ABSTRACT
As shown above, the Darfur crisis represents a tumult that engages parties from multiple sectors of society. Clashes between different communities and local elite conflicts find one source in the militant campaign of the Khartoum government, which seeks to preserve (and capitalize upon) extreme power inequity. The protracted conflicts in Darfur are exacerbated by the political imbalance that pervades the country, where the sources and channels of power are concentrated in the hands of a small elite group of officials at the expense of the marginalized majority (Tanner 2005). These abuses create the conditions for a seemingly endless cycle of violence and repression. In order to rationalize their domination over marginalized groups, the power base typically deploys self-serving ideologies of various forms—political, racial, or religious—that operate on a discursive level to ground social inequities within a fixed part of the order of nature. To complicate matters further, multiple forms of power-struggles often underpin interethnic rivalries among the marginalized communities, weakening their collective bargaining position within the center–periphery dyad.
