International Summer School:
Institutionalization and regulation: Emerging Orders in Sudan after the Referendum

1.-6.10.2011

Summer school organized by D9 and A4: Khartoum (Sudan)

Word FileProgramme


Call for Papers

The postcolonial history of the Sudan can be read as a continuous struggle to find appropriate institutional orders for this vast and heterogeneous country. The main challenges have been

  1. to reconcile the many different local orders (starting from the colonial legacy of “indirect rule”), especially in relation to the state,
  2. to transform them through processes of modernization and nation building,
  3. to overcome the inherited north-south dichotomy, and
  4. to relate Sudanese institutional orders to contradictory international arrangements and conventions.


While many of these attempts completely failed, some were partially or regionally successful. The National Congress Party's programme is the most recent attempt to address the critical situation of Sudanese institutional orders. By drawing its legitimacy chiefly from one of several circulating visions of society and state, namely that of the modernist Islamist part of the riverain elite, the programme was obviously misguided in a country with many divergent visions and webs of belief. Southern Sudan and the marginalized regions (Red Sea, Blue Nile, South Kordofan, Darfur) could not be voluntarily integrated into a unitary nation state based on NCP ideology; a coercive military solution was tried, but did not succeed. Consequently, the referendum held at the beginning of 2011 led to the creation of a new and independent state in the south. Apart from that, the year 2011 marks the formal and strategic endpoint of the six year implementation period of the “Comprehensive Peace Agreement” of 2005. Thus the year 2011 is likely to become a landmark on the long road to amending the institutional orders of the Sudan.

The International Summer School in October 2011 in Khartoum will focus on institutional transformations related to this landmark as well as on emerging institutional orders below the level of state intervention and regulation. Aspects to be considered will include norms, values, significations and technologies that regulate redistribution and solidarity among kin and neighbours, gender relations, life courses, access to land, markets and employment, access to cooperatives, interest groups or rotating savings and credit associations, new spatial orders, ethnic boundaries, new material and technological orders, and similar issues. Of particular interest will be the intermediate institutions between the state and the people like civil society organizations, traditional legal orders, education and elite formation.

Another objective of the Summer School is to offer a platform for representatives of a broad array of academic institutions to meet and exchange experiences, critical observations and analyses of the on-going process of institutional transformation of the Sudan. The Summer School aims especially at bringing together junior and senior scholars of and from the Sudan and giving them the opportunity to work jointly on common questions. Senior scholars are asked to propose texts from their current research interests, which they would like to discuss with their classes, while the junior scholars are invited to engage in intensive debates in their respective classes and to formulate statements for a final symposium.

Some of the papers presented at the Summer School will be selected for publication in an edited volume that aims a grasping the particular moment in history the Sudan finds itself in 2011. Those senior scholars who want to give papers (instead of leading seminars with junior scholars) are expected to submit their papers well in advance of the event.