Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) will host today an on-campus and open-to-the-public book launch for a new publication written by professor Dr Harry Verhoeven, titled Water, Civilisation and Power in Sudan: The Political Economy of Military-Islamist State Building.
The book tells the story of one of the most ambitious state-building projects in the modern era. Through an extraordinary and unprecedented set of interviews with leading Islamists, business tycoons and security officials, Dr Verhoeven examines a quarter of a century of Sudan’s history through the perspectives of the key figures who shaped this region following the Islamic “Al-Ingaz” Revolution.
The book shows how the gamble to use water and agriculture as a tool to consolidate power is linked to 21st century globalisation, Islamist ideology and intensifying geopolitics of the Nile. Going beyond the conventional ideas of famine, “water wars” or the notions of the resource curse, he emphasises a different set of connections between Sudan’s environmental factors, development and political power.
“Despite the fact that people have been talking about the Nile basin region of Africa - which includes Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia - and how politics link to water in this part of the world, the truth is that most of these descriptions are vague and don’t delve into the internal economic and political networks that shaped the behaviour of individual countries,” said Dr Verhoeven.
Prof Christopher Clapham from the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge said, “The Nile waters are central to the politics of northeast Africa, and Sudan is central to the hydro-politics of the Nile. Harry Verhoeven’s superb study reaches deep into the complex issues of water, religion and political power that have shaped the Islamist regime in Khartoum and reveals both its ambitions and its looming failure.”
Dr Verhoeven teaches
at GU-Q and is also an associate member of the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Oxford.
Dr Harry Verhoeven
