudan has a longer history of territorial integrity than most postcolonial nations in Africa. Territories combined together within the Egyptian empire go back over a century and a quarter, at least to the time of the first conquest of Darfur in 1876. The Mahdist state attempted (unsuccessfully) to maintain this integrity; the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium re-established it, except where the edges had been nibbled away by other empires; Egypt and Britain bequeathed it to the independent Sudan.