Water, Civilisation and Power in Sudan

Harry Verhoeven teaches African Politics at Oxford and is the founder and convenor of the University of Oxford China-Africa Network, as well as the founder of the Oxford Central Africa Forum. He has collaborated with UNDP Sudan, Chatham House, Greenpeace India, and Small Arms Survey and has lectured at ministries of foreign affairs, defence academies, and leading universities around the world. He has published in Civil War; Conflict, Security and Development, Development and Change, Geopolitics, the Journal of Eastern African Studies, the Journal of Modern African Studies, Middle East Policy, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the Review of African Political Economy, and The Washington Quarterly. He has recently been appointed to a professorship in Comparative Politics and International Relations at Georgetown University, Washington DC.

'The Nile waters are central to the politics of north-east Africa, and Sudan is central to the hydropolitics 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.' Christopher Clapham, Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge

• 1. Prologue: the inauguration of the Merowe dam; 2. State building, the environment, and the civilisation mission; 3. Hydraulic civilisation and land of famine: the crafting of the Sudanese state and its sources of power; 4. Mashru Al-Hadhari: the rise of Sudan's Al-Ingaz regime and its civilisation project; 5. The hydro-political economy of Al-Ingaz: economic salvation through 'dams as development'; 6. The geopolitics of the Nile: Khartoum's dam programme and agricultural revival in the global economy; 7. Military-Islamist state building and its contradictions: mirages in the desert, South Sudan's secession, and the new hydropolitics of the Nile; 8. Conclusion: water, civilisation, and power.