Water, Civilisation and Power in Sudan The Political Economy of Military-Islamist State Building

In 1989, a secretive movement of Islamists allied itself to a military cabal to violently take power in Africa's biggest country. Sudan's revolutionary regime was built on four pillars - a new politics, economic liberalisation, an Islamic revival, and a U-turn in foreign relations - and mixed militant conservatism with social engineering: a vision of authoritarian modernisation. Water and agricultural policy have been central to this state-building project. Going beyond the conventional lenses of famine, 'water wars' or the oil resource curse, Harry Verhoeven links environmental factors, development, and political power. Based on years of unique access to the Islamists, generals, and business elites at the core of the Al-Ingaz Revolution, Verhoeven tells the story of one of Africa's most ambitious state-building projects in the modern era - and how its gamble to instrumentalise water and agriculture to consolidate power is linked to twenty-first-century globalisation, Islamist ideology, and intensifying geopolitics of the Nile.

1. Prologue: the inauguration of the Merowe dam; 2. State building, the environment, and the civilisation mission; 3. Hydraulic civilisation and land of famine: the crafting of the Sudanese state and its sources of power; 4. Mashru Al-Hadhari: the rise of Sudan's Al-Ingaz regime and its civilisation project; 5. The hydro-political economy of Al-Ingaz: economic salvation through 'dams as development'; 6. The geopolitics of the Nile: Khartoum's dam programme and agricultural revival in the global economy; 7. Military-Islamist state building and its contradictions: mirages in the desert, South Sudan's secession, and the new hydropolitics of the Nile; 8. Conclusion: water, civilisation, and power.

Harry Verhoeven teaches African Politics at Oxford and is the founder and convenor of the University of Oxford China-Africa Network, as well as the founder of the Oxford Central Africa Forum. He has collaborated with UNDP Sudan, Chatham House, Greenpeace India, and Small Arms Survey and has lectured at ministries of foreign affairs, defence academies, and leading universities around the world. He has published in Civil War; Conflict, Security and Development, Development and Change, Geopolitics, the Journal of Eastern African Studies, the Journal of Modern African Studies, Middle East Policy, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the Review of African Political Economy, and The Washington Quarterly. He has recently been appointed to a professorship in Comparative Politics and International Relations at Georgetown University, Washington DC.