Sudanese Images of the Other: Education and Conflict in Sudan

Abstract

Education can contribute to peace and reconciliation as well as to conflict and strife (Bush and Saltarelli 2000; Smith and Vaux 2003; Davies 2004a). On the one hand, (re)building schools, recruiting teachers, and returning children to classrooms may help reduce the causes of fragility, legitimate the state, and create a peace dividend in postconflicts situations. The World Bank also argues that a return of children to school after armed conflict can produce an early peace dividend, cementing support for peace (World Bank 2005; Collier 2006; McEvoy-Levy 2006). On the other hand, Lennart Vriens (2004, 71) argues that education is one of “the most successful instruments for the . . . dissemination of militarism,” and Marc Sommers (2002, 8) claims that “many who conduct modern wars are expert at using educational settings to indoctrinate and control children.” The complex, often contradictory role of education in conflict is explored in this article in relation to Sudan. The focus of the article is the NorthSouth conflict, bearing in mind that other, “minor” wars and military clashes in both the North and South have “each fed into and intensified the fighting of the overall ‘North-South’ war” ( Johnson 2007, 127). I examine the preand postconflict political discourses and the educational discourses employed in relation to the ideological, religious, and military struggle between the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) in the South and the Khartoum government in the North. In addition, I will discuss how the political and educational discourses contributed to the reconstruction of the country and to the simultaneous sustaining and undermining of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).