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Sudanese Political Movements and the Struggle for the State: 1964-1985 examines Sudanese opposition movements focusing on the early independence period. It begins in the period immediately following the 1964 October Revolution in which a civil uprising led by students, unions, and civil society at large ousted President Ibrahim Abboud. This event defined understandings of citizenship and political opposition for decades to come. Following 1964, a host of political movements led by Communists, Islamists, sectarian parties, and regional rebel groups all acted with the knowledge that change to the political system—even the removal of the President—was possible and could be done again. These movements engaged in different forms of confrontation with an evolving regime, not only altering the policies of the state but defining what forms of politics were seen as reasonable and worthy of recognition. These confrontations functioned as an iterative process that both altered the state as well as the larger political system in which the government was a dominant, yet not all-powerful actor. This is a history of state building told through the state’s relationships to non-state actors. It builds upon historically engaged studies of Africa and the Middle East that delve into the nature of state power both in an imperial and colonial context of the 19th and early 20th century as well as in post-independence settings. By discussing politics beyond the state, it shows how the state changed over time in dialogue with those that opposed it. Discussions of state formation (and reformation) in relation to political opposition in post-independence Africa and Middle East are rare due to the political sensitivity of the subject and consequent challenges in accessing source materials. Sudanese Political Movements and the Struggle for the State draws on state produced documents located in the Sudanese National Records Office and the South Sudan National Archives, as well as British diplomatic reporting to describe these contestations directly, providing an understanding of a type of politics rarely discussed in historical works. Divided into five chapters, Sudanese Political Movements and the Struggle for the State periodizes the relationship between political movements and the state based on which groups controlled the government. It begins with an examination of the parliamentary period of 1964-69, when political elites from northern Sudan determined and policed the realm of what was deemed reasonable politics even as the security apparatus retained control over large swathes of the country. Following chapters delve into President Ja’afar Nimeiri’s regime, delineating between the alliances it maintained with Sudanese political movements—first with the Communist party (1969-71), Southerners and “technocrats” (1972-76), Sectarian movements of the center right (1977-1983) and finally the Islamic Movement (1983-85). These alliances did not always obviate those of the past, at least entirely, nor did they remove all opposition. Yet the alliances guided the state in its pursuit of policy, as well as in how to respond to dissent from different segments of Sudanese society and what forms of dissent and lines of political argumentation were legible and which were threatening to state legitimacy.

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