South Sudan: From Liberation to Diplomacy

How conquest, forced incorporation, unequal state-building and the failure to address Southern political demands gave rise to resistance, negotiated autonomy, renewed war and the long road to independence.

South Sudan: From Liberation to Diplomacy, Volume I: The Southern Struggle and the Collapse of Regional Autonomy, 1820–1983 examines how modern Sudan was formed and how the peoples and territories later known as Southern Sudan were incorporated into a state governed largely from the North. Beginning with nineteenth-century conquest, slave raids, enslavement, commercial exploitation and forced recruitment, it shows how incorporation without meaningful consent or equal political participation laid the foundations of the Southern Question and shaped enduring Southern historical memory.

The narrative follows the South through Turco-Egyptian rule, the Mahdist state and the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. It examines the Closed Districts and Southern Policy, including the tendency within some circles of the British administration to regard the South as distinct from the North and more closely connected, culturally and educationally, to East Africa. It also explores the complex role of Christian missions and churches in expanding education and literacy, nurturing an educated Southern leadership, and later providing moral encouragement, humanitarian assistance, international connections and mediation during repression, exile and war.

The book traces the growth of Southern political consciousness from the Juba Conference and demands for federation, through the crisis of 1955 and the formation of Southern political parties, to armed resistance. It explains how constitutional advocacy, parliamentary participation, exile politics, church diplomacy, regional initiatives and the Anyanya struggle converged in the negotiations that produced the Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972.

The agreement ended the first civil war and established the Southern Regional Government, the People’s Regional Assembly and the High Executive Council. Yet the autonomous system remained vulnerable to intervention from Khartoum, institutional weakness, financial dependence, mistrust over military arrangements, disputes over boundaries and natural resources, and divisions within Southern politics. Its gradual dismantling—culminating in the redivision of the South and the crisis of 1983—returned the country to war and prepared the ground for the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

Drawing on documentary evidence, historical scholarship, participant testimony, family accounts and diplomatic insight, Anthony Kon offers a balanced account grounded in a distinctly Southern perspective. The book illuminates the people, institutions, churches, political movements and contested choices that shaped this long struggle, explaining how the unresolved inheritance of the Southern Question ultimately contributed to self-determination and the independence of South Sudan in 2011.