Scholars in Context: Abdaljbar Ejami
Jadaliyya's Scholars in Context series consists of Q&As in which scholars of the Middle East describe their research and the paths they took to arrive at it. The series provides a platform for these scholars to highlight the significance of their work, identify the audiences they seek to reach, and outline their future research trajectories, giving readers an in-depth look at the latest research in a given field.
Jadaliyya (J): What is the main focus of your current research and how does it connect to or depart from your previous work?
Abdaljbar Ejami (AE): I am currently working on three issues. The first is about the failure of transitional peacebuilding in Sudan. I am precisely concerned with decolonizing agendas of the Eastern Track Peace that was reserved for Eastern Sudan, the strategically geopolitical region on the Red Sea and across the Horn of Africa. In this research, I analyze the complexities of conflicting socioeconomic and political interests at the local, national, regional, Gulf/Middle Eastern, and international levels.
The second is on the triangle of knowledge, governmentality, and governance within the colonial and postcolonial Sudanese context. My research attempts to develop the topics and analysis in my PhD dissertation, which was titled: “Colonial and Postcolonial Politics of Religion and Ethnicity: Historical Anthropology of Eastern Sudan Marginalization”. Thirdly, I am intending to revise, edit, and publish this thesis in a book format.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address?
AE: My research areas of interest cover a wide range of interconnected issues, including religion; ethnicity; the politics of land and identity; citizenship; inequality and marginalization; conflicts; and the decoloniality of neoliberal peacebuilding. The analysis of these topics is based on a combination of Marxist and postcolonial perspectives that dig into the historical, socioeconomic, and political dynamics of those interrelated themes. My research analysis is fundamentally situated on the Foucauldian concept of “governmentality,” developed by Mahmood Mamdani as a sophisticated conceptualization to understand the colonial theory of indirect rule, the Sudanese branch of which is called the Native Administration.
J: What brought you to this work? What was the source of inspiration?
AE: My inspiration came from my academic occupation with postcolonial studies and theoretical debates, particularly with Marxists. Among the prominent works that inspire me are two seminal works. The first work that has reshaped the way I think and had a remarkable influence on the analysis of my PhD thesis is Mamdani’s book, Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of late colonialism. Mamdani provides a solid conceptualization of the colonial mechanism of governmentality as a device to “define to define” and to fabricate indirect rule through labelling subjects across their racial, ethnic, and religious identities. The second work that has opened the door for me to the issue of decolonizing knowledge is Anthropology and The Colonial Encounter, edited by Talal Assad. The book heighted the well-established relations between anthropology and colonialism under the British Administration.
J: What audiences would you like to reach, and what kind of impact would you like your research and writing to have?
AE: I aim for my research to reach to a diverse audience among readers and researchers. More specifically, I would like to reach anthropologists and sociologists with whom I share academic interests around ethnicity, the politics of land and identity, inequality, conflicts, and the decoloniality of neoliberal peacebuilding
J: What other projects are you working on now?
AE: I am also working on a project about the transformations of the Beja customary institutions for conflict resolution, with a focus on the galad. The work seeks to engage critically with the existing body of social knowledge that I argue has produced the formulation of the Beja customs as “native” mechanisms used to prevent, manage, and resolve conflicts. The conceptualization is based on lengthy ethnography in Eastern Sudan (2017-2023) and includes the anthropological analysis of Beja poetry, proverbs, and written and historical ethnographic accounts, the importance of which has been reduced, if not totally ignored, by scholars.