The Genocide-Ecocide Nexus in Sudan: Violent “Development” and the Racial-Spatial Dynamics of (Neo)Colonial-Capitalist Extraction

Abstract

This article works with and develops the framework of the genocide-ecocide nexus to examine the relationship between environmental destruction, capitalist expansion, and genocide in Sudan. Arguing that they are more fundamentally interconnected than has tended to be recognized, it discusses how multiple rural, primarily subsistence and place-based communities on Sudan's exploited peripheral regions have been affected by these dynamics over several decades, especially from the 1970s. To demonstrate this, three domains of ecologically destructive extraction are examined: large-scale mechanized agriculture, exploitation of water resources, and oil extraction. These cases, the article contends, show how genocide in Sudan is constitutively intertwined with racialized and class-based "development"-driven ecological destruction in ways that are direct and indirect, short-term and long-termbut always systemically related to (neo)colonial-capitalist extraction. Theoretically, the article builds on existing frameworks on the genocide-ecocide nexus. It also expands these frameworks by emphasizing, firstly, the inherently racialized dynamics of these processes in Sudan, and secondly, the devastating fragmentation of socioecological worlds brought about by the expanding frontier of violent development. The analysis highlights blindspots and limitations with a number of other accounts of genocide in Sudan, including those which frame it as an issue of ideology or identity-based intercommunal tensions, and those which explain it as a form of counterinsurgency.

Criminalization of Ecocide Acts from the Perspective of Dogmatik

“…Therefore, whether violent or non-violent land occupation is equivalent to directly destroying the cultural system of these groups, leading to their social death, that is, cultural extinction. When the cultural system of these groups is destroyed, all these communities resist these processes (land occupation, cultural extinction) in different ways and at different times, and formulate community response and survival strategies against the background of national violence and survival risks (Wise, 2021). This strategy is usually violent, even revolutionary, which leads to ethnic cleansing or large-scale human rights crisis.…”

“…In this case, some groups are more vulnerable to the influence of the state's exploitative tribalism, the strategy of racial divide and rule, and the recruitment of state supported militias. The latter, in turn, are mobilized by the above-mentioned racist trends of thought, and become the main tool for the confluence and displacement of genocide (Wise, 2021).…”