Heather Cox Richardson, the history professor, author, and extraordinarily successful Substacker, is at the top of my list for “Great Synthesizers” because of the way she brings disparate information into a comprehensible [almost] daily summary of important current events. As I have noted frequently on FaceBook posts and in conversation, there's frequently very little, sometimes nothing, in her posts that I don't already know. But the way she brings the information together is usually very helpful to my own understanding. Her posts are a critical part of my own routine efforts to understand what's happening in the world, and there's no doubt that she will be one of the most commonly cited sources of clear thinking and writing in my own nascent efforts at sharing information and viewpoints here. She's absolutely one of my academic heroes, making scholarly understandings available to the masses.
What she brings us today – a recap and short analysis of what went on in the civil war in Sudan – is unusual fare for her, because she mostly deals in US political issues. I'm glad she presented this, though, because (confession time here) I often don't pay much attention to news about conflicts in Africa. It just seems like there's too many of them, involving cultures and tribes I know too little about, and issues that too often seem from afar like ego battles between warlord leaders, with no clearly identifiable 'good side” or 'bad side' for me to develop an informed preference.
I know my own area of specialization, Latin America, can also seem like that from time to time for the casual US observer. But there's a lot few countries in Latin America than in Africa (54 as opposed to 33), the great majority of which have the same names now as they did when I was a child, and I spent years in graduate studies learning about this region. So I follow the news about the entire region, and follow the politics and problems and conflicts of several nations quite closely.
Even given my base of knowledge about Latin America, however, it's often not easy for me to answer the question, “Why is what is happens in Latin America important to the United States?” Even if I'm prepared for the question, the answer is often not easily comprehensible to most people, in large part because it involves “opportunity costs” rather than “direct threats.” That is, the real tragedy of the US's lack of greater involvement in the region is that we miss out on mutual blessings that could flow from a closer economic and cultural connection if we could form tighter alliances with countries that have important resources to share. Meanwhile, if we neglect our Southern neighbors, generally the worst thing that happens is that our immigration crisis is exacerbated. Given that Cold War II is heating up, we could see increasing US interest in Latin America as a strategy to curtail Chinese influence. But we'll have to see how that unfolds in the next few years.
The contrast between “lost opportunities” and “direct threats” has also usually held true in Africa as well. An important difference, however, is that the northeast third or half of Africa is culturally as well as geographically closer to North African and Middle Eastern countries with which the US has had a long history of problematic relations and periodic outright hostilities. This ongoing acute tension generally makes this third or half of Africa more … newsworthy? As well, several of the countries in this region are oil-rich, with the capacity for, and history of, destabilizing international markets. Which is to say that these countries can pose a “direct threat” to the US, so we're more likely to hear about them in those rare moments when the US Press and public attention can be ripped away from our own absurdly dire political situations.
So … that brings me to what I thought was really outstanding about today’s Cox Richardson piece. She does an excellent job of not just summarizing the conflict in Sudan and the harrowing events of the last several days, as US Embassy Personnel were extracted from the combat zone. She also explains why what is happening in Sudan in particular, and Africa in general, is a direct threat and, thus, critical to US security. The whole post is remarkable, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. But the last few paragraphs are terribly important, so I'm going to cut and paste them to this page.
The fighting in Sudan has repercussions around the world. There are signs that Russia’s Wagner group is supporting Hemedti (one of the two generals fighting each other), which would be in keeping with the statement Wagner’s founder, Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, made after his group’s recent losses in Ukraine, saying he planned to concentrate on Africa, where his forces have been propping up authoritarian governments now for a while. They have been in Sudan since 2017, and in addition to the interest of Wagner-linked companies in gold mining there, Russia has long wanted to build a naval base on the Red Sea at Port Sudan, which is currently under the control of the government forces led by Burhan.
The Nile River runs through Sudan, tying Sudan to Egypt and Ethiopia, as well as to eight other African countries. Other international powers are also interested in Sudan’s resources, and in making sure the conflict doesn’t spill over into other countries. Overall, as Patel noted, the violence destabilizes not just Sudan but the region as a whole, hurting civilians and jeopardizing “the will, the aspirations, and the progress that the Sudanese people are hoping to see through some kind of transition to democracy.”
In the New York Times today, Jacqueline Burns, a former advisor to the U.S. special envoy for Sudan and South Sudan and a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, suggested that the conflict in Sudan had a much broader lesson for the international community.
Since 2005, Burns wrote, international negotiators have focused on splitting power between armed groups rather than civilians. Women and others who were not part of armed military groups were almost entirely excluded, she wrote. “Armed groups and dictatorial regimes know that as long as they are participating in a peace process, international pressures will eventually—often quickly—ebb. If they are pressed into signing an agreement, there are typically very few effective mechanisms to hold them to it.” And while they are pretending to engage in peace processes, armed groups are actually consolidating their political and military power.
This pattern was especially problematic in Sudan, she wrote, where the women who had led the uprising that got rid of al-Bashir were largely excluded from the government that followed; armed groups were at the table instead.
Burns warned the international community that if we are going to stop the “continued cycle of violence and human suffering,” negotiators must stop prioritizing the voices of “the armed and corrupt” over those actually interested in real political reform.