ABSTRACT
As outlined in Figure 12.1 poor governance has been the main causative factor indelibly impeding progress in the peripheries of Sudan resulting in institutional failure at local and national levels. The geography of Darfur interacted with these institutional failures, subjugating the people of Darfur to a confl ict that has been hard to resolve. There exists a system of structural endogenous relationships interactively based on simultaneous infl uences between local factors (qabilah bias, local institutional failures, etc.), regional factors (geography, ecology, etc.), national factors (privatization of pro-poor services, land law, etc.), and external infl uences (oil, the war on terror, China versus Western countries, the Washington Consensus, etc.). As Figure 12.1 shows, this study acknowledges such interactive relationships with many of the variables, commonly perceived as root causes (qabilah bias, ecology, etc.), acting more as catalysts than initiating causes. Instead, this analysis is based on the premise that poor governance and the resulting mismanagement of transition from a traditional society to a modern economy are the initiating factors triggering a series of institutional failures interacting with the geography of Darfur to exacerbate the current confl ict. Thus, although institutional breakdown is a national phenomenon that hardly hit all of the peripheries, the interaction of these institutional failures with the geographical structure of Darfur discussed in Chapters 2 and 5 is the main reason for the confl ict development in Darfur. As such, improving governance and political, economic, and social institutions forms the foundation of a long-term solution to the Darfur crisis.
