The Genocide-Ecocide Nexus in Sudan: Violent “Development” and the Racial-Spatial Dynamics of (Neo)Colonial-Capitalist Extraction

Abstract

This article works with and develops the framework of the genocide-ecocide nexus to examine the relationship between environmental destruction, capitalist expansion, and genocide in Sudan. Arguing that they are more fundamentally interconnected than has tended to be recognized, it discusses how multiple rural, primarily subsistence and place-based communities on Sudan’s exploited peripheral regions have been affected by these dynamics over several decades, especially from the 1970s. To demonstrate this, three domains of ecologically destructive extraction are examined: large-scale mechanized agriculture, exploitation of water resources, and oil extraction. These cases, the article contends, show how genocide in Sudan is constitutively intertwined with racialized and class-based “development”-driven ecological destruction in ways that are direct and indirect, short-term and long-term – but always systemically related to (neo)colonial-capitalist extraction. Theoretically, the article builds on existing frameworks on the genocide-ecocide nexus. It also expands these frameworks by emphasizing, firstly, the inherently racialized dynamics of these processes in Sudan, and secondly, the devastating fragmentation of socioecological worlds brought about by the expanding frontier of violent development. The analysis highlights blind-spots and limitations with a number of other accounts of genocide in Sudan, including those which frame it as an issue of ideology or identity-based intercommunal tensions, and those which explain it as a form of counterinsurgency.