"When mud comes between us" : contemporary land enclosures and the politics of claim-making in Central Sudan
Keywords: Anthropology.

In the mid 2000's, a handful of north Sudanese government elites began soliciting foreign investments in agriculture, to offset losses in oil revenue that would accompany South Sudan's likely secession. Prompted in part by visions of a post-oil future as well as the 2008 food and financial crises and framing their investments as gestures of Muslim solidarity, a dozen Gulf Arab investors have since established large agribusiness farms on several million acres of Sudanese land to produce food for export. This dissertation examines the ways Saudi and Emirati land acquisitions are reshaping everyday social relations between landless and landholding stakeholders with competing claims to Sudanese land. Grounded in the agricultural Gezira region of central Sudan, it explores how local communities are negotiating and contesting state-driven processes of land dispossession that are paving the way for this most recent wave of Gulf investments in land. This study is based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in three communities along the eastern Blue Nile, in local courts, at investor conferences and ministries in Khartoum and in the mosques of Sufi religious leaders (sheikhs) who are mediating land disputes that have emerged out of this context. This study makes several theoretical and methodological contributions to the emerging literature on global land grabs, scholarship on racial capitalism in Africa and conceptualizations of space, belonging and environmental sustainability. Prevailing approaches to the study of contemporary land grabs in Africa tend to characterize them as a tidal wave that is hitting the continent, pitting powerful land grabbers against those who are dispossessed, in a binary conflict of opposites. Methodologically, this approach often situates the process of land grabbing within a narrow temporal frame, glossing over landless pastoralists and agricultural workers as well as local government officials and investor representatives. Theoretically, this approach tends to romanticize and de-historicize 'the commons' and the social relations that govern access to communal land and water resources. The local saying "there is mud between us, " referring to the messy disputes over communal and familial lands that have multiplied in the wake of large-scale land deals, suggests a different approach to land grabs across various scales; one that conceptualizes them as a set of historically situated practices, negotiations and contestations, shaped by heterogeneous notions of space, land ownership and belonging. This study theorizes the term 'stratified enclosures' to situate contemporary land grabs in Sudan within a layered history of enclosures and unequal landed relations shaped by legacies of enslavement and colonial rule. It also responds to a growing literature on political reactions 'from below' to large-scale land deals, which centers labor and class relations within the land grab debate, but is less attentive to their intersection with gendered and ethnic social relations. Instead, it build on feminist analyses of racial capitalism to trace the ways in which contemporary processes of land dispossession are gendered and racialized, while examining how race, gender, class, and enslaved descent shape the different forms resistance to these processes can take.