ABSTRACT
Introduction This is the second major chapter looking at the unmaking of post-colonial Sudan. In Chapter 3 we concluded that the Islamist ascendancy was, by and large, a product of the crisis-making process of Nimeiri’s regime and was further facilitated by its outcome. This chapter traces back the Islamists; ascendancy to power from the mid1970s onwards. It examines both internal as well as external factors that enabled such an ascendancy. The chapter examines various strategies employed by the NIF, a narrowly based political movement, to consolidate its power through measures aiming at complete monopoly over violence, social and economic structures including privatization of the state; hegemony over the accumulation process that crowded out the old elite’s and consolidated the ascending Islamist elite’s leading position; fragmentation of the social basis of actual and potential contending forces through re-tribalization; and ethnicization of conflicts in marginalized territories. The chapter addresses the impact of increasing international isolation of the regime and how this isolation exacerbated the process of stagnation and shrinkage of the economy and state, leading to further repression of wages, increased outflows of skills and capital, proliferation of conflict perpetuated by deepening of the crisis in the economy and society and the NIF’s own policies of divide and rule. As stressed earlier, while the previous phase of crisis making was responsible for the erosion of the structural foundation of the post-colonial economy and state, this phase witnessed the ultimate conclusion of this crisis.1
