Notre mission est de soutenir, fédérer et visibiliser les études sur le Moyen-Orient et les mondes musulmans en France. Nous créons un espace d'échanges, de concertations et d'initiatives au sein de la communauté académique.
Notre mission est de soutenir, fédérer et visibiliser les études sur le Moyen-Orient et les mondes musulmans en France. Nous créons un espace d'échanges, de concertations et d'initiatives au sein de la communauté académique.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTION – The Sudan, five years after the independence of South Sudan: which reconfigurations, transformations, and evolutions in the “North”?

South Sudan officially gained independence on the 9th July 2011. This was the outcome of the peace agreement signed in January 2005 and in accordance with the national referendum of January 2011. This historic event, which should have put an end on the historical conflict between the Northern and Southern regions and communities, constituted a real challenge in term of adaptation, resilience and innovation for the whole of the society.
In this unprecedented context of the birth of a new national territory, and the remodelling of existing spatial and political configurations, South Sudan has logically been at the centre of attention – whether this be from political actors, researchers or humanitarian donors. However, the North has been profoundly affected by this rupture as well.
The intention of this issue is to shed light on some of these transformations: the revision of past bureaucratic structures and the creation of new ones, the drastic decrease of oil income in the states revenues and their strategies to replace it, the repositioning of the country at a regional and international scale, the departure of millions of South-Sudanese and their “reappearance” as a new category of stateless refugees (South-Sudanese) in the territory, the changes to nationality laws… It is about fundamental repercussions on the political, religious, social, administrative or economical level, that in turn effect the social and identity relations as much as spatial organisation or even memory.
This call for papers proposes to catch up on these evolutions, more or less brutal or linear, five years after the independence of South Sudan, which strongly calls for further research in social sciences and humanities. Finally, we want to also open a reflection on the consequences that the separation has concretely had on the feasibility of research, as for example the increasing difficulty in carrying on archival research, or the obstacles to the access to certain regions and/or informants.
The ambition of this issue of EMA on Sudan is not to be exhaustive, but to offer a space of reflexion for the empirical research that has been carried out during the last five years. These fieldworks all share the common factor of questioning the consequences of South Sudan’s independence. The aim of this issue is to collect articles of different types (short or long, research notes, notes on current affairs), based on a variety of sources (press, photos, social media, ethnographic material), on different topics and perspectives in order to decrypt the complexity of socio-economic, spatial, political, and identity reconfigurations. A particular attention will be given to works showing the tensions and conflicts that this separation has caused or reinforced in the multiple spheres of Sudanese society. While some Sudanese politicians are stressing the supposed homogeneity of the Sudanese society since the separation of South Sudan, we intend, in contrast, to highlight the processes of differentiation and the on-going reconfiguration of categories.
The last two issues of the EMA specifically about Sudan date from the 1990’s (n°16-17) and reflected on the different aspects of the 1980’s crisis. For this reason, it is high time to renew this fruitful experience.
Abstracts (1 page max) can be sent before the 31th of December 2015.
The complete articles in French, or English (40 000 characters maximum) are to be sent before the 21th of March 2016 to Elena Vezzadnini (elena.vezzadini@univ-paris1.fr) and Alice Franck (alicefranck@yahoo.fr) as well as on the email address of the CEDEJ Khartoum (cedejkhartoum@gmail.com).