Development and Cultural Genocide in the Sudan

Genocide is easily defined: ‘the deliberate extermination of a people’. It appears to occur in human history primarily in association with the emergence of the state, or in the effort of an established régime to maintain or expand its domination, and is virtually unrecorded for ‘traditional’ or pre-state societies. Although the concept of ‘development’ is by contrast exceedingly ambiguous (other than as an ideal process or social form in an evolutionary typology), the meaning conveyed would be antithetical to the definition of genocide, being some form of material or moral improvement in social existence, rather than a means towards the rapid extinction of a cultural tradition.