Turning Violence into a Commodity: The Mechanisms of Authoritarian Resiliency in Al-Bashir’s Sudan (1989-today)

The paper examines how dynamics of disorder as armed conflict can co-exist with durable authoritarian regimes. Literature on authoritarian resiliency usually depicts the use of violence as an ineffective strategy (Saideman and Zahar, 2008) leaving unexplained why some dictatorships survive despite their involvement in civil armed conflicts. Building on an analysis of al-Bashir’s regime in Sudan, this paper argues that violent conflict reinforces authoritarianism through a mechanism of commodification of violence. In Sudan, violence is turned into an exchangeable good, particularly in clientelistic networks. Patrons provide coercive capacity to their clients, who use it to solve private, local issues. In exchange, the latter are expected to promote their patron’s interests. Regime’s durability is especially enhanced when client’s use of violence coincides with those. In the end, the paper makes a case for the necessity to distinguish instability, durability and resiliency in order to explain authoritarian resiliency in highly unstable contexts.