Foreign Land Acquisitions Reshaping Social Relations in Sudan

In the mid 2000’s, in anticipation of South Sudan’s independence, the Sudanese government devised a plan to revive the nation’s post-secession economy by attracting investments in agriculture from within the Muslim world. A dozen Saudi, Gulf Arab and Turkish agribusiness investors have since leased large tracts of Sudan’s most fertile, cultivated land for large-scale food production. My dissertation research explores how these foreign land acquisitions are reshaping social relations between various stakeholders with competing claims to Sudanese land. In particular, I am interested in how different understandings of Islam, notions of belonging and the law are invoked, reconfigured and contested through land disputes that have emerged within this context and ask what these mobilizations produce. How are these claim-making processes reconfiguring social relations between government officials, Muslim investors, absentee landowners, smallholder farmers and landless workers across gender and ethnic lines? I pursue this broader inquiry through a focus on the role prominent Sufi shaykhs (leaders) are playing in mediating land disputes that have emerged out of this context. I ask: What is at stake for Sufi shaykhs as they engage in these disputes and how does their engagement inform the way different stakeholders come to understand and make claims to land? How does it reconfigure their relationships with their followers and challenge or reify existing codes of religious conduct?

Thanks to your generous support, I spent four weeks studying Hausa in New York City and seven weeks conducting preliminary fieldwork in Khartoum and Gezira state over the summer. The time I spent in Sudan was roughly divided into four segments. I spent the first 1-2 weeks doing archival research on Gezira land disputes dating back to the 1920s and attending an agribusiness investment conference in Khartoum. I then traveled to the Gezira to reconnect with previous research contacts, including several Sufi shakyhs whose engagements in dispute resolution I observed last summer. Through these visits, I was able to identify two communities (Hillat Hamad and Jed Karim), which are home to both Hausa landless workers and Gezira Arab smallholding farmers who are experiencing the impact of foreign land acquisitions and mobilizing to varying degrees around maintaining access to their land. I chose these specific communities because both have strong ties to prominent Sufi shaykhs: Shaykh Abdallah of the Arakiya order and Shaykh al Tayib of the Samanniya order, who is also a judge. Both shaykhs have played very different but significant roles in mediating large land disputes between various stakeholders. I spent the rest of my time in the field, participating in daily activities in the zawiya’s (lodges) of Shaykh Abdallah and Shaykh al Tayib and living with several landless, Hausa-speaking families in Hillat Hamad.

My summer research has allowed me to better identify the appropriate research sites, activities and methods I might use to answer the questions that are driving my long-term research interests. It has also given me the opportunity to begin building the kinds of relationships with people that will allow me to figure out how I can best participate in and contribute to the communities I will be living in during my dissertation fieldwork. Ultimately, I hope to contribute to a growing literature on foreign land grabs by understanding this new yet old phenomenon beyond the paradigm of resource extraction imposed by Western investors on poor, African nations rather as a set of historically situated interactions, practices and contestations. We live in an era in which a sensationalist media discourse continuously draws our attention towards sectarian religious conflict in Muslim societies. I therefore, feel honored and grateful to have received your invaluable support to develop a dissertation project which explores Sufi Muslim mediations and practices that foster critical alliances for resolving conflicts over land and for building the foundations of a sustainable peace in war-torn Sudan.