The Collapse of the State in Southern Sudan 91

Freedom etc. The sudden dominance of the term “civil society” in the
vocabulary of social sciences and in the jargon of the development
aid community in the 1980s (it is extremely rare to find the term in
development aid documents of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, even in
dictionaries of social sciences and political thought the term was often
not mentioned at that time), can be seen as an expression of the
strength of this ideological trend. This dichotomy has obvious
ideological connotations. But more importantly; the power of this
concept and its inherent perspective has given birth to a mythology
which has tended to disregard the differences in relationships between
the state and the society under industrial and post-industrial
capitalism and in societies where 90 per cent are subsistence farmers.
The term has also, when dogmatically applied in prescriptions about
NGOs’ contribution to development, failed to distinguish between African
societies with a long and internally rooted state tradition (as in Egypt,
Ethiopia and to a lesser extent Dar Fur, which is studied in this
volume), and African societies in which the state is a very recent
phenomenon, introduced from above and maintained by external sources.
Moreover, the actual and potential role of the third sector in African
countries varies according to its homogeneity, its organizational
history, its exchange relations with the state sector etc. Analytical
perspectives which study NGO-government relations in Africa within
frameworks based on general assumptions about a bureaucraticised and
parasitic state on the one hand, and the existence of a civil
society with supra-ethnic or supra-tribal organisations fighting to curb the
role of the state supported by NGOs as agents of micro-developments
on the other, can, of course, be fruitful. I will show that in the case
of the Southern Sudan it is not very illuminating. The impact of the
NGOs must be analyzed concretely. It depends on the specific
character of the state system and the “civil society” in which they
operate.
The relationship between governments and non-governmental
organisations is fundamentally a question of the legitimacy of the various
types of institutions which exercise power and authority. I will argue
that, in the Southern Sudan, the NGOs contributed unintentionally to
the erosion of the authority of the very weak state. The NGOs did not
organize the civil society against the state, or consciously promote
and strengthen the civil society, as the present rhetoric's suppose.
Basically they themselves became local substitutes for state
administration. The NGOs assumed in a very efficient manner the
welfare functions of an ordinary state (which, as shown above, the
state in the South was unable to fulfill). As the state was
“withering away”, (though not in the way Karl Marx described)—in
the first instance it was ephemeral and in the second its role as
service provider was abdicated— whole districts or sections of
ordinary government ministries’ responsibilities were handed over to
the NGOs to run. The NGOs put up their own administration and
authority systems thereby undermining the state institutions without
establishing viable alternative structures, partly because there simply