Background and Introduction

This book offers a holistic appraisal of the political economy of the Darfur confl ict from an economic, political, historical, social, and ecological perspective. It will treat tribalism, rather than ethnicity, as a consequential factor, not a root cause of the confl ict, demonstrating how societal tensions have emerged from underlying economic, political, and social institutional failures. A qabilah (tribe) is a societal group with the same genealogy or direction of origin. Specifi cally, this study, unlike previous ones, distinguishes the homogeneity of ethnicity (culture) in Darfur from its heterogeneous societal groups (qabilahs).