Humanitarian Aid, Social Services and Conflict : Exploring the Case of Sudan

Sudan is a country that has suffered from civil war for most of its almost 50 years of independence. The recent phase of the conflict began in 1983, and has been the subject of considerable analysis. While most often portrayed as a conflict between the Arab, Muslim north and Christian/ Animist south, the recent upsurge in violence in Darfur has highlighted the considerably more complicated nature of political violence in Sudan, with centre/ periphery issues in resource allocation, extraction and exploitation, identity politics, mobilization around differences in confessional religions and sectarianism within religious denominations all contributing the the dynamics of the conflict.Humanitarian assistance has been one of the most consistent and sustained international interventions with respect to the Sudanese conflict, particularly since the establishment of Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) by the United Nations in 1989. This assistance has been necessitated by considerable humanitarian needs caused or exacerbated (in the case of natural disasters such as drought or floods) by the conflict and the collapse of state provided services throughout most of the country, particularly in those areas most affected by the war - the south, areas to the east bordering Eritrea, the Nuba Mountains and most recently Darfur. This paper seeks to explore the manner in which the provision of social services (including humanitarian aid) has been influenced the conflict itself. It breaks with existing literature on the subject in two ways - ontologically by bracketing humanitarian assistance within social services more generally, rather than specifying it as a separate type, and epistemologically by adopting a relational approach, drawing on the work of McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly (McAdam, Tarrow et al. 2001), in an effort to begin to identify causal mechanisms that are of analytical utility to the situation in Sudan and possibly to other similar situations more generally