Over The Borderline
Coming Soon….
“Higher education is slow to keep pace, actually, with the people that embody it.”
This critique by Professor Lahra Smith frames an expansive and analytical conversation that draws interesting and informative parallels between Africa’s and Myanmar’s political trajectories. Smith argues that to understand the struggles that countries like Myanmar are going through today, they must be viewed as part of broader, global patterns, and Smith brings in Sudan as an illustrative example. While there are obviously significant differences in nuance and detail between the situations in Myanmar and Sudan, the broader political and historical themes link the two nations in informative, and at times, surprising ways.
Smith, a political science professor at Georgetown University specializing in East African politics, emphasizes the colonial mindsets that still haunt and deeply affect much of academia. She buttresses this assertion by noting that although she specializes in East Africa, institutions might well expect professors with her specialty to teach about all of Africa, with “Africa” often referring to the countries located south of the Sahara. Sub-Saharan Africa is then contrasted with North Africa, which is often lumped in with the “Middle East,” itself a colonial concept. Smith highlights how at Georgetown, collaborative efforts are made to disrupt these artificial and inaccurate distinctions. This is especially the case when teaching and researching about a country like Sudan, a country that straddles both regions. “We never do a Sudan program that is not collaborative between our two programs,” she explains.
Smith elaborates on Sudan’s situation, noting that it lies within a broader band of African countries susceptible to coups; in fact, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Chad, and Sudan are often referred to pejoratively as the coup belt. While cautious about overly homogenizing the situation, Smith emphasizes the shared roots of these countries’ dissatisfaction with post-colonial governance and continued, foreign interference. In countries like Burkina Faso and Mali, military coups gained popular support in part just because they were seen as pushing back against entrenched corruption tied to, in their case, French interests.
However, Smith is under no illusion about what typically follows these coups: while military governments may initially have some public support, they often engage in their own brutal oppression and rarely represent a true break from corruption. This is one bit of shared history that ties together Sudan’s recent fate with that of Myanmar. Both modern nations were cobbled together from the British colonial empire, with the legacy of corrupt military regimes that justify their repressive rule with promises of security and development they have never delivered—security and development needs that in large part were themselves caused, or at least exacerbated, by colonial policies.
Smith discusses how colonialism shaped identity in Sudan. The common trope is that the population pits Arab Muslims against African Christians. However, Smith explains that this is just reductive, and that British colonial classifications hardened ethnic and cultural divisions, leading to the tensions which are exacerbated today. “The British colonial project was very interested in classifying Sudanese into Arab and African broad categories.” Being classified as “Arab” often depended on being Muslim, Arabic-speaking, lighter-skinned, or wealthier—criteria that were sloppily applied. For example, someone could be Muslim but not Arabic-speaking, light-skinned but poor, etc. And there was always a racial undertone behind all these enforced ethnic identities. Similarly, British colonialism in Burma solidified ethnic divides, treating groups differently based on religion, loyalty to the Crown, their perceived degree of “civilization,” or their usefulness to colonial administration; post-colonial governments further exacerbated these divisions.
Other enduring legacies of colonialism entrenched this divide in the Sudan. Christian missionaries were largely confined to what is now South Sudan, because the colonial administration prohibited proselytizing in Arab areas. At the same time, infrastructure, like roads and education systems, were concentrated around population centers in the North, because it was more strategically important, more fertile, and had access to the Nile and the Red Sea. “[The Colonial administration] significantly underdeveloped the south....” Similar patterns of infrastructure disparities and power differentials stemming from Burma’s colonial period can be seen today, and continue to impact the power dynamics and political tensions.
These kinds of asymmetries helped foster grievances that would eventually erupt into two Sudanese civil wars, culminating in the independence of South Sudan in 2011. But post-independence has not been a panacea, and a tragic reminder that just drawing new lines on maps does not solve the problem. “South Sudan erupted into a civil war in 2013, two years after independence,” Smith notes, warning that the forces of colonialism continue to shape post-colonial realities. In the same way, the development of the Burmese military into a political force was built on addressing challenges left behind when colonial rule abruptly ended, a throughline which can be traced all the way to the recent coup of 2021.
Smith emphasizes the importance of thinking beyond land borders—themselves artifacts of colonialism—when discussing political and cultural continuity. Reorienting the way we think about the world in this way can reveal trends that long predate European colonization. For example, she challenges the standard view of continents as natural containers of identity and suggests thinking through oceans instead, like an Indian Ocean history and a Mediterranean history. The drawing of arbitrary lines on colonial maps severed age-old kinship, cultural, religious and trade connections, while artificially constructing national entities that contain the conditions for future division and discord, by virtue of making static and contrived what had once been fluid and organic. Similarly, Colonial Britain carved Myanmar’s borders without respecting the ethnic, religious, and trade ties that cross into India, China, Thailand. For example, the Rohingya are linked to the Bengal region, Kachin to Yunnan, Shan to Northern Thailand, etc.
Returning to Sudan’s more recent history, Smith provides an overview of the Bashir regime and the genocide in Darfur. Al-Bashir ruled for 30 years and was eventually indicted by the International Criminal Court. His regime oversaw devastating violence in the west, where even nominally “Arab” Muslim populations were subject to systemic marginalization and brutality. Smith describes this political violence as an outcome of colonial distinctions being reified rather than dismantled, and that moreover, “Any changes to borders... really need to think about these things... because we have to recognize that people are creative and evolving.”
The conversation concludes with Smith’s reflections on the nature of identity. The historical, cultural, religious and ethnic fluidity discussed earlier reveals just how artificial “modern identity” can be: it has often solidified by colonial taxonomies that rarely correspond to actual lived experience. But Smith says, “People are evolving. We live in evolving social spaces,” adding that “There is no ‘natural’ state... Borders are constantly being negotiated... people are creative and evolving.”